dh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: (09/06/2002 15:29)
>Excellent description, you neglected to mention that except for the >very (very!) earliest of versions it was/is also a fully pre-emptive, >multitasking OS. >The first computer I owned that could draw me away from it as far as >usability was a 700mhz athlon. (ppc, mac os7.5 was unusable in >comparison, as far as I was concerned). It still works well today for >email and light net stuff. >I think I paid 150$ 2 1/2 years ago for a brand new Amiga 1200 w/ word >processor, paint and spreadsheet programs as well as 4gb hard drive. > >The biggest limitation was expensive peripherals due to lack of >manufacturer support (thanks to m$ and the sheepish behavior of >society). Yes, I forgot the pre-emptive multi-tasking. That i. more than one application could run at once without fakery (such as terminate-and-stay-resident applications in DOS); ii. if an application crashed, neither other applications nor the OS was brought down; was sensational and, I think, underappreciated (people were so used to running applications sequentially they couldn't think what to do with something which could run them in parallel :) Despite the lack of availability the hardware that existed was plug- and-play. I remember buying a 20MB hard drive (!) for about £200 (!) in 1991 or so which attached to the side of the machine and 'just worked' - an icon appeared on Workbench (the Amiga GUI) and, after formatting, I could drag icons and folders to it. There was also a trapdoor under the machine in which various expansion cards could be inserted, and it was easy to insert an accelerator card which overrode the 68000 CPU (for example, with a 68030 plus 68882 floating point unit). These facilities were _certainly_ way ahead of the times; adding hardware tended to be (deliberately?) difficult if not impossible on most systems. At the time the Mac offered similar usability but was a far more closed system and cost 7 or 8 times more :) Alastair ________________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned for all viruses by the MessageLabs SkyScan service. For more information on a proactive anti-virus service working around the clock, around the globe, visit http://www.messagelabs.com ________________________________________________________________________
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