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From: kurt@fluke.UUCP (Kurt Guntheroth)
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari,net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga and ST (important comparisons!)
Message-ID: <961@vax2.fluke.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 8-Oct-85 11:35:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: vax2.961
Posted: Tue Oct  8 11:35:51 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 11-Oct-85 08:31:01 EDT
References: <377@eneevax.UUCP>
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Organization: John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc., Everett, WA
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Xref: linus net.micro.atari:1241 net.micro.amiga:4216

I am confused.  I am hearing wildly contradictory information about the
amiga and st.  Just for instance

    The st has fast floppy disks and a 1.33 Mb/Sec DMA channel...The amign
    doesn't have DMA disks.  (377@eneeval.UUCP and elsewhere)

    The amiga has a custom programmable DMA controller (the 'copper') and 
    no less than 25 channels of DMA including video, disk, and audio.  (BYTE
    article).

OK, what is true.  The st definitely has DMA.  Does the amiga use DMA for
floppies?  How fast is it?

    Running the BALL demo, with a 3-D ball rolling and bouncing, and making
    noise, less than 8% of the CPU is being used.  (BYTE article)

    The amiga's video controller takes up too many cycles and the amiga's
    clock rate is lower.  The amiga has much less horsepower for computing.
    (377@eneevax.UUCP)

The amiga does run at 7.8Mhz vs 8Mhz for the st.  How much of the rest is
true?

    The amiga OS is full of bugs.  (377@eneevax.UUCP)

    AmigaDOS is a version of TRIPOS from Canbridge.

    AmigaDOS was written by Metacompco  (various)

If AmigaDOS is a version of a longstanding OS, how come it is full of
(presumably serious) bugs?  Which rumor is true here.  Furthermore, I have
personally crashed TOS on the st just fooling around with it at a computer
store.  It took me 10 minutes before my first crash.  Is the amiga getting
undeservedly bad press here?  Doesn't TOS ever crash?  Also, a note about
porting the multitasking OS9 to the ST:  You will give up GEM if you port
OS9 probably.  It seems like it will be difficult to link GEM to OS9 and
presumably difficult to duplicate its function.  This means an OS9 will only
be useful to hacker types (like us all I suppose).

How about some additional opinions?
-- 
Kurt Guntheroth
John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc.
{uw-beaver,decvax!microsof,ucbvax!lbl-csam,allegra,ssc-vax}!fluke!kurt