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From: higgin@cbmvax.UUCP (Paul Higginbottom SALES)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Are you playing with (enough) power?
Message-ID: <2793@cbmvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 16-Nov-87 10:16:52 EST
Article-I.D.: cbmvax.2793
Posted: Mon Nov 16 10:16:52 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 18-Nov-87 04:29:05 EST
References: <4124@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 34

in article <4124@watdragon.waterloo.edu>, palarson@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Paul Larson) says:
> Oh boy, I think I'm going to get flamed for this one.

Not at all, that's a perfectly reasonable question.

> I am a non-Amiga user.  I just found out that the Amiga is multi-tasking,
> something for which I would kill.  However, if my sources are correct, the
> A2000 only comes with 1 meg standard.  My question is: is this enough to
> really use multi-tasking to its full extent?  Multifinder for the Mac is
> pseudo-multitasking, but it appearantly doesn't do much good until you're
> playing with at least 2 meg of memory and a hard disk.
> 	Johan Larson

Well Johan, the main difference between the Mac and the Amiga is that the
Amiga OS was designed with multi-tasking in from day one, not as an
afterthought, and as such has a number of memory conserving features that
make 1 megabyte more than enough to do multi-tasking unless you're running
a desktop publishing program, a word processor, and a 3D animation
program all at once!!!  Anyway... these features are things like
shared software libraries.  Huge amounts of re-entrant code so that
each program doesn't bring into memory the same code over and over.
"On-demand" (disk resident) libraries and device drivers.  Software
resources are only brought into memory as needed and can be expunged from
the system if no longer needed by any running program to free up memory.
A hard disk is absolutely not necessary for multi-tasking because things
are not paged back and forth to disk to allow multiple programs to run.
The Amiga OS is compact, efficient, fast, and expandable.

Now on the other hand... memory is cheap... our 2Mb expansion card for
the A2000 is only $499 (sugg. list), so if you do need additional memory,
you can buy ours or a third party card.

	Regards,
		efeway