Xref: utzoo comp.sys.ibm.pc:27976 comp.sys.amiga:32820
Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!watmath!watcgl!bmacintyre
From: bmacintyre@watcgl.waterloo.edu (Blair MacIntyre)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: OS/2 vs AmigaDOS
Message-ID: <9412@watcgl.waterloo.edu>
Date: 27 Apr 89 14:21:04 GMT
References: <2134@iitmax.IIT.EDU>
Reply-To: bmacintyre@watcgl.waterloo.edu (Blair MacIntyre)
Organization: UofW Computer Graphics Lab
Lines: 38

In article <2134@iitmax.IIT.EDU> ed@iitmax.IIT.EDU (Ed Federmeyer) writes:
>
>I don't really have much of an opportunity to use OS/2 or AmigaDOS, but I
>couldn't help but wonder how different the two opperating systems are?

Very different, actually.  What I know of OS/2 is limited and based on
discussions I have had with a friend that works for IBM ( and he
looks so intelligent, too!:-) 

AmigaDOS (Exec, actually) gives you a nice, small light-weight OS.
It has one paradigm for intertask communications (Send-Receive-Reply)
which is (IMHO) more than sufficient and, indeed, the best method
available so far.

It is small and consistent (generally speaking)

OS/2 gives you ... everything.  Picture an OS designed by committee.
Pick your favourite, perhaps extremely esoteric, OS primitive and there
is a 99% chance it is in there somewhere! 1/2 :-)
The standard processes are VERY heavy-weight, but they provide you
with a variety of lightweigth threads, etc.  The impression I get is
that any of the popular, or unpopular, methods of communication are
in there: SRR, monitors, rendevous, etc.

It also has memory protection because ... it has Virtual Memory.

That's about all I can dredge up from my feeble memory ... comments?
Take all this with a half-ton grain of salt!

>I don't understand why OS/2 uses 3 Mb of RAM (I think I read that somewhere) to be usefull, while with AmigaDOS you only need 256 Kb.  What does OS/2 give
>you that AmigaDOS doesn't?  After all, they both multitask, have graphics
>based interfaces, etc...  Is it maybe because the 68000 assembly language
>is more compact than 80286 or 80386?

No, that's not it ... see above!

It basically has more too it!  Of course, as my friend put it (mostly
jokingly :-) "It sells memory!!!!"