Amiga Multitask

[Digiman]

Prior to the Amiga (later renamed Amiga 1000 to distinguish with those ugly 500/2000 replacements coming) the only multi-tasking OS on a home/personal computer was with the Sinclair QL. This however is not a GUI based multi-tasking OS.

So yes it was the first, and if you ever used a 1mb Atari ST over a 1mb Amiga 1000 you will instantly appreciate the option of multi-tasking.

Secondly not only was it the more sophisticated pre-emptive type (using a round robin timeslice scheduler?) but it was also quite capable of load balancing and prioritising well and it was mighty efficient due to the Kernal.

So in summary, before Windows XP in 2002 or OS/2 2.0 onwards maybe half a decade before that....multitasking on everything else was a load of pizz poor marketing bullcrap.

For nearly a decade and a half it seriously was a case of 'only Amiga'

Now if you are stupid enough to put down the mutli-tasking kernal of Amiga because it doesn't magically fit interlaced HAM animations and complex word processor documents into 256kb well go and use a Win 95/98 PC where not only does the same thing not fit but their Kernal takes up much more memory AND it loses memory like a rusty sieve and needs constant daily reboots a decade after Kickstart/Workbench 1.2 to get the same program you just shut down to run again or print something etc etc!

[Digiman]

Well it is possible to add 8mb to any OCS Amiga giving 8.5mb total back in the 80s, your average PC in those days was 4mb MAX. So given the file sizes even of VGA/HAM pictures an extra 8mb over chip ram is A LOT. Hard drives were only like 20 or 40mb ram to put it in perspective for top end machines.

As for the 6510 based C64 doing multitasking, yeh sure and a Sinclair C5 has 4 wheels so is as good as driving to the shops in a real car lol. With a relocatable zero page only the 6509 based Tandy 8bits can multitask effectively, other than that the only reasonable method is SymbOS for the Z80 based MSX2 or Amstrad CPC 8 bit computers (Z80 has ability to move zero page)#

Virtual memory was sort of a good idea when 24bit images first appeared on 286/386 machines with 4mb but today the legacy is hurting Windows, the system is designed around it even though you could build a 64gb PC. It is soo deep down in the code that switching it off even if you don't need it (why would you need it with 64GB of RAM) actually impacts Windows performance IME.

And I hope we all know that around the time of Kickstart 2.0 that Commodore and IBM shared information, they got exclusive access to how Kickstart/Workbench works and we got AREXX (IBMs REXX for Amiga) so OS/2 improved quite a bit before Windows 95 as was easily the most efficient multitasking OS on PC. It even done a better job of playing DOS games than MS-DOS through it's virtual DOS sessions with 640kb RAM assigned to them with nothing lost for the usual drivers you had to load.

Also people always say Win2000 is better than XP but unless you only had 64mb (a paltry amount in 2002 when XP was in use) it booted faster and thrashed the disk a lot less than 2000 on all the 100s of laptops I tried it on over the decade of sales of computers and laptops I managed. Don't ask me why. Maybe 32mb or 64mb limited machines are better but XP Professional had no other disadvantage on SP1. XP SP1 is REALLY fast actually, but you are stopped from installing things like Chrome browser etc (but not Firefox though).