I remember picking up some Pascal on a friend's Amiga. That computer blew me away. I had still an Apple IIe, which sucked by comparison on all levels. Even the (then current) IBM AT models couldn't compare the speed, sound quality, graphics, and stability of the Amigas. Never owned one, but I remember my friend's fondly.
Brilliant system. Took the best of unix/dos and combined it with the GUI ability of the Macintosh, even adding colors. Both the Atari ST and the Amiga were great computers. Both were designed by Atari. The Amiga was designed by a company funded by Atari, but when Jack Tramiel (Commodre's founder) bought Atari from Warner Bros, Commodore bought the company leaving Atari with nothing. The St was designed and built in 6 months. we could put a Mac ROM in the Atari and run Mac programs faster than real Macs. The IBM architecture really was poor back then. it was only until the 386 and Windows 3.1 when it was barely usable. The Atari ST used Digital research's GEMDOS and GEM graphics environment. GEM was really designed for the Intel little-endian architecture and one had to do byteswaps to put things into big endian. It used the same file system as the PC. I think that the Amiga OS was more advanced than the Atari TOS, but TOS was much more stable as it was really DR's CPM-86 with support for GEM. We know it today on the x86 platforms as DR DOS sold by Darl McBride and his henchmen. I also ran a couple of Unix-like systems on
On Thursday 10 November 2005 4:57 pm, Kai Ponte wrote:
the ST.
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Jerry Feldman