Amiga Multitask

[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

[JimS]

The Amiga 1000 looks nice. Don't forget you have to load the OS first, no rom.
Also upgrades are minimal.

The ROM thing was easily handled with 3rd party upgrade boards. I had a DKB Kwikstart in my 1000.

[vidarh]

"Can do" and "actually did" are different.
I believe he is saying he is impressed that the Amiga actually did it..

There were multitasking implementations for the C64

It's actually very easy to do on the C64 simply by setting up a suitable interrupt, since you have so little state to save/load, and then just swap the return addresses around before you leave the interrupt handler.

Of course, it's not very *useful* on a machine that slow - the closest most people would get would be the interrupt handler in parallel with a main "thread".

But at least one BASIC extension offered pre-emptively multi-tasking BASIC. Lightning BASIC perhaps? I believe it was up 3 BASIC "threads" in parallel + sprite animations.

(EDIT: It was Laser Basic from OASIS I remember, based on "White Lightning" which had a boat-load of other features too - there a demo of some of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8609Pel_RU )

[desiv]

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.

I did like OS/2, but they were behind the curve initially.
It didn't even release until 87, and that was with no GUI.
The initial GUI was released in 88, and it took it quite a bit to get to "user friendly" status.
By that time tho, Windows (which wasn't as good kernel wise) had the market all sewn up..

Heck, it didn't get all 32-bit goodness until 2.0 which was released in 92.

OS/2 Warp was awesome tho...  A great OS..  ;-)
And released a year before Win95.  Too bad they couldn't have marketed it better.
There are also people that say that the Windows 3.1 application compatibility helped kill it.  Developers saw no reason to write a native OS/2 version of their app if it would run (mostly) already.

Then again, by 1994, WB 3.x had been out for 2 years.  And from a user perspective (not memory protection or kernels), I preferred WB3.x to OS/2 WARP, which came out 2 years later.

desiv

[desiv]

There were multitasking implementations for the C64

True, and fun stuff..
But we were talking Multitasking OSes here.. ;-)

desiv

[persia]

@desiv

You might be interested to know OS/2 lives.
http://www.ecomstation.com

[desiv]

You might be interested to know OS/2 lives.
http://www.ecomstation.com

Oh sweet !!!

Awesome!!!
Thanx!

desiv

[bitcpy]

There is a difference between multi-threading and multi-tasking.
 
The C64 was my first computer and as much as I can remember, there was no way to task switch and have more than 1 open application and switch between them.
 
The C64 was an amazing piece of hardware for it's time, but, I think Commodore really set the bar when they created The Amiga.
 

There were multitasking implementations for the C64
 
It's actually very easy to do on the C64 simply by setting up a suitable interrupt, since you have so little state to save/load, and then just swap the return addresses around before you leave the interrupt handler.
 
Of course, it's not very *useful* on a machine that slow - the closest most people would get would be the interrupt handler in parallel with a main "thread".
 
But at least one BASIC extension offered pre-emptively multi-tasking BASIC. Lightning BASIC perhaps? I believe it was up 3 BASIC "threads" in parallel + sprite animations.
 
(EDIT: It was Laser Basic from OASIS I remember, based on "White Lightning" which had a boat-load of other features too - there a demo of some of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8609Pel_RU )

[bitcpy]

Holy heck... OS/2 lives?? I thought that was long gone.
 
I'd bet there is a linux kernel running under eComStation.. lol..
 

@desiv
 
You might be interested to know OS/2 lives.
http://www.ecomstation.com

[Thorham]

The C64 was my first computer and as much as I can remember, there was no way to task switch and have more than 1 open application and switch between them.

That's because the OS doesn't have preemptive multitasking, not because the C64 can't do it (it's easy to do, actually).

[bitcpy]

I know.
 
The thread was about: what was reality, not what was possible.
 

That's because the OS doesn't have preemptive multitasking, not because the C64 can't do it (it's easy to do, actually).

[Pentad]

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.

I don't know how many people remember this but Apple tried to include custom chips to offload the CPU on the MacIIFX and then with DSP chips down the road.

The problem was that it was all 'add-on' technology and the core OS was not built to do this.  Almost no software took advantage of the MacIIFX's custom chips and very few used the DSP's later (other than for specific tasks - audio related).

Folks like Guy Kawasaki and other Apple evangelists used to promote Mono-tasking as a more preferred way to compute.

Anybody remember these Apple Phrases?

"I can't multitasking so why should my computer?"
"I'm more productive staying on task with one application."
"A human being isn't meant to multitask."
"Multitasking is a distraction."

Apple really pushed the whole mono-tasking view of computing.


Good times,
-P

[paul1981]

Folks like Guy Kawasaki and other Apple evangelists used to promote Mono-tasking as a more preferred way to compute.

Anybody remember these Apple Phrases?

"I can't multitasking so why should my computer?"
"I'm more productive staying on task with one application."
"A human being isn't meant to multitask."
"Multitasking is a distraction."

Apple really pushed the whole mono-tasking view of computing.


Good times,
-P

Brilliant grounds for an Apple piss take! I like it. :laugh1:

[itix]

it was not because of the OS but because of these programs. Kamelito

If it had virtual memory you could actually run paint program and word processor at the same time. So it is actually an OS limitation.

[commodorejohn]

If it had virtual memory you could actually run paint program and word processor at the same time. So it is actually an OS limitation.

I'm trying to imagine a virtual-memory system on 8MHz and 28 KB/s floppy disks, but I can't think over the screaming in my brain. I think there may be a lesson in there somewhere.

[itix]

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

Neither did Windows 3.x. There Windows applications were running inside a single process and applications could share memory like Amiga does. What made it finally quite unstable piece of crap was trying to retrofit paging and virtual memory to this mess. Applications had to lock handles to convert them to real memory pointers but sometimes programmers were not careful. Sometimes they were using stale pointer that worked until memory paging kicked in.