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Re:Atari 520ST Review in Creative Computing – By Paul Lefebvre by snek_case on Saturday June 22, 2024 @10:20AM (#40759328)
It's kind of insane that the Amiga didn't do better, given it had much better graphics and sound than the PC at the time. It effectively had some simple accelerated 2D graphics. It feels like a wasted opportunity.
Re:Atari 520ST Review in Creative Computing – By Paul Lefebvre by ChainOfFools on Saturday June 22, 2024 @11:39AM (#40759825)
And probably the biggest "like living in the future" advantage out of all, true preemptive multitasking. However with the major Achilles heel of no memory protection; message passing done through pointer exchange was wonderful for insanely fast lightweight contact switching but terrible for system stability.
Re:Atari 520ST Review in Creative Computing – By Paul Lefebvre by beagle3 on Saturday June 22, 2024 @04:21PM (#40761855)
It’s not like anything with a comparable price had memory protection - windows at the time was equally unstable and lacking protection, and it didn’t even have preemptive multitasking.

The later Amigas (3000 for sure, don’t remember about 2000) did have the memory protection, used e.g. by Enforcer.

Re:Atari 520ST Review in Creative Computing – By Paul Lefebvre by icedchai on Saturday June 22, 2024 @09:29PM (#40763864)
"Enforcer" did not provide full memory protection. It only protected the lower page of memory (which were used as lookup tables by the OS, example: address 4 which was the Amiga "Exec" base address), in addition to some unmapped areas of memory.

It definitely helped, but it did not prevent processes from writing all over each other like on a modern operating system.

Re:Atari 520ST Review in Creative Computing – By Paul Lefebvre by wkat4242 on Saturday June 22, 2024 @07:52PM (#40763330)
It had preemptive multitasking when consumer windows was still stuck on cooperative technologies. Where one misbehaving application could crash the whole system.
Re:Atari 520ST Review in Creative Computing – By Paul Lefebvre by the_af on Monday June 24, 2024 @09:33AM (#40775872)
There is an interesting "History of the Amiga" article in Ars Technica [1], and the sense I got is that the Amiga didn't win out for non-technical reasons.

It was, hands down, the best hardware/software combo out there. If I remember the article correctly, the Amiga failed for other reasons. Bad marketing, bad Commodore management decisions, etc.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/

Re:Atari 520ST Review in Creative Computing – By Paul Lefebvre by 1oooqooq on Saturday June 22, 2024 @12:03PM (#40760001)
this article actually explain it.

they didn't understand magazine article sold machines. so simple.

Re:Atari 520ST Review in Creative Computing – By Paul Lefebvre by sixothree on Saturday June 22, 2024 @10:51AM (#40759509)
It was literally a matter of expansion and upgradability. People saw it as a “micro” with vendor lock in.