Amiga stability?

[koshman]

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?

[Ancalimon]

I think MSDOS was more stable than Workbench. But Workbench was more stable than Windows2000

[commodorejohn]

While I haven't used the Atari (though I do know that it didn't have memory protection, either,) I've used DOS, Win3.1, classic Mac OS, and Amiga Workbench (1.3 & 3.1.) Honestly, I'd put them all about on par in terms of stability. None of them had memory protection, so one errant process could potentially take down the whole system. Only the Amiga had pre-emptive multi-tasking, so an ill-behaved process could stall out the system almost as easily as a crashy one on Windows and Mac OS. And all three GUI OSes seem to have crashes about as frequently (not terribly often, but it definitely does happen.)

Really, it seems to come down to the quality of the applications you're using, as none of the OSes really have any way to protect themselves from an ill-behaved application. Part of the perception with the Amiga, though, might be because so much software was regularily run off floppies - one or two undetected disk errors can absolutely kill a program's reliability, so the gradual decay of a poorly-manufactured floppy can make software act a lot more unstable than it really is. With Windows and Mac, on the other hand, hard disks were pretty much a given by the time they got well-established.

Really, crazily enough, if you want stability in older computers, you just can't beat DOS. One application has absolute control of the system, with no others to get in its way (barring those pesky TSRs,) and you don't have to worry about any other programs being taken down if it does crash. Of course, that's because there aren't any other programs, due to the whole "no multitasking" thing, but hey! Stability's stability - which is why you'll still find ancient DOS boxes chugging away in the back room of countless little shops when Mac and Windows systems have long since been retired and replaced.

[b41d3r]

I read somewhere that the first release of Amiga 1000 suffered of instability. But this was corrected in the subsequent versions.
The funniest thing about guru meditation is the origin of this expression.

[bbond007]

When they claim "lack of stability" do they mean hardware or software wise?

The fact that the Amiga implemented a preemptive multitasking system without a memory protection scheme just means that you have more moving parts that can potentially conflict with each other. If you were to refrain from running multiple applications contemporaneously, then I suspect that the stability would be more-or-less the same on both platforms.

I can't comment on the Atari vs Amiga hardware wise having never owned one. I do know that Commodore were plagued with some hardware issues from time to time.

[Thorham]

if you want stability in older computers, you just can't beat DOS.

You could always try to look for alternatives with memory protection (assuming your CPU has an MMU of course).

[commodorejohn]

You could always try to look for alternatives with memory protection (assuming your CPU has an MMU of course).

You could, but IIRC there really weren't that many alternatives at the time. Xenix, I guess, but how many people really used that? And by the time the free Unices really took off, Win95 had already brought memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking to the PC world (write your own commentary on whether that actually improved stability or not :lol:)

[Thorham]

Only serious alternative on the Amiga is to write a new OS from scratch, but there are two problems:

1) Someone has to write it. Not necessarily a big deal, but still.
2) Even if successful, new software will be needed that's not just a port of existing open source software.

[bbond007]

Really, crazily enough, if you want stability in older computers, you just can't beat DOS.

DOS OK as long as you only wanted to address a total 1MB or ram one 64K segment at a time.

Once you tried to address over 1MB of ram through various extended and expended memory schemes, or enter "386" 32bit mode stability went out the window. Those memory managers were massively temperamental when trying to optimize your valuable "conventional" RAM.

If you want to real treat, you could add in a splash of multitasking with various DOS extenders like Desqview windows 3X I can't imagine Amiga being any less stable than that mess

[commodorejohn]

Only serious alternative on the Amiga is to write a new OS from scratch, but there are two problems:

1) Someone has to write it. Not necessarily a big deal, but still.
2) Even if successful, new software will be needed that's not just a port of existing open source software.

Yep. And it seems like most people figure that'd be more trouble than it's worth...

DOS OK as long as you only wanted to address a total 1MB or ram one 64K segment at a time.

Once you tried to address over 1MB of ram through various extended and  expended memory schemes, or enter "386" 32bit mode stability went out  the window. Those memory managers were massively temperamental when  trying to optimize your valuable "conventional" RAM.

I never had stability problems with protected-mode DOS, but then, all I ever did was run Descent on it...

[commodorejohn]

DOS OK as long as you only wanted to address a total 1MB or ram one 64K segment at a time.

Once you tried to address over 1MB of ram through various extended and expended memory schemes, or enter "386" 32bit mode stability went out the window. Those memory managers were massively temperamental when trying to optimize your valuable "conventional" RAM.

I never had stability problems with protected-mode DOS, but then, all I ever did was run Descent on it...

[ajlwalker]

Maybe if some of the contemporaries of the time could actually multi-task they too would have crashed as they would have had more programmes trying to use the same unprotected resource.

Personally the crashes didn't bother me that much as I always saved my work regularly.  It was just something you did back then.

Anyway, you just rebooted and you were up again in seconds.

[Thorham]

Yep. And it seems like most people figure that'd be more trouble than it's worth...

Indeed. The only good reason I can come up with to do it, is to see how good you can actually make such an OS while keeping it fast.

Personally the crashes didn't bother me that much as I always saved my work regularly.  It was just something you did back then.

It's ALWAYS a good idea to save your work often, even on a 100% stable system, for the simple fact that the user can do things wrong, too, not just the software

[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

[Paulie85]

I enjoy the Amiga experience but even my Winuae Amigasys setup crashes all the time and I've only added a few extra programs.