Amiga Multitask

[bbond007]

To be precise, Windows 3.x did multitask, at least on a 386 - however, only on the much more primitive, cooperative level (which the application needed to allow and some just didn't). Amiga OS offered preemptive multitasking from the beginning - a feature which required 10 years to reach the mainstream Windows platform (Windows 95).

It would preemptively multitask DOS applications, just not windows applications until Windows 95. Even within Windows95 I believe all applications shared a common message queue, which was a point of failure for smooth multitasking.

Anyway, there is nothing really magical about preemptive multitasking in just 256K of ram(or less), and if you had a A1000 with just 256K of ram, you probably were not doing much multitasking anyway...

The preemptive multitasking was just one of the many cool features. The GUI, and API and custom hardware were equally important.

Cinemaware games were a good example of what could be achieved in the OS (with the hardware) without banging on the hardware directly...

[koaftder]

To be precise, Windows 3.x did multitask, at least on a 386 - however, only on the much more primitive, cooperative level (which the application needed to allow and some just didn't). Amiga OS offered preemptive multitasking from the beginning - a feature which required 10 years to reach the mainstream Windows platform (Windows 95).

It did on the 286 as well.

I think the preemptive multitasking feature of AmigaOS is mostly overrated. Without memory protection, preemptive multitasking doesn't result in a significantly better end user experience. It's all fun a games until a program goes off into the weeds and then the result is the same with either setup, i.e. the user gets to hit the reset button.

Love the Amiga to death but back in the day when I first got my hands on a 386DX/25 w/ 8MiB of RAM and 1MiB trident VGA board, I didn't miss the Amiga one bit. I'd go so far as to say that Windows 3.1 was more sophisticated than classic AmigaOS ever was. It certainly was more stable.

[kamelito]

It did on the 286 as well.

I think the preemptive multitasking feature of AmigaOS is mostly overrated. Without memory protection, preemptive multitasking doesn't result in a significantly better end user experience. It's all fun a games until a program goes off into the weeds and then the result is the same with either setup, i.e. the user gets to hit the reset button.

Love the Amiga to death but back in the day when I first got my hands on a 386DX/25 w/ 8MiB of RAM and 1MiB trident VGA board, I didn't miss the Amiga one bit. I'd go so far as to say that Windows 3.1 was more sophisticated than classic AmigaOS ever was. It certainly was more stable.

 Well, about stability you mix OS and applications, no memory protection forced serious Amiga programmers to write more robust programs, if you run a bad one the OS won't help you there. Kamelito

[commodorejohn]

I've had more crashes (program and system) on Windows 3.1 than I've ever had on AmigaOS...

[bbond007]

Love the Amiga to death but back in the day when I first got my hands on a 386DX/25 w/ 8MiB of RAM and 1MiB trident VGA board, I didn't miss the Amiga one bit. I'd go so far as to say that Windows 3.1 was more sophisticated than classic AmigaOS ever was. It certainly was more stable.

Did your Amiga also have 8MB of ram? Windows also had virtual memory....

I think the biggest problem with stability on the Amiga was caused by running out of RAM.

I ended up getting into x86 because you could afford 40mhz and 8MB of ram for a fraction of the price of a comparable Amiga system... not because I liked DOS or Windows

[desiv]

It did on the 286 as well.

Not pre-emptively, and very few people actually ran Windows on a 286.  ;-)

I think the preemptive multitasking feature of AmigaOS is mostly overrated. Without memory protection, preemptive multitasking doesn't result in a significantly better end user experience.

It did compared to the other OSs out at the time. IMHO

It's all fun a games until a program goes off into the weeds and then the result is the same with either setup, i.e. the user gets to hit the reset button.

I used a lot of early Windows (predating Windows 3 even) and early MacOS.
There were lots of crashes there too...

Love the Amiga to death but back in the day when I first got my hands on a 386DX/25 w/ 8MiB of RAM and 1MiB trident VGA board, I didn't miss the Amiga one bit. I'd go so far as to say that Windows 3.1 was more sophisticated than classic AmigaOS ever was. It certainly was more stable.

