Amiga Multitask

[psxphill]

And yes, it was impressive. The Amiga OS was a very impressive step forward at the time.

It was the first time most people got to use a pre-emptive multi tasking computer in the comfort of their own home. So in that regard it was impressive.
 
Windows was not a big deal for Microsoft in 1985, they joined forces with IBM to make OS/2 & that was supposed to be the next big thing. But five years later and people were still buying Windows and not OS/2. Microsoft chased the money and while it gained them customers, they didn't produce the most technically compelling products. But in business it's customers that are happy to keep giving you money that count.

[psxphill]

Alternatively, you could just have efficient software that maximizes free memory for your actual work purposes and enough RAM to fit the task at hand, rather than churning data to and fro over a disk interface many orders of magnitude slower than the RAM which is itself likely not actually fast enough to keep up with the demands of the processor.
 
But, you know, that'd just be crazy.

Some software needs alot of ram because of the functionality it offers. The only compromise you can make here is to remove functionality, but then there would be no innovation.
 
Some uses more than it should because writing perfectly efficient software is alot more expensive & ram is cheap. The only compromise you can make here is delay the software and charge more for it, the odds are the developers would run out of money.
 
It's not limited to Windows, the Amiga & Mac had the same issues. They both had to increase ram during development, because their inefficient code was too bloated. Using high level languages to ease software development was the cause.

[psxphill]

There are text editors now that take up 10-20MB just sitting idle with nothing open. That's inexcusable. It's not even that nobody hand-optimizes software anymore, hardly anybody even designs for efficiency on any level these days.

You think it's inexcusable, but you have a rather extreme point of view.
 
If you work in software development and aren't lucky enough to work for a billionaire that is as obsessed with efficiency as you are then you'll end up having to make tough choices.
 
After you follow these choices here:
 
[URL]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle[/COLOR][/URL]
 
 

"You are given the options of Fast, Good and Cheap, and told to pick any two. Here Fast refers to the time required to deliver the product, Good is the quality of the final product, and Cheap refers to the total cost of designing and building the product. This triangle reflects the fact that the three properties of a project are interrelated, and it is not possible to optimize all three – one will always suffer. In other words you have three options:

• Design something quickly and to a high standard, but then it will not be cheap.
• Design something quickly and cheaply, but it will not be of high quality.
• Design something with high quality and cheaply, but it will take a long time."

Which compromise would you make?
 
If you pick throwing money at it, then there is no guarantee that your product will ever recoup the money. Plus you run into Brook's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law).
 
So you could decide to take longer but then as your project rolls on not making money, ram is actually getting cheaper & cheaper all the time. You're going to have to charge more and users will ask you to justify it. The software runs in 100mb you'll say, they will answer: but my phone has 100gb of ram in it & I've been running your competitors cheaper software that uses 1gb of ram for the last year.
 
Good is something you'll have to compromise on. Unfortuntaly design decisions made at the start of the project are often unfixable by the end. This is usually worse on software you've tried to optimise, object oriented code is often easier to change but it comes with a higher performance penalty to start with. I've worked on a project that moved from C to C++ and while some things got slower there was also alot of things that became faster.
 
Some people go the open source route as without a boss you can spend as much time as you like writing the software. But this is only a short term fix. It will only work while there are people that grew up with being obsessed about efficiency spending their free time to write the software. They need a job to pay the bills & open source software doesn't generate money for software developers. The only money is in web sites and scripting, which isn't the type of job that an optimisation junky will go for.
 
 
Either use what makes you happy or become happy about what you use, or you'll end up making yourself ill.

[psxphill]

I do work in software development, and I do it backend, on processes only the IT staff will ever use once per day, for a company that pays me the same in any case and only cares whether things are up and running on-time. Even so, I at least put some kind of thought into making things reasonably efficient and not a huge waste of memory and CPU time. Someone designing software that many people will use multiple hours a day should be putting even more thought into designing software that's light and responsive and not bloaty crap, not less (and that goes for the companies behind them, too.)

Unfortunately the companies won't agree with you, the same as they don't agree with the people who work there that want more time to write better software.
 
There are programmers that are incapable of writing good software, but it's quite subjective so you can't sack someone because of it. Most managers in software development are clueless, they just see people standing at a production line churning out product and paying into the managers pension.
 
Basically decent software is doomed to fail all the time any humans are involved in some form in it's creation.

[psxphill]

Well, that's basically the problem, isn't it? Software companies (or, actually, pretty much all companies, these days) have zero interest in actually providing quality anymore except insofar as it can be used to justify a higher price tag, because the whole pirahna-pool atmosphere of the modern business world sneers at the idea of pride in a job well done, let alone any other reason for doing anything than making the most money with the least expenditure of effort possible. It's a disease...

It's always been like that, we were just delusional sheep in the past.
You describe Commodore extremely well.

[psxphill]

There's nothing about the x86 architecture that prevents it from doing decent multitasking, even in the larval 16-bit phases. It's just that nobody did it well until way later, for stupid reasons.

If QDOS had been based on MPM instead of CPM then maybe we'd have had some form of multitasking.
 
However decent multitasking is a matter of opinion. While I loved the Amiga, the lack of memory protection was a huge downside. Especially if you're developing software, as it's more likely to crash. It wasn't until I started using Windows NT that I realise how useful memory protection was.

[psxphill]

What exactly does "RTG" stand for here? Certainly not "ReTargetable Graphics," it definitely supported that at least from WB3.1, with drivers...

RTG wasn't really supported, it just had barely enough for Picasso/Cybergrafx. Real RTG was to be supported in the next OS.
 

I won't argue that memory protection is hugely useful, but it's not an absolute requirement. And anyway Iggy was talking about the 8086 in comparison to the 68000 and 6809, neither of which featured protected memory either.

And because of that, they could all multitask as badly as each other. Everything was fine as long as nobody did anything wrong. At that point co-operative multitasking vs pre-emptive multitasking becomes a difficult argument as well. Pre-emptive multitasking means you can still be run, even if some other software is so badly written that it never yields. But if it's that badly written then it's likely to be stomping all over memory. It's one of those things, like visual basic, that allows people to become developers who you really don't want to become developers.

[psxphill]

I used many of the options available at the time, and the Amiga wasn't any less stable, and was (IMHO) much more usable.

It wasn't more usable because of the pre-emptive multitasking though. Especially when running code that did Forbid() or Disable(), which because of the OS design pretty much every program had to.
 
MacOS and Windows were slower because of the lack of hardware accelerated graphics & using PIO instead of DMA etc.
 
Doing things in hardware instead of software is a cost/performance tradeoff that works all the time you have a slow CPU. However Windows and a lesser extent MacOS could be made faster simply by selling machines with the latest CPU. While commodore had to fund the development of their chipset themselves.
 
Relying on third parties to develop faster graphics chips is a much better business model.

[psxphill]

@koaftder
" I never understood why so many folks clung to 2k"
Because not all apps run on XP?
Or because XP does not run on their HW?
Those things happen.

I have a machine still on 2000 because the upgrade cost wasn't worth it. It sits there running the same software that it has for the last decade. It's annoyingly slow, but it always has been.
 
I wouldn't run anything older than windows 7 on a machine I have to use daily. I've already started the transition to windows 8.