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"Christen, Duane J." <dchristen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm going to get smacked down for this: The Amiga was the most "stable" and capable pc of its day
"Capable," maybe, but "stable"? In what parallel universe?The Amiga multitasked with absolutely no memory protection whatsoever (not even the level of protection one has in WinDoze, much less Linux or OS/400), and therefore required all applications to be scrupulously polite about multitasking, as the first visible indication of one task getting into another's memory was usually the appearance of that "unwelcome visitor from the east" who dressed in red and black, the "Amiga Guru." And by the time the Guru started "meditating," files might already have been corrupted.
The thing that drove me over the edge was a product called Nimbus, which was an accounting system for small businesses. Aptly named, as it was perpetually under a big dark cloud.
You would expect that the database of an accounting system would be sufficiently denormalized as to be self-repairing, but not in Nimbus. To make matters worse, the original developer of NIMBUS was not a professional programmer, and had never written a non-trivial program before in any language other than BASIC. It was written in C, and it multitasked heavily within itself.
When it crashed, which was frequent, it invariably corrupted its own database beyond repair.
Also, for some reason, probably closely related to the Amiga's insane floppy disk format (3 1/2" DS/DD, but not the DOS standard of 720k, or even the Macintosh standard of 800k, but 880k per disk, NON-INDEX-SYNCHED!), Nimbus disks were almost impossible to mass-produce without corrupting them in the duplication process.
Every time I thought I'd eliminated one hidden flaw, and we got a new release out the door, another would appear. And I was invariably the one blamed for it.
The Amiga was a hot-rod. Very powerful, but not very safe. -- JHHL
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