Amiga stability?

[desiv]

Wish I could remember where, but I read or saw something from the Amiga designers.
They were talking about the original designs and mentioned that they were always planning on the original Amiga being 512k RAM.
When the 512k was cut back to 256k late in the game, some of the software that had been written would crash, as it expected 512k.

Now, as this was a "multitasking" system, I would think that it might have crashed with 512k also, if enough other programs were running, but the bit wasn't that in depth...

I think it implies tho, that some of the very early software might not have been totally "ready for prime time" so to speak.

I think part of that also, was the rush to complete as that company who was going to write part of the OS had to be dumped and that had to be done in house...

So I think the early AmigaOS was probably rushed and had some issues.
But, I'm guessing by the time 1.2 probably came around, it was pretty much stabilized.

Of course, as has also been said, being a multitasking OS without memory protection, a BAD program could crash the OS.

Frankly tho, it didn't happen to me all that often, and I ran a LOT of public domain stuff that I'm sure wasn't of the highest quality.  ;-)

Also, I saw my share of sad Macs back in the day....

I didn't play with the ST, so I'm not sure how common or not the BOMB was, but it was an existing OS.  GEM was a pretty stable OS already, so I would guess that it was more stable that Amiga or Mac OS early on..

That said, I didn't like it...  I "much" preferred the AmigaDOS/Workbench combination than a locked in GUI like GEM or MacOS.

desiv

[desiv]

GEM was just a GUI, which started on CP/M (and DOS.) The actual underlying operating system for the ST was Atari's own creation.

Of course I was simplifying..
I used to use GEM on the PC, so I was familiar with it from there.
But when people talk about the ST being stable, they are (IMHO) talking about TOS and GEM together.
When they are talking about the Amiga being less-than-stable, they are (again, IMHO) talking about the full desktop experience.
Especially since TOS does (as has been mentioned) virtually nothing without GEM.
That's like comparing TOS to the Amiga Kickstart.
Both of those were very stable.  Both did nothing, but allowed other programs to do things.

TOS w/GEM seemed to be more stable than Amiga w/Workbench.

In that situation, GEM was a much more mature product, and didn't have to deal with the memory issues from a non-protected multitasking system.

However, that being said, I remember GURUs, but not that often...

desiv

[desiv]

Right. Kickstart doesn't do anything. Except set up a whole multitasking environment with various things going on in the background...

You missed the whole point.
I'm talking about from the users perspective.
I'm fully aware of what's inside kickstart.
But, you boot a machine with just kickstart, you get a hand asking for a disk.
That's it..
You can't even boot an ST with TOS and not GEM.

More mature... and of course not even remotely as powerful as kickstart.
Please do your homework

You again miss the point.  It was more mature in that it was around longer.
Stable code base.  More time for bug fixing.

Of course it wasn't anywhere near as powerful as the Amiga, which I mentioned as a reason the Amiga might have been less stable.

desiv

[desiv]

You could load something over the serial port

Not without the "type" command (or some other program), which you need on a floppy disk.

One of the things I like about the Apple IIs is  that you can bootstrap them over serial (or even AUDIO!!)..   No need for any media to use them...
I wish all computers would let you do that...  ;-)

Hey you read my post! Atarian63 or whatever always claims this

I wasn't going to name names, but that was my first thought also.
He and I have a history...  :bitch:  
He's just believes that his world/life experience must be the way it is for everyone and everywhere else...

desiv

[desiv]

Not if you boot without a startup sequence using the boot menu. In this case the core of the OS is setup and you get a command line interface.

Hmm..
I haven't tried that..  I'll have to give it a shot..  

Still, that's only with Kickstart 2 and above..  

desiv

[desiv]

What about WACK?

I thought you could only get to that after a GURU???

Never tried tho..

desiv