lha in Aminet

[Tenacious]

This is one of the areas in which the Amiga really shines because of directory utilities (like Dopus 4.xx, Ordering, DiskMaster, etc) and the ram disk.

In Dopus, for example, you can assign one of its buttons (or menus) to be "UnLHA".  You would then only have to figure out the required command line arguments (in LHA's docs) once when configuring the button.  There after, all files compressed with LHA would require a click to select the file and another click on the new button.  All of the directory utilities listed above have more capacity to be customized than I can ever need.

Amiga has the best implimented ram disk of ANY OS I have ever used.  If you have enough ram, any program, utility, etc can be un-archived to the ram disk and then executed directly from there.  You can test the new program, see if it meets your expectations.  If you like it, you can find a permanent home for it on your floppy or HD.  If not, merely delete it from the ram disk, and nothing in your OS setup has been altered or disturbed.  (Try that with any OS that relies upon a registry-like file.)

If this seems like a lot to take on, a number of Dopus users have uploaded their configuration files to Aminet as examples of clever use of the program.

[Tenacious]

RAM disk is indeed very handy and I use it a quite often but it's not something Amiga exclusive. RAM disks existed long before Amiga.

For example Atari 8bit DOS's and MSX-DOS use RAM disks pretty much in the same way and they can be used just like you discribed above. I've used both systems before I got my Amiga and I still do occasionally and on both I use the RAM disk just like on my Amiga's, unarchive stuff, run programs from it, store temporary data or config files.

Yes, Apple 8-bit computers were the the first that I noticed them.

The beauty of Amiga's ram disk is that it is dynamically allocated.  If the user puts nothing there, it uses few system resources.  If files are stored there, it balloons to the required size.  When those files are removed, the memory that was required by the ram disk is returned to the system.  Very elegant and built into the OS from the beginning.

I don't remember any other OS doing a ram disk as well (It seems the user had to allocate the memory for a fixed size ram disk.).  Correct me if I'm wrong.

EDIT:  I just saw your edit.  That is cool, especially the powered Off retention.  Amiga does have RAD: as well.  It survives a warm reboot and the "boot" disk can be moved to there.  This makes for a very fast Amiga after the initial loading.