Re: Best OS
Joe Kiniry (kiniry@cs.caltech.edu)
Thu, 23 Jan 1997 17:50:20 -0800
Jim Whitehead writes:
>
> Man, I just can't believe that AmigaDOS was left off this list! OK, so the
> Amiga's a fossilized dinosaur, a towering example of how a technically
> superior product that everyone loves can still fail in the hands of the
> truly incompetent, but just check out these features, available in 1986, on
> a 68000:
>
> - true multitasking
> - windowing
> - auto detection of floppy disks in a drive (with support for the eject
> button, no dragging to trash cans)
> - support for graphics in a window at speeds that were finally equaled by
> my 68040 Mac 520c (hey, I know it's old, so buy me a new one)
>
> In my book, normalizing for 10 years of subsequent development, this puts
> AmigaDOS between 3 and 4 on your list, and arguably between 2 and 3. I
> shudder to think of the amazing networking support a 1997 Amiga would have
> (it'd probably have its own private networking bus, with an ethnernet chip,
> dedicated networking DMA chip, and dedicated memory, with the bit blitter
> able to transfer from main memory to network memory blazingly fast).
>
> *sigh* Instead, here it is 1997, and I get to watch Be do the slow Amiga
> death spiral.
>
> What about CP/M, ProDOS, and AppleDOS?
>
> - Jim
right on jim! and all in 256kb!
we won't even comment on the current gen amiga (yes, someone out there
is still producing them....68060s shipping and dec alphas in
development).
joe