On February 15, Jeff Hellige wrote:
The most base Amiga 1000's have just 256k of RAM
and a single
880k floppy and require two steps to boot the OS (loading Kickstart
off of the 1st floppy and then reading Workbench off of the second)
and will happily run off of that single floppy, even allowing you to
swap it out for whatever application disk you want to use. This with
full GUI, sound and all the other nifty things that go along with
using an Amiga. I no longer recall what the exact size of the
A1000's Kickstart is but nearly all remaining machines (with the
exception of a softkicked A3000) had the Kickstart in ROM. Of
course, there was also the Atari ST line that had it's GEM-based TOS
totally ROM based and ran well in less than 1meg of RAM, though I've
never thought their graphics capabilities were on par with the Amiga.
Amigas rock. A solid operating system with preemptive multitasking
and a GUI in 256K of RAM on a floppy-based system...Amazing! Why
can't Microsoft get it right with thousands of programmers, 800+MHz
processors, hundreds of megabytes of RAM, and gigabytes of disk space?
-Dave McGuire