Amiga stability?

[orange]

Windows 200 was one of the most stable Windows OS I've ever encountered.  It was a great step from Windows NT 4.0 on the way to Windows XP.

too bad its almost useless due to lack of drivers (compared to win9x)

1.  Memory Protection.  I can crash any classic AmigaOS by writing to memory location $4.  Poof!  Gone!  AmigaOS stability is based on the premise that Amiga Apps are written to behave properly.  There is nothing in the OS that can stop a malicious program from trashing your memory, data, or hard drive.

-P

well then, thank god there are so few malicious programs for Amiga..

[Ancalimon]

Who wrote that Wikipedia? That is just plain wrong....

I workbench.library still in my 1200s 3.1 ROM.

I do know that it is one library you can remove to make room for other stuff. I was experimenting with doing this with Remus.

Maybe that is something specific to the 4000.

only Amiga4000T have workbench.library outside because there isn't enough space.

[thegman]

Obviously compared to modern machines, Amigas were/are very unreliable. I sold my Sam 440 simply because of the the instability, I could not program it if every time I did anything, it crashed hard.

Compared to peers of it's time, I only had experience of Acorn RISC OS, and the Mac. I'd say the Amiga was less stable than both, but not by a significant margin. I expect the Guru meditation stuck in my mind, so maybe it did seem more unreliable than it was, but RISC OS crashing, was very annoying, so that stick in my mind too. RISC OS just brought up these modal dialogs, replaced with another modal dialog when one went away. It did that until bits of the UI disappeared and you knew it was all over.

[Daedalus]

It's perfectly simple, like many people here have said. The OS itself is very stable (apart from the early versions), but due to the unprotected memory and the open multitasking nature of the OS, it was very easy for a running application to trash system memory, thus causing a crash. The ST didn't really have that problem since it couldn't multitask that way, so naturally it'll feel more stable.

@commodorejohn
It's on Wikipedia, so it *must* be true Workbench.library was only supplied on disk for the A4000T, since the ROM space was needed for a driver for the onboard SCSI. Every other kickstart ROM has had workbench.library included, meaning that once the boot flag was set on a floppy, or a hard drive was installed, you could boot. It wasn't much fun to use, but it was all there - GUI, DOS, mouse, sound etc.

[Thorham]

Obviously compared to modern machines, Amigas were/are very unreliable.

Unreliable? Right, that's why they still work after 20+ years :rolleyes:

[bloodline]

If your Amiga is unstable, then you'll want to check the little rubber feet on the bottom, if you lose one, the thing can be a pain to type on...







:-D

[stefcep2]

There's theoretical instability and actual instability.  Yes no MP --> increase risk of a bad program bringing the whole system.  But don't use cracked software/ beta software/ software written by someone who got Blitz Basic for Christmas, and suddenly Amiga becomes a very stable machine.  

I like to point to all the stuff on aminet that has been created by ordinary users on aminet: if everyone was losing data all the time, how could Aminet at one stage end being the world's biggest repository of PD software?

Personally, my A4000 with 68060 and CV64 running a reasonably-heavily patched 3.1 was rock solid with the Apps I ran, most of which were original and commercial.   Amazing given that the software support for the CPU itself and the RTG graphics card were basically third party kludges.  And thats the thing here: after Commodire went under so much of the OS was updated by so many different people, adding CD support, RT audio and graphics, datatypes, tcp stacks, floating point libraries, screen drawing routines, menu hacks, things which really go to the heart of what the OS should be doing was all written by third parties without any central quality control.

[Digiman]

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)

[Digiman]

There's theoretical instability and actual instability.  Yes no MP --> increase risk of a bad program bringing the whole system.  But don't use cracked software/ beta software/ software written by someone who got Blitz Basic for Christmas, and suddenly Amiga becomes a very stable machine.  

Exactly, in 1992/3 I was using both an A1200 and a 486 PC to do various things. I NEVER lost any work due to my Amiga crashing.....not something I could say for the time spent re-typing stuff at 3am because my PC just hung or corrupted a file on shut-down

[jorkany]

I had an Atari 520 ST and a 1040 ST for a few months before I got an Amiga 1000 (this is back when all of them were new). I rarely saw the Ataris crash, but my Amiga crashed all the time. However I was also doing a lot of development on the Amiga so maybe it just seems like it was less stable in retrospect.

[pyrre]

I like to think of the Amiga more like an AC Cobra with no air bags, traction control, abs breaks, power steering, or other non essential bloat. It's bare bones and slower than some of today's cars and you can kill yourself in a jiffy but it's worth the ride .

Well put.
I agree on that.

[commodorejohn]

@commodorejohn
It's on Wikipedia, so it *must* be true

Well, that's why I specified, when in doubt, pre-shift the blame

[_ThEcRoW]

@crumb

You said it, a disk. Without a disk, on his own, the kisckstart is unable to do anything.

[Thorham]

@crumb

You said it, a disk. Without a disk, on his own, the kisckstart is unable to do anything.

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. Basically the OS is now functional. The only thing you can't do is run programs, because they're not available

[commodorejohn]

You could load something over the serial port

[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