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Comment by function_seven | Hacker News Reader

Same story here. I had an Amiga 1000 from 1985 all the way through 1995. Never with a hard drive or modem either. I was still disappointed by the 486DX2 (4MB!) that replaced it. It was better in every "bullet point" way, but lacking in a hard-to-describe way.

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I remember my Amiga buddies having the same issues (I myself went from a C64 to a 286 earlier than they). Main complaints were the OS (i.e. Windows, whether it's 3.11 or 95), and a general lack of smoothness (again, OS and multi-tasking, smooth scrolling not being something you get for free with a VGA).

Also, the PC, assuming VGA and at least SoundBlaster, had fewer limitations there, compared to e.g. the Amiga's half-bright modes. It was way easier to get something more garish.

(I felt a bit like that regarding the C64's SID sounds to the more generic-feeling samples of the Amiga. Especially when the latter veered towards Eurodance)

Could it be that your "hard to describe way" was simply the difference between an exceptionally well designed system (hardware and software) and a stack of weird kludges that was the PC at that time?

> was

I actually think it's way worse now. It's only tolerable because computers are faster.

Is it really that much worse? If PC hardware wouldn't require obscure old hardware features for software compatibility, the resulting architecture based on the newer stuff only (e.g. PCI) is way better. The cores of the available operating systems also improved a lot over the years. Windows now has a rather decent kernel at its core, for example.

The whole package is far from perfect, but it is better than what would have resulted from continued engineering at the level that we had in the 80s and 90s.

Not sure... maybe I’m old, but the current system is alive, but not in a beautiful way. Instead, it’s like metastasis of cancer, runtime after runtime of duplicated and slightly different versions of Nodejs, .Net and who knows what, and not in perfect harmony. It’s chaotic.

It took me until around 1995 to realise how great and ahead of its time Workbench was. Win95 still felt like it was behind Workbench 3 (even 2.0) in so many ways.

That’s because it was, in every capability imaginable.

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