Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!emory!gatech!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!ncoast!davewt From: davewt@NCoast.ORG (David Wright) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy Subject: Re: Amiga OS *IS* state of the art Message-ID: <1991Apr2.032104.11155@NCoast.ORG> Date: 2 Apr 91 03:21:04 GMT References: <1991Mar27.062345.6622@sserve.cc.adfa.oz.au> <7840@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU> Organization: North Coast Public Access Un*x (ncoast) Lines: 48 In article kudla@rpi.edu (Robert J. Kudla) writes: > >Okay - but I claim that a personal computer OS doesn't need >file/process ownership, security, or any of the junk Unix, VMS, etc >have to allow multiple users. A friend and I were trying to kludge I agree. And if the Amiga had it it would be dead by now. The smooth optimization for single user use, and a constant search for making things smaller and more reuseable is what makes the Amiga's GUI as fast and as useable as it is on a 7Mhz 512k machine. Just try running Win3 on a 8Mhz 512k '286 or '386. >out a little bit of multiuser functionality once just for fun since we >were sharing a computer, but realized it was really pretty unnecessary >when people can't be simultaneously using it. Actually, they can, as long as you control what they do. Take for example a BBS. The Amiga is the best possible machine to run a BBS on, for the money. The native OS is multitasking, as has a lot of shared resources. It is very easy to write code to go into a shared library, so chances are that if you know how to program (and aparently the people at C-Net and Paragon don't), you can easily write a BBS that will only require ONE copy in memory no matter how many users are online at a single time. Take a look at Amiga Empire. I have personally run 4 users at a time on a 1 meg Amiga 500 (using a custom multiplexer interface and driver software I wrote), and was only limited by the number of modems I had at the time. I have also run 3 users on a 512k Amiga 500. None of the users were able to tell that anyone else was using the system. I tend to think that a properly written BBS program could do more and be more powerfull than Unix for managing files, since Unix has to be generalized for doing more than just handling the ownership of files and sending/receiving messages. The OS doesn't have to be multi-user to allow multiple users. You can put that into another layer on top of the OS, and you will be more free to optimize it to your needs, rather than a system-wide level of security that may not be enough in some cases, but too much in other cases. As a maximum test I have tried running one C= 7 port card, one ASDG 2 port card, and the built-in serial port on my 3000 (some people brought the c= board and some terminals) and running an Empire session on each of them, plus 10 on the local console, and I still didn't notice any real delays in throughput (with the obvious exception of when the server was busy with an action like flushing the buffers to disk). There is no reason that a BBS, written properly, shouldn't be able to support 3 remote users on a 2000 (with an ASDG serial port card) and 1 meg of RAM, have all the people doing something (reading messages, downloading files, uploading, etc.) without any real noticeable delays. These kinds of things just aren't CPU intensive, and even less disk intensive. Dave