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From: cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Are you playing with (enough) power?
Message-ID: <34014@sun.uucp>
Date: Mon, 16-Nov-87 17:46:24 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.34014
Posted: Mon Nov 16 17:46:24 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 19-Nov-87 00:21:28 EST
References: <4124@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (Chuck McManis)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 46

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

I don't see why you would. 

>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

First, the answer is that the Amiga multitasks well in 512K and above 
systems. It is very nice on a 1Meg system and above 4 megs other things
come into play. 

But the real reason I am posting this rather than mailing it, is because
the growing misconception which I cannot stop on my own, all I can do is
ask you to write in to various magazines etc and complain loudly. The
misconception is this :

	"Multitasking is only reasonable on when you have a lot of memory."

And this misconception is coming about by people trying to bandaid multi-
tasking on single tasking OSs like MS-DOS and the Mac's OS. When the system
is designed from the ground up to be multitasking it takes no more memory
than a single tasking operating system, period. A classic example is Xenix.
It runs multitasking (and multiuser) in a 1 meg AT, why can't OS/2 ? Because
it is bound by backward compatibility with MS-DOS. Why is the Mac's Multi-
finder so huge? Because it has to contend with programs that think they 
own the entire address space, and thus the only way it works is by providing
three our four address spaces. Multitasking on the 2000 works, works cleanly,
and to the extent that it doesn't have an MMU (and cannot protect you against
other tasks scribbling in each others address spaces) works reliably. 

The only limit I have ever hit on the Amiga was running out of chip memory.
With only 512K and each 640X200 window getting 32K (64K if they are 16
color windows) you can run out of chip mem with less than 15 interactive
tasks running.


--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: cmcmanis  ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.