RE: worst RPG ever seen?

In my universe anyway.  

-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces+dchristen=mcleodusa.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:rpg400-l-bounces+dchristen=mcleodusa.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf
Of James H H Lampert
Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 3:33 PM
To: RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: worst RPG ever seen?


"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