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From: james@uw-june.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: Unix, etc. (posting announcement for a shell at end)
Message-ID: <470@uw-june>
Date: Wed, 26-Feb-86 15:47:19 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-june.470
Posted: Wed Feb 26 15:47:19 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Mar-86 23:15:07 EST
References: <8602230657.AA09363@cory>
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 32
Summary: Sounds great

In article <8602230657.AA09363@cory>, dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon) writes:
> 	But taking a good look at the Amiga's OS, I can find only two faults
> with it:  The multi-processing was done incorrectly (e.g. if you run an lc1,
> alink, or lc2 in the background, the rest of the machine freezes.  
> Specifically, when the latter programs have finished their disk access and
> are doing purely computational in-memory processing).  Secondly, the Amiga's
> OS does not handle error conditions at all well, and doesn't have the 
> ability to kill a process nicely.
  I'm not convinced that AmigaDos should get all the blame for these
problems: The compiler and linker (especially the linker) seem to be poor
examples of how to write a program to fit in to this multi-tasking
enviroment. It should be possible for programs to written which keep good
track of their resources (using Remember?) and can be deleted.
  In large part these problems seem to stem from the fact that there is no
MMU to aid the CPU. If different tasks ran in different memory spaces, or a
2 dimensional space like Multics or VMS, then reclaiming the resources would
be greatly simplified.
> Another minor asside: The Amiga
> has a memory-fragmentation problem, in that after using it for many hours,
> Alink sometimes crashes the machine because it can't get a contiguous 
> piece big enough.

  Granted: Alink is very unimpressive.

> 	Now what has everybody missed the most between UNIX and the Amiga?
> 	I'll tell you what we have all missed: A SHELL!.  
> 	aliases, history, filename expansion.....
> 	I thought you would be interested.
  I'm very interested Matt. Sounds just great. Does your shell handle path
searching (as in unix with the PATH variable)?

- James Synge