AmigoOS vs Everything Else + Storage!

R

radar1200gs

Regular
MS-DOS is derived from QDOS (Seattle Computer), which was developed because CP/M-86 progress was slow.

QDOS stands for Quick & Dirty Operating System. Quite prophetic actually given the software development habits of the company that bought the rights to it (Microsoft) and used it as the foundation for their own OS's. :LOL:

http://www.patersontech.com/Dos/Byte/History.html

The real irony is that QDOS/MSDOS succeeded at all given the quality of competing OS's such as AmigaDOS, Unix etc. It's amazing what hitching yourself to the right brandname (IBM) can acheive for you, no matter how lame your product is.
 
i really wish that people could actually go back in time to when all this happened..
then some of these sheer rubbish that gets repeatedly spouted would be seen for the crap it is.

amigados/unix as competition to msdos . . good grief.
-dave-

give bill the credit he deserves, he got a fantastic deal under the noses of other companies and dragged ibm into the 'home-computer' world . . . mind you if those clones hadnt appeared , well . . .
 
Amigados happened 1984, not that long after MS-DOS (and together with workbench gave us a taste of windows 95 over a decade before it happened PC side).

AmigaDOS itself was based on a british OS mainframe/minicomputer OS(can't remember the name) that made Unix look silly.
 
radar1200gs said:
AmigaDOS itself was based on a british OS mainframe/minicomputer OS(can't remember the name) that made Unix look silly.
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Pray tell, how?

How could it do, say, unix style memory management? The Amiga, IIRC, use a 68000 which had no memory management/protection systems. The 68010 tried to introduce a MMU but was, effectively, useless (if I remember my operating systems class of ~84). It wasn't until the '020 arrived that the 68K family had a sensible memory protection system.
 
after using pc's with hdd running msdos to develop games for say about 2 years. i then used amiga's / st's to develop games.
the amiga's crashed all the bloody time, of course these had to be a500's coz the original a1000's were far too expensive ( well i didnt think they were but the bosses did).
the amigados was a pita because it was designed to need an hdd , without it was annoying . ( i know , get a 2nd drive) . .
i'm not sure what 'taste' of win95 your talking about , though it did crash a lot ;)
i suppose i didnt really get to use it for developing "applications" rather than games, but i dont remember it being 'fantastic' i just remember it ran dpaint ( which i'll contend was good)..

-dave-

mind you , we did eventually find out that we'd got the first pesky virus, so maybe it wasnt all amigas fault :-/
[edit] i think the bit about the 'basing on a server-os ' is the running commands from hd bit . .. great idea... if you have an hd .
 
hahah was about to post same link...

bit more googlin'
a1000 launched in us on 1985, a500 launched 1987 .

1981 for the ibm-pc ,,,,

so that was at least 4 years difference, maybe 6 .

-dave-
me "come on amiga do something"
it " grrrrrrrrrrrrrrggrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr disk error"
hahaha
 
Nothing is ever perfect. The Amiga's multitasking was only as good as the underlying hardware could allow it to be, naturally. But it was designed with the future in mind, not with the future needing to be bolted on.

The Windows 95 reference was a bit unkind of me. AmigaDOS actually has more in common capability wise with the NT kernel than MSDOS.

Windows 95 had better looks than Workbench, but AmigaDOS had the brains under the pretty face.

You really should grab an AmigaDOS reference manual and compare the capabilities. It blew just about everything else out the water.

Unfortunately, Commodore didn't have a clue what to do with the Amiga, whereas Bill knew he wanted to rule the world. I guess that's what made the difference in the end.
 
i think thats the point,

boss "why havent you done your work?"
me " well i'm reading the manual for amigados , it's wonderful, just think although the machine we have here isnt all that useful the one which may or may not get made might just be fantastic"
boss "GET OUT!"

any (well lots of ) idiot can design something which doesnt work on the current hardware... it's a bit more useful to design stuff which can be used as a tool now .


-dave-

when i was younger i went on a trip with the computer club to see some new apple lisas that the apple centre had got , they were quite exciting.
i swear to god within 10 minutes one had eaten a floppy disk . . . gee thats clever . [ this might have been the first mac i saw ]
 
I'm not following you.

Everything the Amiga did, it did better than the PC of the day. Same for the DOS side.

We had heaps of big name userfriendly software and everything else, but no-one at Commodore knew what the Amiga's future was and thats what ultimately doomed it. It was up to the owners and third party developers to carry the Amiga can on their own a lot of the time.

Back then one computer that could excel at everything just wasn't a concept people could easily get their heads around. Business people wrote it off as a glorified games console. They couldn't see the future sitting right in front of them.
 
radar1200gs said:
Nothing is ever perfect. The Amiga's multitasking was only as good as the underlying hardware could allow it to be, naturally. But it was designed with the future in mind, not with the future needing to be bolted on.
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But what features did it have that, in your own words "made Unix look silly."?

For example, did it have named pipes or soft links?
 
If you search around you'll find how articles dedicated to how, back then, Unix was the enemy and people were cheering on Windows. There were good reasons to, and let's recall that Unix then is somewhat different from Unix now.

Microsoft = Bad is nice and all, but not really accurate, and you need to understand what was going on at the time to see why they did so well and were so popular.
 
Quitch said:
If you search around you'll find how articles dedicated to how, back then, Unix was the enemy and people were cheering on Windows. There were good reasons to, and let's recall that Unix then is somewhat different from Unix now..
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Really? I've been using it since, err, around 1985 or 86. Still seems much the same to me.
I don't recall anyone cheering on Windows.
 
