AmigaOS, CP/M, OS/2, DOS -- which OS do you miss the most?
Link Articolo: http://www.computerworld.com/action/art ... geNumber=3
Adios, Amiga
We tend to take multitasking for granted these days, but 20 years ago, it was a Holy Grail for the personal computing platforms. With its DOS foundation, Windows could only wish for it. The Mac and OS/2 fumbled their way around it. You could switch around among programs, but if one of them was actually doing something like downloading a file or recalculating a spreadsheet, it would slow down or stop cold until you turned back to it.
Meanwhile, a four-year-old gaming platform was running rings around them all. The Amiga operating system was so tightly coded that it took the big corporate computers almost a decade to catch up. By then, Amiga computers had been used to generate backgrounds for popular TV shows like SeaQuest, Babylon 5 and Max Headroom, and they were routinely being used for titling and cheesy real-time effects on live network broadcasts.
Naturally, the Amiga's video subsystem and NewTek's Video Toaster hardware deserve much of the credit for the system's popularity among video professionals, but the AmigaOS played a major part. Its multithreaded multitasking made it a natural for heavy graphics work. And it could strut its stuff in as little as 250K of address space.
AmigaOS Workbench 3.9
AmigaOS 3.9 (credit: Amiga Future).
Click to view larger image.
Small wonder, then, that the Amiga gained a fiercely loyal following. It wasn't until the late 1990s that Windows NT, OS/2 and the Mac OS were able to multitask as well -- and they required vast hardware resources to do it.
Sadly, the technical prowess of the Amiga makers was overwhelmed by cash-flow problems. Beginning in 1994, bankruptcies shunted Amiga through many owners, from Commodore to Escom to Gateway and beyond. Development on AmigaOS 4 continued on the PowerPC platform, but there's currently some kind of dispute over who actually owns the operating system, so it's in a holding pattern.
Nevertheless, Amiga users remain committed to their platform of choice, as shown by the reader responses to our blog asking if anyone still uses AmigaOS -- many say they still use it every day.
We only hope that the world at large hasn't said a final adios to Amiga. Any operating system that could bring us Max Headroom is worth seeing again. And again. And ag-g-g-g-gain.
+SAM= 
NG c'è! 
