Xref: utzoo comp.sys.ibm.pc:28425 comp.sys.amiga:33422
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!bellcore!texbell!sugar!peter
From: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: OS/2 vs AmigaDOS
Message-ID: <3796@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Date: 8 May 89 03:17:38 GMT
References: <2134@iitmax.IIT.EDU> <5625@microsoft.UUCP> <5664@microsoft.UUCP>
Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston
Lines: 53

In article <5664@microsoft.UUCP>, t-stephp@microsoft.UUCP (Stephen Poole) writes:
> On my OS/2 box I can have 4M and use it like 16M.  That's a good bit more
> valuable than being limited to 8M AND having to pay for it.

For the price difference between the Amiga and the OS/2-capable box you can
buy 4 extra megs of RAM, and have enough change left for a down payment on
a Hyundai Excel. Besides, the Amiga is a real-time system. That's a capability
you can't get for OS/2 (or any VM system I know of) for any price.

> Sounds like an Amiga to me.  It's been a while, but I used to use the
> Amiga quite a bit.  A 512K machine didn't do a whole lot, considering that
> the OS ate half of it.

The OS never ate half of *my* 512K. It got loaded into the same address space
as the ROMs, which has nothing to do with the 512K CHIP RAM.

> Now that the OS is in ROM I suppose it's not such
> I am certainly no big Windows fan and am not defending it.  You, however,
> completely missed the point.  Windows is a more intelligent OS in that it
> demand loads code and resources.

It also demands that you rewrite your application from scratch in an even more
contorted way than the Macintosh does.

Besides, I can demand-load code and resources on my Amiga. It's called using
libraries and overlays, which puts some overhead on the programmer... but
nothing like the demands Windows makes.

> As everyone is aware, there
> is a significant amount of overhead associated with an OS with advanced
> networking and memory management capabilities, but that megabyte or two
> of overhead most assuredly leads to far more efficient memory utilization
> and connectivity.

Why does that stuff need an extra megabyte or two? UNIX does a hell of a lot
more than OS/2, and isn't anywhere near that big.

> The
> productivity gains I have realized have been amazing.  I totally dig
> having email running all the time and checking for new messages, having
> two compilations running, having my machine set up as a network server
> (a piece of cake, and something that can be done at any time without
> even rebooting), all while I'm using Word or a telecommunications
> program and formatting a floppy.  And that's on a 4.6M machine WITH
> the DOS box enabled.  That strikes me as being pretty good resource
> management.

Wow. I can do all that on a 1 Meg machine running a 4-year-old version of
Xenix. I used to do all that on a 512K machine running an 8-year-old version
of UNIX. Yep, OS/2 is a real step forwards.
-- 
Peter "Have you hugged your wolf today" da Silva      `-_-'
...texbell!sugar!peter, or peter@sugar.hackercorp.com  'U`