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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, though people have explained to me that there were things in the Amiga that kind of "stayed primitive". While I think it's insanely cool how early they got preemptive multitasking, something that I think hurt them was the fact that by-design it didn't really support any kind of protected memory.

The Amiga was a bit before my time, sadly, so I'm getting Wikipedia-depth knowledge of this; my dad had one when I was very young but all I ever used it for was playing games. Still, it's easy to look back at these things and feel like things should have been different; particularly I feel like Microsoft got way more slack than it should have. DOS, which felt really primitive by the early 90s, still seemed to be more-or-less standard until Windows 95.

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> Wikipedia-depth knowledge of this

The filfre.net series of articles on the history of Commodore and Amiga is truly great work, and should give you a much clearer picture than pretty much anything else.

Every weakness of the Amiga could have been solved if money was poured into it instead of poured out of it.

The entire chipset state could have been bankswitched in a multi-tasking fashion and each process could have gotten its own "virtual Amiga" to play in. So much can be done when you have full vertical integration, but Commodore never leaned into it.

Every perceived weakness of the Amiga is from the perspective of the design of the winning system, i.e. generic modular PC design where the hardware and the OS are at best uneasy friends.

Did really anything support protected memory back then?

I also am still much more bought into the power of marketing and generally focusing on getting things into student's hands as the power move that Microsoft pulled off. Probably helped a ton by a lot of failed vendors along the way. It isn't that DOS and Windows were pure successes. Rather, they managed to outsource a ton of their failures onto other companies.

I think the DR-DOS variants of DOS did? I also believe that OS/2 did as well.

I broadly agree with everything you said though.

OS/2 1.x supported memory protection for apps targeted for OS/2. Since 1.x was written for the 286, it put all MS-DOS apps in the same address space, so one errant app could bring down the whole MS-DOS subsystem. It would take OS/2 2.0 to exploit the 386's Virtual 8086 mode, which allowed each MS-DOS app to run isolated.

All varieties of DOS supported protected memory from the early '90s onward, using the DPMI spec.

> Did really anything support protected memory back then?

UNIX did, I ran it on a 386-25 from 1987.

And Minix on 286, but each process had only 64 kbytes.

I was thinking before 386 machines. I probably have a poor calibration of what was contemporary to Amiga machines.

> focusing on getting things into student's hands as the power move that Microsoft pulled off

That's a huge part of Microsoft's success. They looked the other way regarding "piracy" to gain market share. At least in my country nobody paid for Windows at home. If students and home users had been forced to pay, the adoption of new Windows versions would fall drastically.

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