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Comment by actionfromafar | Hacker News Reader

They are more common in Europe, since they sold better there. (Except the Amiga 1000.)

There are also several reimplementations, either with FPGA or "real" 680x0 CPUs.

This Serena operating system fascinates me in several ways. I have said it before, but I think one very cool thing about the Amigas is how they are the missing link between "too simple" 8-bit and 16-bit DOS computers and our modern computers.

They are advanced enough to run modern(-ish) software and simple enough to be reimplemented faithfully several times over by various projects.

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The Amiga was my first exposure to a computer with a "real" OS: tasks/processes, memory management, IPC, shared libraries, etc. I first learned C on an Amiga. It also taught me to be careful: a bug in your program with no memory protection would often mean a crash/reboot ("Guru Meditation" error.)

Where does that come from that a fraction of computing history is dismissed as "not a real OS" ? Did "real" OS's exist for the IBM PC?

I put real in quotes. I probably should've said "OS of sufficient level of complexity."

Or name the features directly: "my first OS with multitasking and memory management"

I did name the features directly.

OS/2 comes to mind. Version 1.x was already much more sophisticated than MS-DOS.

And Xenix.

For you two: The IBM PC was the first PC and had a 8088 CPU. OS/2 and Xenix were for the 286 and up.

If you make virtual memory a necessary attribute to qualify as OS, there were no OS for the original IBM PC as the 8088 had no support for virtual memory. That's why my (tricky) question.

Amiga OS didn't have virtual memory either.

My first computer was a Timex 2068, while at the school lab we had Amstrad PC1512 with 5" floppies and no HD...

Naturally when we speak about PC, we don't mean the original IBM PC and nothing else.

If we are being pedantic then what you’re describing are called IBM-compatible PCs. Ie they weren’t made by IBM but were designed to support most other of the same software.

Yes and i said "IBM PC"...

The "IBM PC" was a category of machines, not a model. Many of which had advanced processors with MMUs and 16-bit support:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IBM_Personal_Compute...

If what you're referring to as the "IBM PC" is the classic model 5150 and we follow your arbitrary designation of a "real OS", than no. But, by that same logic, I can say ducks aren't birds "if we consider birds only those with non-webbed feet".

No. Xenix through at least version 2.1 ran on the original IBM PC (and early Xenix was ported to the 68000 (e.g. Tandy model 16), which also lacked hardware VM support).[1] You could also run IBM PC Unix in the form of Venix from Venturecom (Version 7 with some BSD things) and PC/IX from ISC (System III). Both were 'official' licensed Unix ports. In the Unix-ish camp, there was Coherent and Minix, as well as various MMU-less Linux projects (e.g. ELKS). And there are many interesting oddballs like iRMX.

Yes, OS/2 did require a 286 until it required a 386.

If you make virtual memory a necessary attribute to qualify as OS

That would be pedantic and historically inaccurate and we shouldn't engage in that.

[1] https://gunkies.org/wiki/XENIX

Xenix .. that brings back memories of green screens and digicards (digiboards).

I have the a1000 I learned on as a kid. And the c64 from before that, but I keep saying here that the 32bit microcontrollers are fairly close approximations that use less power and have more processing. You can't get bloat though because they still have ram constraints tied to the mmu that can only do page protection, just like the amiga... Could even use the DACs to spit out s-video maybe?

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