🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2h9cih$23i@news.iastate.edu> barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N. Barrett) writes:
>    Here are a few things that the Amiga's OS lacks:
>
>     Memory Protection

  This is unnecessary, as any well-written program will not write to memory
outside of what it has allocated.  For programs that you're developing,
there's always Enforcer, if you're so worried about keeping your memory
safe.

>     Virtual Memory

  I can think of two VM programs off the top of my head: HDMem and Gigamem.
(Yes, I know, these aren't part of the OS, but see below.)

>     Printer drivers (note 1)
>   note 1: The Amiga's printer drivers are so bad, they might as well not even
>be there.  EVERY program that has anything to do with printing bypasses these
>drivers with it's own drivers, so why are they there?  A person could delete
>the entire devs:printers directory, and programs like Final Copy, PageStream,
>WordPerfect, etc.. would still work fine.

  How do you know this?  Have you tried it?  Any OS-friendly program goes
through the printer.device, which automatically takes care of the details.

>     Device-independent graphics

  If you're talking about RTG, that's supposed to come with some revision
of the OS soon.

>     Device-independent audio

  Well, this is one thing it does lack that is at least somewhat useful.

>     OS support for structured objects

  What's that supposed to mean?

>     Resources (note 2)
>   note 2: This is what the program MUI tries to give the Amiga, and fails
>miserably.  On a Mac, you can use ResEdit to complete alter the user interface
>of ANY program.  You can replace sounds with other sounds, replace objects 
>(bitmapped objects and structured objects), add Baloon Help to programs that
>don't support it, etc.  

  Why would you want to?  Most user interfaces are designed pretty well
anyway.  There's no need for this unless you are the kind of person who
spends hours playing with his background pattern.

>   The AmigaOS does multitask very well,

  Which makes it at least ten times better than any Mac.

>but it is incredibly antiquated in most respects.

  Which version of the OS are you talking about?  I'll admit that
Workbench 1.0 is rather antique...

>It is so effecient because it has virtually no features.

  How do you define a "feature"?  If it's "something the Mac OS has that
the Amiga OS doesn't", then sure, it's lacking lots of features.  Like
inefficiency.  Or wasting of memory and disk space.  The Amiga OS is so
efficient because it only contains what is necessary for the system to
run.  Everything else (such as virtual memory) is added by external
programs, libraries, etc.  The OS doesn't waste megabytes of memory on
"features" that most people won't ever use.

>+++++++
> ++++      Marc Barrett  -MB-
>   ++      IRC nick: Cyclone  |  e-mail: barrett@iastate.edu
>   +       Amiga: No excellence, just bullshit
            ^^^^^
  You must have had quite a knock on the head to have written this post.
Let me set you straight:

   The Amiga OS is much better than the Macintosh OS.  Not only can it
multitask well, but it is very memory-, disk space-, and CPU-efficient. 
Only the essential system routines which are not in ROM are loaded into
memory upon startup; the rest are in shared libraries and device drivers,
which use standard calling methods (i.e. a JSR instruction rather than an
undefined instruction code like the Mac OS uses, which is bad programming
style in the worst way).  Thus, you can have several programs running at
the same time even on a one-megabyte machine, while the Mac OS alone
requires two.  In addition, programs that need a different screen
resolution than the default (which is user-definable) can open their own
screen in any resolution supported by the hardware.  These screens can be
repositioned and depth-arranged, just like windows.

  In addition to all this, the Amiga has custom chips that take care of
the low-level graphics, sound, and disk operations independently of the
CPU, leaving it free for other tasks.  Also, any program that needs to can
program these chips for its own display while still being system-friendly.

  While the Amiga OS has its shortcomings, it beats the Mac OS all to pieces.

  --Andy Church (95ACHURCH@vax.mbhs.edu)

P.S.  Macintosh: No excellence, just bullshit.
--
   The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the University of
     North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Campus Office for Information
        Technology, or the Experimental Bulletin Board Service.
           internet:  laUNChpad.unc.edu or 152.2.22.80