Windows 3.x was an acceptable program launcher, but as with most things, the stability was dependent on the software you were running.  It could be just as unstable or more so than any of the other machines out there..

The Mac was the most stable (well, once they got to System 6), but I remember lots of "Sad Macs."
The more you used them, the more they crashed...

In theory, Windows 3.1 was more stable because it didn't have pre-emptive multitasking.  But I found that my Amiga could be very stable when I ran known stable software and Windows could be very unstable, as the term "cooperative multitasking" implies that the programs cooperate, which they didn't always do...

That said, I've had any and all OSes be both stable and not stable for me depending on what I was doing...

However, pre-emptive multitasking was incredibly useful for me at the time.
It was well worth the occasional crash.  ;-)

desiv

[Pentad]

It certainly was more stable.

Sorry, given the wide range of hardware, drivers, and software developers, Windows was probably the least stable compared to Mac or Amiga.  The flexibility and expanse of hardware was at the cost of stability due to poor drivers, conflicting hardware and an OS that did not separate such things yet.

It was not until Windows XP that MS brought the stability of NT which the driver availability of 9x.

*I think the preemptive multitasking feature of AmigaOS is mostly overrated.

No offense, this is probably because you have no idea how it really works, how hard it would be to code something like this given the specs at the time, and have no idea how bad the other systems were during that period of time.  Remember, by 1985 Andy Hertzfeld was just beginning to shoehorn Switcher into 512k Macs (which would lead to MultiFinder).

The biggest advantage the Amiga had was multitasking was built into the OS...it was part of the framework foundation.  Most of the multitasking that came after the Amiga was an afterthought so it was never part of the foundation.  It became a layer that the OS and Applications had to pass through.

This is one of the reasons memory fragmentation could really cause 'multitasking' to have problems on say Switcher, MultiFinder, or even early Windows.  The Amiga was created with multitasking so memory fragmentation was not a huge problem.

As an adult, programmer, and CS Professor, I would love to sit down with Carl and ask him many questions about his designs.  Knowing what I know now, he was a bigger genius than most people realize given what he had to work with.

-P

[bitcpy]

Let's not forget about Quarterdeck Desqview and Desqview/X. It ran on a 386 with 640kb of RAM and if you had extra memory, it could be mapped by QEMM and made usable by Desqview.
 
1985 was an interesting year because Desqview was released in July, AmigaOS was released in October,  and Windows followed shortly after in November.
 
Desqview was actually the first multi-tasking OS I used and shortly after that I purchased my Amiga 1000.
 
It was amazing what programmers were able to do with such little resources back then.
 
These days, I think most programmers take for granted the abundance of resources available (GB's of RAM, TB's of HD, etc, etc). I think it makes for lazy programming and a constant bloat of our OS's and applications.
 
That's why I like to look back and use some of these great machines of those times; it reminds you of what can be done within confined specs.

[lassie]

Let's not forget about Quarterdeck Desqview and Desqview/X. It ran on a 386 with 640kb of RAM and if you had extra memory, it could be mapped by QEMM and made usable by Desqview.
 
1985 was an interesting year because Desqview was released in July, AmigaOS was released in October,  and Windows followed shortly after in November.
 
Desqview was actually the first multi-tasking OS I used and shortly after that I purchased my Amiga 1000.
 
It was amazing what programmers were able to do with such little resources back then.
 
These days, I think most programmers take for granted the abundance of resources available (GB's of RAM, TB's of HD, etc, etc). I think it makes for lazy programming and a constant bloat of our OS's and applications.
 
That's why I like to look back and use some of these great machines of those times; it reminds you of what can be done within confined specs.

Yes it was amazing what they could do back then with so little. I come to think of my first computer a Commodore 64 with only 64 kb of ram, i know it was not the same as Amiga, but still it could do wonderful things in the hands of the right people. The pc i am using now has 60000 times more ram than a Commodore 64

[haywirepc]

As far as multitasking... I don't think there is any comparison of amiga os and other available systems at the time.

