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From: rjc@geech.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Ray Cromwell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Amiga is better then what???
Message-ID: <1991Jun29.062317.22639@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: 29 Jun 91 06:23:17 GMT
References: <678091803.1@therip.FidoNet>
Sender: news@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 73

In article <678091803.1@therip.FidoNet> Rod.Fulk@f24.n228.z1.FidoNet.Org (Rod Fulk) writes:
>Gem tasks can communicate between them. 
>As I said before TRUE multi tasking is of limited use. Specialty programs are 
>available to do most things in the back ground. There is an explosion of PD 

   Right now I am on a BSD Unix machine. If I get a write message from a user
or if I get a mail notice, I can stop rn/emacs, and go respond. Likewise,
I can start up a huge compilation (average time, 5 minutes) and read news
while it's compiling. The ability to have multiple shells and run
multiple programs is invaluable to me.

> DRL>      Workbench is just as easy to use as any most other GUIs.  Double 
> DRL> click 
> DRL> the icon & away you go...
>Yes but its not as "intuitive" as the St or Macs Desktop.. If you compare the 
>amiga desktop to Windows maybe it works well and is very powerful... ;-)
>(CLI support is heavy in the ST.. They just didnt provide the actual interface 
>to one. There are alot of powerful Cli's out there. I like to run a unix clone 
>type CLI when I DO need a CLI.. But the GUI is powerful enough you do not need 
>the CLI...)

   What not's intuitive about Workbench? Give an example please? I find
most of the Finder/Gem type stuff is nothing but a glorified 
program launcher/file renamer/copier. If GUIs are so powerful then why
do Mac developers use MPW? The bandwidth of the mouse/icon interface
gets in the way sometimes. I can type cc -c *.c faster than I can drag
20 source icons onto a compiler icon.

> DRL> 	 As far as "pure power", I've yet to see a GUI with the pure power of
> DRL> a Unix-like command line, which is part of the Amiga OS (note that you
> DRL> don't _have_ to use this; it's just there in case you want to).
>The STe and above have VERY powerful features tucked away in their desktops...
>Unless your a programmer you will never see them anyhow... (Isnt this the way 
>its supposed to be? ;-) )

  Give me some examples.

> DRL> 	 Nearly every Amiga user I talk to uses it on a regular basis.  I'm 
> DRL> doing
> DRL> it now.  A BBS is certainly far from the only time multitasking is 
> DRL> useful.
> DRL> 	 A list of the processes currently running on my system (using Snap, one
> DRL> of those processes, to clip this text from a window & paste it here):
>(list of processes deleted.) Yes but those programs you listed could be run as 
>TSR's too.. The ST DOES support specialized multi tasking... YOu just can not
>do full blown multi tasking. The ability to run them in a full blown 
>environment makes it kinda nice but its not a necessity... (I have a few 
>processes running on my ST in the background too.. But they are either desk 
>accessories like my terminal program or they are TSR's such as my ram disks 
>and caches... And some performance enhancers are available too as well as 
>things to make my screen bigger and such...) 

   This is not multitasking (not really). These programs on the IBM
(TSR)'s are more like interupt handlers. They don't multitask. Each one
of them runs until completion. Let's suppose you have a screen blanker that
draws fireworks on the screen and a hotkey utility. While the
screen blanker is rendering, the hotkey utility will get no cpu time.
The more the screen blanker takes, the less the hotkey gets. it also
makes things load order dependent.
   On the Amiga, the screen blanker will get interupted while it's rendering
to give the hotkey utility some CPU time. In addition, AmigaDOS 2.0
has made load-order dependency totally vanish. Commodities Exchange
allows multiple "enhancer" (INIT/DA time programs) to peacfully coexist
even if they watch the same keys on the keyboard. No more load-order
dependency.

 
[followups to advocacy, since I may be getting on some ST users' nerves]
  
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