What still makes Amiga superior today?

[stefcep2]

persia wrote:
It silly to compare an '80s OS with an '00 OS.  OS's today have different demands and run on far more powerful equipment.  We're all here because we like the retro look and feel, it's fun.  The Amiga lost the superior title a decade or more ago.  

The "demands of an OS" are as simple today as they were 15 years ago: to enable the user to issue commands to the hardware to make it do the things the user wants to do".  The stuff that an Amiga can't do is a limitation of the CPU speed (mainly because playback of digital media relies on decompressing heavily compressed files) lack of support for 3D graphics hardware, and non-development of applications software eg web browser.  But this has nothing to do with the OS.

Autoconfig- what plug-and-play should be.  Shove a card in the trap door: INSTANT speed-up, no IRQ, No drivers.

Separate screens makes for clean, clutter-free work environment, not fixated on screen dragging though.

Arexx- ability to automate software and add functionality to  programs by accessing functions of other programs.

Faster CPU actually means a lot faster system operation, rather than Windows where double your cpu clock and you barely notice.

Multitasking: nothing like the amiga's version of it, especially with Executive ( this is the best value piece of shareware you can get. The guy who wrote this charged 10 pounds for software that does things that Linux developers are still trying to figure out how to do, on their quadcore 3 ghz 4 gig ram monsters)

Most of all: simplicity

[stefcep2]

Without drivers, add-on cards like CyberGraphics would be useless.

true but CGX and P96 are third party add-ons

Faster CPU actually means a lot faster system operation, rather than Windows where double your cpu clock and you barely notice.

Modern X86 CPUs are already running significantly faster than the rest the computer e.g. CPU clock speed vs main memory vs harddisk.  

There are other areas that reduces the performance in the  PC e.g. harddisk and main memory.

In X86 PC land, increasing main memory capacity and installing faster hard disk benefits more than installing faster CPU.

true but the RAM and Hard disk systems -what with new buses- are probably 10-50 times faster than what you have on an Amiga.  Its just that the OS needs gargantuan amounts of data to be loaded back and forth to do the simplest of things that slows it down.  This what I mean by the immediate speed increase that you get with an Amiga that you don't with a PC. The OS doesn't suck up you resources in proprtion to how big or fast those resources are.

Have a look at Vista: what does it need to install (recommend) 12G of hard drive space.  I have most of the text and pictures of the Encylclopeadia Brittanica and it fits on one 650 Mb CD.  How can it take possibly take more information than whats in an encyclopedia to make a hard drive arrange its data in order, suck information of it or a DVD, put the info into memory so that the CPU can do something to it, show some windows and move a mouse pointer and display the result on a screen or print it out?

Whenever I read the hardware spec on a modern PC and then use one it makes me want to cry, because it should be SO MUCH faster, but isn't.

[stefcep2]

The hardware had DMA and co-processors, meaning that the sound chip,and the graphics chip could act independently of the CPU.  I am sure this has a lot to do with how smooth Amiga multitasking is and why it was so hard for Windows to do it in "less than 4 meg" (W.Gates)

[stefcep2]

Hammer wrote:

Have a look at Vista: what does it need to install (recommend) 12G of hard drive space. I have most of the text and pictures of the Encylclopeadia Brittanica and it fits on one 650 Mb CD. How can it take possibly take more information than whats in an encyclopedia to make a hard drive arrange its data in order, suck information of it or a DVD, put the info into memory so that the CPU can do something to it, show some windows and move a mouse pointer and display the result on a screen or print it out?

Windows provides more than just showing some windows and move a mouse pointer and display the result on a screen.

Windows Print Spooler supports multi-user objects and network printing.

Ok, so we need 20 times the data thats in the Encyclopedia Brittanica (with maps and pictures) so that we can run a multi-user print spooler.  Great.  If I were a hardware vendor I'd be having a stroke at how the OS is crippling my hardware.

Its a croc.  Todays programmers are the laziest ever.  I am not a programmer but I did it for 1 semester at university years ago.  Just by writing better code we more than doubled the search speed and halved the file size of a little database proggie we had to write.  Today its: "who cares: we'll have double the processor speeds in 18 month time, lets write for that.."  An this extends to the OS programming as well.

yes Windows does more things than AmigaOS, but not by a factor of 1000 or 10000.  If I had a modern web browser, PDF reader/writer DVD player and burner I would not need to suffer through it (or Linux for that matter).

[stefcep2]

sdyates wrote:
Other than boot-time, I can't see how it is better than other OSes. The lack of new hardware is a big issue.

I still enjoy running my Amigas, but I'd say the baton has been passed on some years ago.