I ran a bbs on pc... I wanted to do it on amiga os but couldn't afford an amiga 2000 at the time. I always had an amiga for me, and pc for the bbs, running
dos and desqview.

I ran a bbs and did alot of bbsing. On a 386 with desqview you could call a bbs and do something else at one time, but it crashed constantly and was not a joy to use. I could run my 1 node bbs and run perhaps some small apps in the background (the draw or a text editor) But the users noticed lags while I did this.

At the time time, I could use an amiga 500 with 2 meg ram and call a bbs and download files while playing a game, while playing mod files, while running dpaint in another screen, while waiting for the files to download, with almost never a crash...

Later, I got a 486. I tried running 4 phone lines (nodes on the bbs) on one machine, no way. I could do 2 lines max at 2400 baud on a 486 66dx2 with 32 megs ram.

Around the same time, a friend of mine ran 8 lines (6 - 2400 baud lines and 2 57600 lines) on an amiga 2000 with 25mhz 68030, with cnet. He could also
still play games, write letters, play mod files, play games, view gifs,and users rarely or never saw any lag.


Around that sime time.
Want to try windows for multitasking? Forget it, it was much slower and worse than desqview because the processor did everything, graphics, sound, all bogged down the main cpu.

Amiga worked better because the sound, graphics used custom
chips... and the os cooperated, spreading the workload across graphics
chips, sound chips and main cpu.

windows 95 things got a bit better, but not much. I still think an amiga 500
with 68000 and 2 meg of ram ran rings around a 200 mhz Pentium running windows 95 or 98 when it came to running multiple applications and a smooth user experience.

After windows 98, I gave up on dos/windows and moved to linux. Linux multitasks as smoothly as amiga. I sure miss the simplicity of knowing where
everything is in amiga though...

I should also mention, before amiga or pc I used a trs-80 color computer with os9, it multitasked beautifully on a 2mhz 6809 in 64k. Coming from that,
I couldn't believe the ****tiness of a "pc" with so much more resources not being able to do this effectively.  How can a computer that is like 25 times
faster than the 2mhz color computer not be able to run 2 applications smoothly multitasking? Bad design, and bad programming I think.

[djos]

I ran a 386sx25 with OS/2 (2.1 then Warp 3.0) and it was great, didnt start using windows until WinNT 4.0 was released.

OS/2 had stuff that Winblows still doesnt such as a fully object oriented OS - you could use both floppies at the same time and I can remember having Lotus Smartsuite for OS/2 installing from one drive and MS Office for Windows installing on the other drive at the same time while surfing a BBS!

[KimmoK]

>I think the preemptive multitasking feature of AmigaOS is mostly overrated.

It can not be.
But a lot of people had too limited setup to truly use it.

>Without memory protection, preemptive multitasking doesn't result in a significantly better end user experience.

Yes it did. After you found stable programs, you could multitask a workd day without any symptoms of problems.

I got A2000C(1MchipRAM)+2MB+20MBHDD+Bridgeboard+Multisync in 1989, it was a superb workstation untill 1994 (I sold it at that time). I used multitasking continuously. I even tried to favour games with HDD installation + multitasking option. Did some renderings in multitasking, dock writing & picture editing for the doc...
And I had mods playing on the background, without any hickups. One nice thing was be able to use music apps and animation tools at the same time and record the animation with sound to VHS.

>Love the Amiga to death but back in the day when I first got my hands on a 386DX/25 w/ 8MiB of RAM and 1MiB trident VGA board,

My first own real x86 was P1/75Mhz with some 8MB  RAM etc (in 1995).
It could in no way compare with my A4k.
(x86 had more raw power but it was slower than 040/25 systemn anyway, everywhere. And unstable. Cheaper, though.)

(before late 1995 I used bridgeboard with my A2000 and PC Task on my 4k for occasional x86 need, for graduation work I had P1/60+Win3.11 at work, but I bought my own HW to get rid some of the troubles.)


>I didn't miss the Amiga one bit. I'd go so far as to say that Windows 3.1 was more sophisticated than classic AmigaOS ever was. It certainly was more stable.