Simon F said:
radar1200gs said:
Nothing is ever perfect. The Amiga's multitasking was only as good as the underlying hardware could allow it to be, naturally. But it was designed with the future in mind, not with the future needing to be bolted on.
Click to expand...
But what features did it have that, in your own words "made Unix look silly."?

For example, did it have named pipes or soft links?
Click to expand...

My word it did. That and a powerful assign command that truly made life much easier than it otherwise would have been.

The only thing really missing Unix wise was multi-user, but this was all pre PC networking, nobody really thought multi-user was a big concern for personal machines back then.
 
If the Amiga was such a wonderful machine, I wonder why I and just about every other serious Amiga games developer I knew used a PC running MSDOS to develop content for it.

Back in the day we had one Amiga (an upgraded A500) with a harddrive in it that the artist used for DPaint, we backed it up daily because it would trash the drive on a regular basis.

Backing up a floppy on an original A500 with 1 drive was like tossing a coin to see if you'd end up with no usable disks at the end of the process, since it would just ignore the write protect tab and write to the source disk. Although they did fix that bug in later ROMS.

Amiga's did a lot of things better than an MSDOS PC, but there another one of those machines that gets looked at with rose tinted spectacles these days. Amiga's were always way ahead in terms of multimedia performance and the later Amiga's A2000's and A3000's were actually pretty good machines, but they were far from perfect.
 
As an ex-Amiga coder/lover, I have to pipe up here. The AmigaOS had no memory protection, no resource tracking, no real concept of processes in the NT/Unix (it was all threads), a really poor filesystem, a device driver model that was not abstract enough (tied too much into CBM HW).

What it had was a) good HW at the time and b) very nice multithreading support with concurrency support (semaphores, locks, etc)

It got somewhat better over time (AmigaOS 2.0, 3.0, etc) but make Unix look silly? You've got to be kidding. OS/2, BEOS, NT, and OS X are examples of modern operating systems. AmigaOS is more a real-time OS like WindRiver/OS9/etc
 
fact is FAT was bloody backwardy even when it was new. regardless, the stubborness and critical mass of its owner practically made it a de-fact least-common denominator among file-system-dealing platforms, hence we're stuck now with it for eternity. i can clearly see in 100 years from now how people will still mess up things with long filenames in the wrong places..

/distant future scenario/

kid: mom, i swear i did my homework - but the homework file i just stored on my usb exercises book somehow vanished!!
mom: you silly boy, did you not follow your dad's advice to always store files under 8.3 character filenames when putting them on your excersice book?
kid: uh...
 
ERP said:
If the Amiga was such a wonderful machine, I wonder why I and just about every other serious Amiga games developer I knew used a PC running MSDOS to develop content for it.
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Compilers were better on other platforms, and fast processors were cheaper... Still, doesn't change MSDOS is a total PITA compared to AmigaDOS's shell. ;)

we backed it up daily because it would trash the drive on a regular basis.
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Umm? Either your artist was like, spilling coke into his hardware on an equally regular basis or your machine had hardware problems. Trashed harddrives wasn't anything either I or my Amiga-owning friends experienced very often at all. My box usually ran for years without a disk crash.

Backing up a floppy on an original A500 with 1 drive was like tossing a coin to see if you'd end up with no usable disks at the end of the process
Click to expand...

Maybe you'd better complain to Sony then since they developed the 3.5" floppy.

since it would just ignore the write protect tab and write to the source disk. Although they did fix that bug in later ROMS.
Click to expand...

Hand over some of that shit you're smoking, that's IMPOSSIBLE. The write protect tab CAN'T be ignored since it's controlled by the disk drive itself. It's not possible to overwrite write-protected disks no matter how much you try so stop BSing, please. If you need to beat up an old infirm piece of hardware at least don't make stuff up when you do it.

but they were far from perfect.
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Who said they were?!
 
Hand over some of that shit you're smoking, that's IMPOSSIBLE. The write protect tab CAN'T be ignored since it's controlled by the disk drive itself. It's not possible to overwrite write-protected disks no matter how much you try so stop BSing, please. If you need to beat up an old infirm piece of hardware at least don't make stuff up when you do it.
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It's my understanding that in the Amiga it actually wasn't, it was just a software switch. Although I've never taken one apart to verify it, this was the explanation given to me as to why it could corrupt write protected disks, during a copy operation.

The Bug they fixed in later ROM's was to do with the OS telling you to remove a disk while it was still writing, copying disks was pretty safe as long as you watched the light and not the messages.

To be honest I liked Amigas and PC's of the day were largly horrible. As it shipped though the A500 though was nothing much more than a glorified console. You had to add at least an extra drive and some memory to make Amigados a good experience.

And as an OS Amigados while better than Dos certainly wasn't comparable to UNIX. Although to be fair back in the day pretty much every game would just switch it off and write to the hardware anyway.
 
ERP said:
It's my understanding that in the Amiga it actually wasn't, it was just a software switch. Although I've never taken one apart to verify it, this was the explanation given to me as to why it could corrupt write protected disks, during a copy operation.
Click to expand...

That's not true - it's a physical switch as with all floppy drives. When the write protect tab is closed, the switch is pressed and the drive firmware will not write to the disk.

The only way to corrupt disks is to pop them from the drive before writing is finished, as per any floppy disk. The only difference was that if you watched an Amiga disk write, it finishes writing, then there is a pause of a second or two, and then there is another write. Many people corrupted their floppies by impatiently popping them out of the drive during that short pause before writing was completely finished.
 
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