Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

dfarq.homeip.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 181 posts

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#61

Post by [deleted] »

fredoralive wrote: post #44
0x1ceb00da wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes Modern macbooks do something really interesting when the OS freezes. If the OS OOMs or something like a kernel panic happens, the trackpad stops clicking! There's something in the trackpad hardware that polls the OS and locks the trackpad when the OS stops responding so that it can't be pre…

That’s because with most modern MacBook touchpads (bar the Neo) the touchpad never really moves much. It’s all force detection and a haptic feedback thingy. If the system crashes, it stops triggering the feedback.

[deleted]

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#62

Post by tialaramex »

mmustapic wrote: post #26
doener wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected This was not the case for Windows 95/98 and ME, either BTW IIRC. Only with Windows XP Microsoft introduced memory protection for the mass market.

No, Windows 95 had memory protection for 32-bit apps. Usually when a 32-bit app crashed, the rest of the OS worked fine.

There's definitely a difference in magnitude in how likely crap software is to set the world on fire and ruin your day between Win95 and Amiga.

One big problem is that Amiga "multi-tasking" while not co-operative like Mac or Win 3.x, can be switched off as a convenience for programmers. So all that needs to go wrong is a program switches off multi-tasking to do something and then gets stuck before restoring it. The program which crashed is dead but you can't fix that because it turn off multi-tasking.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#63

Post by [deleted] »

somat wrote: post #12

I was trying to figure out it's contemporaries, the i386 was still a few months away, you could get a sun-2, which had a sweet 4 MB of ram, but wikipedia sez that would cost you a eye watering 29 thousand dollars, in 1985, for the low end monochrome graphics version, oh, you want color that is "just" a cool 50k. Yeah Sun is not really playing the same game. The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the…

[deleted]

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#65

Post by smallstepforman »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #17
somat wrote: post #12

I was trying to figure out it's contemporaries, the i386 was still a few months away, you could get a sun-2, which had a sweet 4 MB of ram, but wikipedia sez that would cost you a eye watering 29 thousand dollars, in 1985, for the low end monochrome graphics version, oh, you want color that is "just" a cool 50k. Yeah Sun is not really playing the same game. The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the…

In the UK, its main contemporary in the non-PC realm was the Atari ST, which was cheaper, arrived on the market sooner, and took the “professional” market because of its excellent mono monitor (“small, but perfectly formed”). The ST didn’t multitask, but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected, so crashing something meant you could (would) lose everything running. It also couldn’t do the graphical tricks the Amiga…

To support protected memory, you need an MMU, and the base 68000 did not ship with an MMU, however the 68020 and later did. The Amiga 3000 onwards should have defaulted to MMU and had a flicker fixer and chunky graphics and 16 bit sound to really succeed. Another multiverse timeline, perhaps.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#66

Post by snarfy »

vidarh wrote: post #30
Annatar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all have our delusions.

The Atari fans showing up does bring up the nostalgia of BBS and Usenet flamewars though. The Atari was so unpopular in my parts that was the only exposure I had to the two of them.

It wouldn't be a proper Amiga thread without some Atari ST guys showing up.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#67

Post by smallstepforman »

brazzy wrote: post #38
somat wrote: post #12

I was trying to figure out it's contemporaries, the i386 was still a few months away, you could get a sun-2, which had a sweet 4 MB of ram, but wikipedia sez that would cost you a eye watering 29 thousand dollars, in 1985, for the low end monochrome graphics version, oh, you want color that is "just" a cool 50k. Yeah Sun is not really playing the same game. The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the…

I remember buying a memory upgrade for my Amiga 500, from 512KB to 1MB - IIRC it cost about $200, and I had to take the subway across town to some dinky little shop whose ad I had found in an Amiga gaming magazine. Different times...

You also got a battery backed clock with the 512kb memory upgrade :)

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#68

Post by rwmj »

spacedcowboy wrote: post #17
somat wrote: post #12

I was trying to figure out it's contemporaries, the i386 was still a few months away, you could get a sun-2, which had a sweet 4 MB of ram, but wikipedia sez that would cost you a eye watering 29 thousand dollars, in 1985, for the low end monochrome graphics version, oh, you want color that is "just" a cool 50k. Yeah Sun is not really playing the same game. The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the…

In the UK, its main contemporary in the non-PC realm was the Atari ST, which was cheaper, arrived on the market sooner, and took the “professional” market because of its excellent mono monitor (“small, but perfectly formed”). The ST didn’t multitask, but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected, so crashing something meant you could (would) lose everything running. It also couldn’t do the graphical tricks the Amiga…

I think the Acorn Archimedes (1987) might be the closest UK vision to the Amiga. Of course it was 2 years later. But, mouse-oriented interface, graphics central, kind of 32 bit CPU with limitations (similar to the 68k which is 16 bit aspiring to be 32 bit), thoroughly weird desktop environment.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#69

Post by amiga386 »

elpocko wrote: post #31
dev0p wrote: post #28

I’d argue that it's still ahead of a lot of modern systems. Aside from the loading times, the thing is incredibly fast. I invite you to try one if you have the chance, as words don't make it justice. I can't think of anything today that comes close to how instantly it responds to user input, even iOS feels sluggish in comparison. It had only a few kilobytes of memory, a bunch of CPU cycles and a dream, but By God the…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o8E3ycB7Aw In case someone wants to see for themselves how "instantly" it really was. Skip to ~9:50 when it gets real sluggish. Edit: if you don't wear nostalgia glasses, you can watch the bits of screen being redrawn piece by piece after something moves or a menu closes. Everything is flickering. Opening and closing a menu takes up to one second. The text being typed in the editor la…

To give a corresponding example, try moving the mouse while loading from floppy disk on Windows 95, ten years later. The mouse pointer judders!

This does not happen on a 1985 Amiga, even with a fraction of the CPU power, which it needs all of it to redraw UI damage as seen.

The reason is that the Amiga system prioritised input processing above normal tasks, it had preemptive multitasking where hardware timers triggered a CPU interrupt to let the kernel switch to a new timeslice, and of course reading a floppy disk was done with hardware interrupts and DMA transfers because the OS knew exactly what hardware it was dealing with, while PC compatibles couldn't guarantee those transfer modes (https://wiki.osdev.org/Floppy_Disk_Controller) so Windows 95 would inevitably handle floppy drives with polling.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#70

Post by amiga386 »

vidarh wrote: post #50
emj wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GUI was fast because it was fixed layout, MUI on the Amiga was slow as well. We tend to go that way to get UI that is easy to create. You see the same in all GUI libraries the more CPU you have the more you use it.

MUI was slow because it layered on a crazy amount of configurability. You didn't need things to get slow with resizeable/dynamic layouts even then.

MUI was slow because it was written in C and went all-in on BOOPSI, as well as supporting fully dynamic layout. It could likely have been faster, but the sort of people who paid for it were also the sort of people who bought CPU accelerators.
Post reply on HN