Not meaning to offend, but there are over 80 posts here highlighting the benefits of the Amiga operating environment over other systems.  We are not talking about the lack of new hardware or software, but the concepts.  If you want to see what AmigaOS might be like on new hardware, try Winuae.  See how quickly it boots, how quickly it lists window contents, how quickly applications start, how smooth the multitasking is, all the while its actually emulating a foreign instruction set.  Why does outlook take longer to fetch my email than YAM under Winuae and under my A4000? Imagine if it were running native code: your PC would fly.  Here are some of the advantages:

1. 5 sec boot.
2. Amiga RDB/Assign command
3. Wonderfully smooth preemptive mutitasking
4. Highly configurable GUI
5. Datatypes
6. Arexx
7. Shell
8. Multiple screens, each with their own color depth and resolution.
9. Highly efficient RAM and hard drive usage.
10. Graphics and sound co-processors with their own DMA, leaving the CPU to act independently on house keeping tasks, ensuring that you always have a responsive GUI.
11. Autoconfig
12. RAM: disk

[stefcep2]

pkillo wrote:


If the software didn't cripple the hardware, people would simply not buy hardware often enough to make manufacturing PC hardware profitable! A PC used to be considered to have a lifespan (free from hardware failure) of about 3 years. These days, you can expect a brand-new PC that never sees smoke or other environmental factors that cause damage to last you twice as long.

I could do everything on my circa 1994 PIII 650 256 meg Win98SE machine that I do on my Athlon 4800 with 2 gig ram XPPro machine .  In fact i can't think of a single thing that I do now on the XPPro machine that i didn't do before on the Win98 machine.  Yes USB support wasn't as good but how hard could it have been to add a service pack-hell Amiga does it on a 1993 or earlier OS.  For me i upgraded only because XPPro is more stable, and to run XPpro on that hardware would have cost 50% of the cost of a new PC, about $200 more.

[stefcep2]

Yes I inherited it from my brother, I was mainly using my A1200 then.

[stefcep2]

 :crazy:  D'Oh 2004 damnit, 2004!!!

[stefcep2]

persia wrote:
1. Because it doesn't support more than 25% of what modern OS's support.
2. Really?  So it can switch between 4 pages of 1600x1200 screens at the push of a mouse?  Display a picture of all currently running apps and allow you to choose between them?
3. I can make Linux, OS X and even MSWindows look pretty much how I want them to look, including a retro Amiga style.
4. Maybe because nobody else has them...  Don't quite get your point.
5. Every OS multitasks today, they all are pre-emptive with memory protection.  I've had apps crash and burn and calmly go to the Apple menu, click on force quit and they are gone.

Let's be realistic, it's retro computing, it's like restoring and driving old cars, it's not about superiority.  It's a hobby, it's fun, but in the end we still use the people mover to pick up kids from soccer, not the model t...

AmiDelf wrote:
Today Amiga wins on:

1. Fast boot
2. Better screen-handling (switching etc...)
3. GUI can be adjusted as you wish
4. Nice looking systems! Its more personal
5. Great multitasking while playing games. No lagg

1. list the 75% of the functions at the operating system level that the Amiga doesn't support, or couldn't support if someone bothered to write it, due to a fundamental design flaw.  Nothing, absolutely nothing: as I've said give me firefox, acrobat some dvd codecs and players and I won't need the bloated crap that is Windows, Macosx or Linux.

2.  thats a native graphics hardware limitation. under cgx4 on my A4000 68060 with CV64 i can do 1024x768 screen switching thats damned quick, never tried any higher resolutions. if i had faster video ram, it would be faster still. under winuae 1280x1024 is very fast to switch, almost instantaneous

3.  yeah but is it as easy as mui, and do you end up with a  consistent look and feel?

4. irrelevant personal aesthetics

5.  Ah but there is pre-emptive multitasking and there is pre-emptive multitasking.  It depends on the scheduler.  linux's implementation is rubbish for desktops: read this  http://apcmag.com/why_i_quit_kernel_developer_con_kolivas.htm

As for Windows, well yeah it multitasks nicely if you give it two or more cpu's running at 3 ghz each with 2 gig or more ram; oh and it will still find a way to use the swap file on the hard drive.  why do you think intel/microsoft is pushing multicore cpu with their "do more" campaign-because multitasking is now becoming a mainstream concept and they couldn't make it happen well enough with 3 ghz 1 gig ram machines.  Laughable.

To this day no mainstream system multitasks as smoothly as the Amiga.  Try it under emulation with the brute power of todays processors, even as the cpu is translating 68k code to x86 code, and see how you NEVER have to wait for a window to be active, for the mouse pointer to move, how quickly software starts, no matter what is running in the background.

Memory protection crashing I grant you is an issue, but only rarely these days, and i think amikit has some third party thing that gives partial memory protection that seems to stop other crashing software taking the system with it.  if you save regularly, data loss is minimal, and with boot in 5 sec, time loss is minimal.  But you are right.