Amiga stability?

[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.

[commodorejohn]

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..

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.

[runequester]

TOS is stable because it barely does anything.
 
I never had stability issues with Workbench, but the original release was pretty dicey.
 
When the old fan wars rear their heads again, you'll notice that Atari fans like to pretend only the A1000 exists.

[commodorejohn]

TOS is stable because it barely does anything.

See also: MS-DOS

[matthey]

The Amiga can be pretty stable if not many hacks are used and buggy software is avoided. My Amiga 3000T with AmigaOS 3.9 is very stable. I can go days without a guru. It is possible to protect kickstart (soft ROM) with the MMU which can improve the OS stability.

[save2600]

TOS is stable because it barely does anything.

Good one!

The two times in my life I briefly had an ST (520 & 1040), separated by about 10 years, I remember seeing those damn bombs piling up way more often than I thought they had a right to. And I was hardly "power using" those machines.

[persia]

It was the '80s, instability was a feature back then....

[bbond007]

Good one!

The two times in my life I briefly had an ST (520 & 1040), separated by about 10 years, I remember seeing those damn bombs piling up way more often than I thought they had a right to. And I was hardly a power user.

I remember one computer lab in HS filled with Macs. All I had to do was enter that room and 3 or 4 of those machines would get those little bombs...

DING!

[lost_loven]

Wasn't there a sort of guru catcher that would .. .. well catch the guru in workbench before it happened.. I am sure i used something like that.. Sooo 20 years ago lol  I think i got it off the fred fish collection..

lost

[drHirudo]

Wasn't there a sort of guru catcher that would .. .. well catch the guru in workbench before it happened.. I am sure i used something like that.. Sooo 20 years ago lol  I think i got it off the fred fish collection..

lost

I used MuForce on my Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000. It helped me a lot in preventing random crashes and finding bugs in software. In fact it helped me resolve a random crash in the assembler AHX replayer that I used in my games. It took me some days to make free of Enforcer hits version, but it was worth the trouble. No more random crashes after using it. Many programs don't need to reside in the memory to cause a crash. They just do some changes and later some program when trying to use the altered resources crashes and you go to blame that program, without having a clue that it was some other buggy software.

On AmigaOS 4 the GrimReaper is even better than MuForce. I still compile 68K programs with VBCC and Assembler, that help me remember the old times of instability.

[lsmart]

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.

That´s the core of the problem. In the early days, many programmers thought they could just write software for the Amiga the same way they were used to on other platforms. Not only did they waste resources, but they didn´t properly clean up after themselves and ended up trashing system data structures.

the gradual decay of a poorly-manufactured floppy can make software act a lot more unstable than it really is.

Never happened to me. Most of my old disks are still working.

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

You can. DOS is a stability nightmare! I don´t know how you can forget that installing extra memory would break your software installations. Mice would stop working because of programms that reconfigured the COM-Port. One program would install something in your config.sys or autoexec.bat and the system would refuse to start at all. It took people days to make a new GFX-Card work with their games. And if you didn´t have a Souindblaster, but a compatible card, you were likely to have no sound in 30% of the games. Drivers would hang themselves midway in a program and there would be no error message at all.

Don´t kid yourself. The DOS you are seeing nowadays is a standardized virtual machine. The real DOS was very different in stability.

[itix]

When Amiga 1000 its operating system and applications were quite crash prone. Things improved when Amiga 500 was released in 1987 but you can make first impression only once.

[_ThEcRoW]

Heavily modded workbenches are prone to crash, and that is a fact. There will be always a 3rd party app that could bring the system to his knees.*And it happens be it winuae, or real amiga.

[commodorejohn]

\You can. DOS is a stability nightmare! I don´t know how you can forget that installing extra memory would break your software installations. Mice would stop working because of programms that reconfigured the COM-Port. One program would install something in your config.sys or autoexec.bat and the system would refuse to start at all. It took people days to make a new GFX-Card work with their games. And if you didn´t have a Souindblaster, but a compatible card, you were likely to have no sound in 30% of the games. Drivers would hang themselves midway in a program and there would be no error message at all.

Don´t kid yourself. The DOS you are seeing nowadays is a standardized virtual machine. The real DOS was very different in stability.

I've used real DOS plenty, thanks. And yes, configuration could be a nightmare - but once you got it configured, if you didn't change anything, you could keep the same setup running pretty much forever. I never said it's a great all-around operating system, just that when it comes to responding the same way to the same input with the same settings, day in and day out, year after year, DOS is where it's at.

[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

[pyrre]

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

Hmmmm... I cannot agree with you on that...

I have used pcs since spring 1999 and the most stable windows based os i have ever used (disregard any hardware specs causing instability) is windows 2000 (professional).
second place goes to XP. I only changed to Xp because drivers were no longer written to support win2k.
and third place goes to win98se...
Judging by my experiences with PCs over the years...
And by my experiences workbench do not come even close to win2k.
But amiga os beats the crap out of win95, early 98 releases and win millennium with regards to stability.
It does not beat win 3.11 in stability, but sure as hell beats it in userfriendliness and of course, multitasking....

With regards to msdos. i have very little experiences with it.