|
by all means buy that Amiga!!!!!!
The Amiga is an interesting system, the zorro bus looks an awful lot like what PCI turned out to be except that it properly handles interrupt sharing.
And the OS... imagine if you will an OS that provides pre-emptive task switching, and fits in less than 256K of memory. If I had to pick on the OS I would point out that they did not include any kind of memory management, but then they had a pretty good argument that they didn't need it<G>!
I managed to use an Amiga as a digital audio workstation quite effectively, and didn't need memory management until I tried to edit a 90 minute recording. At that point it was a pretty simple matter to add on a third party product.
Another real plus was their layered approach, and the fact that their shared library architecture really worked.
The interface was also very cool, providing a very nice shell environment and a GUI. The GUI was noun oriented, in other words when you clicked on a document the OS figured out what action to apply... may not sound particularly earthshaking right now, but it was back then.
The hardware/Operating system combo was pretty remarkable, although it is showing its age now. The fastest machine I had (still have) was a 68040 running at 30MHz (I'm not sure about the processor speed, but it was 10'x not 100's). The co-processor chip architecture allowed the CPU to do CPU things, while graphics, I/O, and audio chips did their things. I was able to record and playback 8 tracks of audio with 48 channels of MIDI without a glitch. If I tried to play back full motion video I would get ocassional stutters, but I could configure things so that the video stuttered, not the audio.
The development environment was very unix-like, and a great deal of the GNU collection was ported to the Amiga. Then there were folks who had just too much time on their hands. One guy, Dillon, wrote an entire, integrated C development environment, including compiler, and it was no slouch. He also wrote a sliding window network protocol to allow a server running on one amiga to run clients on other Amigas or Sun 3's. And it was usable even at 9600bps.
If you get an Amiga be sure to find a copy of Mind Walker. It was a game that came with the original Amiga 1000, and it is very very cool.
Bill
|