Rumor has it that Jules Richardson may have mentioned these words: You're asking why adverts aren't using logic?!?!? ;-) Tandy Color Computer w/OS-9. However, for the money, they were prolly comparing Mac hardware w/MacOS (more expensive, couldn't multitask) with the Amiga line. I haven't taken the quiz, but I'd prolly suck at it, too. Never had an Amiga until about a year ago, methinks... Laterz, Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Bugs of a feather flock together." sysadmin, Iceberg Computers | Russell Nelson zmerch at 30below.com |

Presumably because it was the only home computer that made it possible (got that one right!). I haven't used Amigas at all really, but I have to admit the ability to multitask at home must have been pretty astounding back in the day. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Sponsored Link Rates near 39yr lows. $420,000 Loan for $1399/mo. Calcuate new payment. www.LowerMyBills.com/lre

On 11/23/06, Roger Merchberger <zmerch-cctalk at 30below.com> wrote: I got that particular question wrong, but I think it was a case of ESL ambiguation... I first read that question as saying that multitasking specifically _allowed_ one to run a second OS, rather than "the Amiga had two unique attributes... 1) multitasking, and 2) permitting one to run a second OS. The original "Bridge Card" (A2088) was, in effect, a slave DOS processor. It depended on the Amiga for the display by a somewhat-complicated scheme to emulate an ISA video card for the DOS side, but give the Amiga a block of memory to point the custom chips at so that the Amiga side could easily render whatever the DOS side was cobbling up. There's an in-depth dissection of what's under the hood in the A500/A2000 Tech Ref Manual, IIRC. Give the cost of an A2088 (and the need to still go out and buy ISA cards to get the A2088 to be able to do much of anything useful), I don't think it was any cheaper than buying a clone and setting it _next_ to your Amiga, but some people seem to want all things from one box, so it did sell. I have an A2088 that I picked up in a pile of Amiga stuff from a defunct dealer, but, honestly, except for trying it out to see it work, I never found a practical application for the way I get things done. OS-9 is certainly leaps and bounds ahead of other common 1980s 8-bit OSes, in that regard. At least the 6809 is a fast little 2MHz 8-bitter. I jumped from PETs/C-64s right up to the Amiga - it took me months to adjust to the differences. Hmm... given that in 1982, the C-64 was brand-new, and the Apple II was the reigning champion at home, I can't think of any examples to dislodge the CoCo from the top-of-the-8-bit-multitasking heap. I had an Amiga for years before I got DOS. I just set up the XT clone next to the Amiga and multitasked by reading my mail and News on the Amiga (aquired via UUCP), then turning in my seat to do one thing at a time on the DOS box. If you could get them to load without massive .BAT fiddling to handle DOS memory issues, sound card IRQ issues, etc. :-P -ethan

And just how would you describe a TRS-80 colour computer running OS-9? -tony

Officially, the COCO 1 and 2 were limitied to 64K, the CoCo 3 to 512K. I believe there were various unofficial hacks to extend that limit. I think all programs were reentrant. So if 2 users wanted to use BASIC-09, only one copy was loaded (IIRC, that was 22K long). And yes, programs tended to be quite small. The line editor was something like 5K (but did quite a bit, with macros, multiple buffers, etc). You're not going to support a dozen users on a CoCo, but it was certainly possible to have 2. Or 1 user running one large-ish program (like BASIC-09) and the odd smaller one (like the editor). -tony

Jules Richardson wrote: I think it's because it was the first home computer that could run two OSs *at the same time* -- ISTR there was a way to run an MS-DOS and an Amiga OS program at the same time. That's the same as I got, which I thought was not too bad considering I have avoided Amigas of all sorts. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

On 11/23/06, Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: There were a couple... one or two of them even support access of ISA hardware via the GG2 Bus+ board. Someone did some EPROM programming using that set up a number of years back. It did not - just a plain old 68000 which could be easily swapped for a 68010. -ethan

On 11/23/06, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote: If by "later models", you mean the A2000, the second model to ship (1987?), then yes. The A2088 card does let you run DOS on an Amiga equipped with Zorro slots, eliminating unexpanded A1000s and A500s (contemporary with the A2088). -ethan

On 11/23/06, Roger Merchberger <zmerch-cctalk at 30below.com> wrote: I think the big difference was "at the same time". The A2088 rendered to an Intuition-compatible "screen" - i.e., you could pull down the Workbench screen in front and see both the DOS processor and the Amiga processor doing things at the same time, on the same monitor. Of course, there was still only one mouse, one keyboard, and one human, so to a certain extent, there was a limit to how well one could exploit that situation. I guess one common example would be to download something from a BBS on the Amiga side while one played games on the DOS side - the computer was doing something useful that didn't require your attention while you could be doing something entirely unrelated, and at full speed. -ethan

On 11/23/06, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: I don't think that's my quote. I'm not sure I understand how you'd use this... Time-sliced how? To alternate displaying the output of one processor, then the other on the primary display? I did have a Spartan Mimic that was, in effect, a bolt-on Apple II for the C-64. You could hot-key one CPU or the other to be displaying, but it was done with relays to physically switch the video out of one processor or the other to your monitor. I was able to play two Infocom games simultaneously with that rig - type one command, then switch CPUs while the first CPU ground on the disk for a few seconds. Very handy for game research (not so handy for really _playing_). -ethan

On 23/11/2006 01:00, Chuck Guzis wrote: It was mine :-) Because there's no effective way to time-slice or multitask arbitrary programs. The Z80 card won't voluntarily give up control on a regular basis, and the Apple ][ doesn't support interrupts. The first Amiga(s) had no MMU, but at least did have timeslicing. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

Chuck Guzis wrote: Yes, but you'd have to modify CP/M and the Apple's firmware to do it. AFAIK, no-one ever did. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

On 22 Nov 2006 at 18:53, Richard wrote: Could the SSM 6502 S-100 card (the earliest alternate CPU card that I can recall) co-reside with a 8080 CPU card? It seems to me that one of the early "alternate" cards would simply pull the bus "hold" line high to do this, But it's been a loooong time... Cheers, Chuck