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Comment by snakeyjake | Hacker News Reader

Apple had System 7.

AmigaOS 2 (I think this was the first 32-bit amiga OS) was, and this is putting it kindly, primitive compared to System 7.

Besides, in the early 90s when Amiga was dying Apple was also dying. They only survived because of extremely high-end desktop publishing and educational users buying IIfx's, Quadra 950s, and PowerMac 8100s, the fact that Apple moved to PowerPC (two months before this article was published) while Amiga was releasing the 4000T with a 68040, and their extremely desirable laptops.

People like to dismiss Apple but there were many years in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s when Macintoshes were the absolutely, irrefutably, and unquestionably fastest non-UNIX workstation personal computers you could buy at any price. And then they became UNIX workstations.

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> there were many years in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s when Macintoshes were the absolutely, irrefutably, and unquestionably fastest non-UNIX workstation personal computers you could buy

Arguably true of PowerPC Macintoshes, but for quite some time the fastest m68k Macintosh you could buy was an Amiga running a Macintosh emulator.

I too subscribed to Amiga World and remember that article.

That was only true for a very brief period of time with Amigas using the 68060, which they never came from the factory with.

I and, judging by their price on Amibay today, very few other people ever owned or used or even saw a 68060 accelerator card.

At the time I could barely afford the 030 accelerator for my A2000 and could sell it today for the price of a 4090. Hmm......

I have an Amiga 1000 with an expansion package called A-Max. This allows my Amiga to use a real external Macintosh floppy drive. But it also allows me to use a separate partition on the A1K's internal hard drive where I've installed System 6. A-Max allows me to have what would essentially be a Macintosh Plus with crazy stats for the times, including a mild accelerator. The little thing flies. Two computers in one!

Since most software except certain Mac games (cough!) ever hit the Mac custom chips, virtually everything I throw at it works flawlessly.

MS Word, Mac Draw, Hypercard, Quarterstaff... It's pretty cool.

Almost nobody has the fastest Macs either, and high end Macs were not the market segment Commodore competed against.

Maybe it'd have gone better if they did. But the vast majority of Commodores Amiga sales were the low end machines that were hurt by being overtaken by PCs in the games market.

> I think this was the first 32-bit amiga OS

There has never been any such distinction. The 68k has a 24 bit address bus, and a 16 bit data bus, but addresses are 32 bit. As such, apart from a few stupid programs (cough Microsofts Amiga Basic cough) that assumed they could use the top 8 bits of some pointers to store data, AmigaOS was 32 bit from the very start.

> and this is putting it kindly, primitive compared to System 7.

AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking from the start. I'm sure there were features of System 7 that were better than AmigaOS, but all I remember of the OS differences at that time was how we ridiculously primitive everyone I knew considered MacOS to be for lacking basics like that.

Even a couple of years after Commodore's bankruptcy, I remember visiting a publisher, and marveling at how primitive MacOS seemed on the surface at least.

And it was the access to that software much more than the hardware that mattered - even when you could buy far more capable PC hardware for less, being able to run e.g. the Mac version of Quark outweighed any cost and performance considerations in those specific niches (I helped out with tech for a newspaper for a short while in that period, and it was beyond frustrating to have to deal with the printers who only used Macs).

>AmigaOS 2 (I think this was the first 32-bit amiga OS) was, and this is putting it kindly, primitive compared to System 7.

You CANT be serious. The multitasking on System 7 was a joke compared to Amiga. And Amiga had AREXX, which was absolutely ahead of its time. I had easily written scripts that connected all kinds of Amiga applications together, nothing like that existed on System 7 and I doubt it really exists today on OSX.

>People like to dismiss Apple but there were many years in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s when Macintoshes were the absolutely, irrefutably, and unquestionably fastest non-UNIX workstation personal computers you could buy at any price.

Lol, just no.

AREXX sounds very similar to AppleScript/AppleEvents which came with System 7 and exists in macOS to this day

Apple Events even worked over a network so you could trivially make scripts that remotely controlled other Macs over AppleTalk. This was great for making HyperCard stacks (HyperCard had native AppleScript support of course) that worked as remote control panels and such.

Apple Events were also emitted by applications when you were running them, so you could make an AppleScript simply by hitting "record", acting out what you wanted to do, and then edit the script to add any kind of interactivity/customization you wanted to do.

Apple Events was supported by a whole scripting subsystem in System 7 called the Open Scripting Architecture, so you didn't need to use AppleScript's own language, you could plug in other languages. Third party companies made Python and JavaScript language plugins so you could write (or record) scripts in those languages, and any app that wanted to add macro features would instantly support it. AppleScript itself was even ported to other human languages - Apple made a French version to demonstrate the capability

Alright, so applescript was about equal with AREXX, but AREXX was around in 1987, Applescript appeared in 1993.

System 7 multitasking was still a bad joke.

And the first macs had 1-bit black and white graphics? That was also a really bad joke.

Macs had 1 channel 8-bit 22kz audio. Amiga had stereo 14 bit audio.

Amiga was way ahead of Macs in pretty much every way.

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