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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

when i arrived at college in 1991 with a 286 and a broken hard drive, my roommate showed me his amiga. where I was stuck in DOS textland, he had a fully interactive windowing system with high quality graphics, audio, and video capture. I stuck with PCs and I don't think I had anything that was nearly as "pretty" even 10 years later.

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I arrived at college in 1990 with my trusty Amiga 2000 in hand. I then quickly discovered the school's Unix workstations. I have to admit that the Amiga soon after started collecting a lot of dust.

I arrived in 1987 with my Amiga 1000 in tow, quickly discovered the school's Unix workstations (Sun 3/50, 3/60) and started using my Amiga more. They had the same a.out format so you could compile on the Sun systems with the Unix fun stuff, link with a different library, side-load it onto the Amiga and you're good to go.

That A1000 ended up with 4MB, 14MHz 68020, SCSI controller, and 80MB of disk 'borrowed' from a Sun.

Sure the OS was a bit different, but it's basically a cut-rate Sun 3/60. So many earl Amiga devs were Unix nerds sitting in front of Suns all day and wanting something close to that feeling for home. Macintosh (lol), IBM PC (lol DOS).

Pretty much wasn't until Linux that the PC actually became useful at all.

> Pretty much wasn't until Linux that the PC actually became useful at all.

This. I got lucky to experience a SGI Indy when it came out and although going from my beloved Amiga to a 386 running DOS "because CPU speed" (and because the PC was obviously where it was heading) was a really bitter move. Then a 486. Then I discovered Linux and my 486 + Linux was my "poor boy's SGI Indy". Great memories (and still rocking desktop linux on my workstation on a daily basis).

Are you sure? By the time Windows 95 came out, the Amiga was looking pretty long in the tooth.

Windows 95 ran like a dog compared to Amiga. PCs couldn't match a 25-MHz Amiga for responsiveness until they were in the hundreds of MHz in the late nineties.

That’s so true. Amiga didn’t have an RTOS, but it sure felt like it. Windows had so much latency in comparison that I couldn’t bear to use it for the longest time.

The maneuver that always astounded me at the time was right clicking on the menu bar and pulling it down, to reveal whatever application was open on the "screen" behind it. (The Amiga had separate windows and screen abstractions, though I don't recall if I'm using the right terms.) No matter how heavily loaded the system was, whether it was doing floppy I/O at the time, etc., that pull down motion never became choppy. It did feel a lot like an RTOS in that respect.

You could overload the system in other ways though, particularly disk I/O in Workbench.

Those are the right terms.

Even more mind blowing is that the visible screens could have different resolutions. The display hardware could switch modes per scanline while keeping the same output frequencies, so you could have a low-res/high-color screen on the top half of the monitor with a high-res/low-color screen on the bottom half.

Those are your memories. Win95 on contemporary 1995 Pentium system will display explorer window full of icons in split second. Workbench when opening a HDD drawer will paint icons one at a time taking several seconds, even with fastest accelerators possible and fast cf IDE drive.

>1995 Pentium system

Then bitwise is right.

Pentium 75-120 != hundreds of MHz in the late nineties

120 is still a hundred.

Windows 98 crawled under a Pentuim@133 and 64MB of RAM (we had that in the library), but Windows 95 without that crapware called IE4 + ActiveX was fine.

The reason behind Win95 showing icons much faster than any Amiga was due to the relatively slow filesystem used by the Amiga, not by its hardware speed, which in fact was a bit faster than PCs in a MHz to MHz comparison.

The complete lack of a disk cache integrated with the OS on the Amiga hurt as well. Even MS-DOS was shipping with disk caching software to make use of high memory on 386 systems in the early 1990s when AmigaOS had just launched 2.04.

Also the Amiga was slow due to the simplistic way metadata / icons were handled. There was a separate "file.info" file, containing the icon and some other metadata, for each actual file on disk.

Most users didn't have Pentium systems when Win95 came out or for a long time afterwards.

At least the vast majority of customers we had to support had 386 DX's or 486's.

Most people were still on 386 and 486 systems by then.

Had to do with whether you had 4mb of RAM or 8 or more. 4 was unusable.

that was 4 years later, which was an aeon in internet time.

Well, you said "10 years later" after 1991, which would put us at 2001-ish.

Duh, yes I see now. I actually went away from DOS/Windows between 1993 and 2001+, so I don't know much about what their UI was doing at that point. I really meant it took Linux desktops a long time to be as useful as Amigas (and even then you would have to find a compatible video capture board, compatible 3d graphics card, etc).

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