My experience is totally different.
On Amiga you can set up the system to be stable. You cound stretch the system unbelieveably.
But pre-NT windows systems always broke if you truly used them a lot (for more than word2).

(and you had to do insane amount of tricks to get every SW + games to work. For example I had 32bit soundcard on the P1/75, but never got it working with DOS games (90% of x86 game content was in DOS). And usually you had to kill win95 to run DOS games ... and even then you had to have the know how to set high/low/whatever mem and IRQs right .... AAAAARGHHHHH!!!!!).


For me. The biggest advancement on my devices after AOS1.2 in multitasking was the Executive task scheduler.
Suddenly I could automate the priority settings. 600%cpu load without loosing any responsiveness...
And also Amigas virtual memory was superb. I was able to set what apps use virtual memory, the rest of the system remained 99% responsive even when there was a lot of swapping ongoing. .... oh those times ....
Yes, most of my HW have MP etc etc. But still the multitasking is behind Amiga basics. (to my liking)

[KimmoK]

One nice multitasking thing on AOS has been that you can continue your doings without any multitasking quirks even when handling the main media, floppy disks. You could do disk to disk copies and backups while continuing yoruy work and music listening.

Later it was the same with CD-R. You could write CD and multitask without as big risk of failing burn as on Win95 (when using modest HW). I think minimum recommended CPU for CDR burning was some 200Mhz CPU on x86??? On A2000 some people did it with 030/25Mhz or less, in multitasking. (when burnproof HW became available, things got forgotten)

And for multitasking....
For some reason, even when DMA was not used, Amigas could do faster HDD data transfers and with lower CPU overhead than on x86. It affected in multitasking greatly in late 90's.

[stefcep2]

One impressive example I saw was of a "high seas sailor" acquaintance I knew, who ran an A4000 with a warp engine+scsi and picasso 4 with a Magellan set up: web, IRC, burning playstation , ahem "back-ups" ( 4 burners going), running x-copy with 4 floppy drives, downloading files continuosly, playing mods in the background, and he was bringing up listers, creating folders of software "packages" that we wanted, and he ran a BBS at the same time.  Windows 98 had just come out, but next to this Amiga, it was a toy.

And for all the "no memory protection" arguments, here was an amiga that had up time in the months, doing all sorts of crap, but this was in the hands of a guy who really knew how to set it up right.

I would then go home to my 2mb A1200 and cry myself to sleep....

[lassie]

One impressive example I saw was of a "high seas sailor" acquaintance I knew, who ran an A4000 with a warp engine+scsi and picasso 4 with a Magellan set up: web, IRC, burning playstation , ahem "back-ups" ( 4 burners going), running x-copy with 4 floppy drives, downloading files continuosly, playing mods in the background, and he was bringing up listers, creating folders of software "packages" that we wanted, and he ran a BBS at the same time.  Windows 98 had just come out, but next to this Amiga, it was a toy.

And for all the "no memory protection" arguments, here was an amiga that had up time in the months, doing all sorts of crap, but this was in the hands of a guy who really knew how to set it up right.

I would then go home to my 2mb A1200 and cry myself to sleep....

Hi that sounds very cool than An Amiga 4000 could do all that. He must realy has know how to get the most of that girl

[lassie]

One impressive example I saw was of a "high seas sailor" acquaintance I knew, who ran an A4000 with a warp engine+scsi and picasso 4 with a Magellan set up: web, IRC, burning playstation , ahem "back-ups" ( 4 burners going), running x-copy with 4 floppy drives, downloading files continuosly, playing mods in the background, and he was bringing up listers, creating folders of software "packages" that we wanted, and he ran a BBS at the same time.  Windows 98 had just come out, but next to this Amiga, it was a toy.

And for all the "no memory protection" arguments, here was an amiga that had up time in the months, doing all sorts of crap, but this was in the hands of a guy who really knew how to set it up right.

I would then go home to my 2mb A1200 and cry myself to sleep....

Hi that sounds very cool than An Amiga 4000 could do all that. He must realy has know how to get the most out of that girl