Hi,
I am an Amigan and never owned an Atari in my life (okay, my father did, but it was 8bit - before Amiga came to be). But lately I've been eyeing the Falcon and will probably buy one in the near future (if I can get by with just one kidney...). By all accounts it must have been quite an interesting machine.
Anyway, in the last few days I have visited a few Atari forums in an attempt to become more familiar with different 3rd party HW expansions that exist for the Falcon (would you believe they don't have a centralized HW information storage like a BBOAH or amiga.resource.cx 
). Of course, in the end I ended up reading those various Amiga vs Atari, 'what was the biggest flaw in ST design' etc threads.
One thing I noticed is that quite often when talking about Amiga, Atarians (is that a word?) complain about its lack of stability. Now that I think about it it's not the first time I heard someone outside the Amiga community complaining about 'too many guru meditations'.
Now I'm wondering - compared to modern machines and OSs (realistically, even Windows...) classic Amigas are not that stable. The thing is I always thought it normal for a platform basically designed in the 80s to behave like that, not have memory protection etc. Based on what I read lately it seems like Amiga wasn't that stable even compared to its contemporaries.
I wasn't there in the late 80s/early 90s so I don't really know what to think about this. What is your opinion?
Also do you think that the quirkiness of the funny guru meditation messages may have contributed to the fact that Amiga system errors stuck more in people's memory?
Hey you read my post! Atarian63 or whatever always claims this and I return him with factual experience that I didn't have any problems multi-tasking professional software together and the only thing that GURU'd my A1000 was copied software and PD hacks/shovelware. Never things like Dpaint and Digi-View running together even with just 1.5mb of RAM in 1988 etc
The point is multi-tasking has it's own problems over and above single tasking systems like the Atari ST CP/M 68k + GEM solution. Windows might not crash as often but then it is 2.5 decades since Workbench came out so not surprising. However there are still processes that can randomly shut down on Windows 7 and XP is quite easy to blue screen with a rogue app.
So all things considered....notably Microsoft have had 25 years to improve on Amiga's multi-tasking kernal....they have not made improvements that Amiga did to OS technology 25 years before Workbench first booted up on an A1000 prototype
So yeah the ST was stable enough but no more so than my Amiga. I had just as many 'bombs' on my 520ST screen as GURUs on my A1000 and for the same reason and owned an ST since 1986 or whatever (before the butt ugly models with the built in disk drive). I think I had a task manager from a PD disk that was quite useful too (no less sophisticated than the ineffectual task priority controls in Windows today)
