[lproven]

All excellent points.

It does seem to me that Atari did very well with the use of COTS hardware and software to get a usable machine out at such a low price. It was more usable than the Amiga at base spec (512kB RAM, 1 floppy) because the OS in ROM meant much less disk swapping.

But it did need both a lot more upgrades and expansions as time went on, as you point out, correctly IMHO. Secondly, I think Atari should have adopted PC standards as they appeared and settled: PS/2 ports, VGA and SVGA monitors and display modes, Baby AT motherboards, SIMM slots, IDE connectors, ISA slots and so on. Apple successfully adopted a lot of this stuff, so classic Macs had standard RAM slots, and the lower-end ones had IDE drives, and so on.

Things like PCI (1992), ATX motherboards and USB (1995) came along too late.

[alexisread]

Agreed. The Falcon started down this route with IDE, SCSI2, localtalk, chunky VGA (props to Richard Miller), but Atari cheaped out as they had already decided to leave the computer market and were really just clearing stock.

[lproven]

Yup.

It is a damned shame, really.

TOS/GEM was so very basic that enterprising 3rd party developers were able to extend it from a single-tasking OS to a complete multitasking one, over time, without totally losing compatibility.

(Yes, yes, before any Amiga owners "Well actually..." me: we know, AmigaOS had that built in... But with interprocess communications designed for a single flat shared memory space, that meant that it could't be extended to support 68030+ memory management without breaking compatibility.)

The ST had the potential to really grow as a platform, just as Atari gave up on it. The TT 030, Falcon and ATW (AKA Abaq) were amazing machines with great potential, but it went unrealised.

Oddly enough, the relatively humble Sinclair QL, which was by Sinclair standards a flop, went on to inspire both hardware compatibles (ICL One Per Desk, Merlin Tonto, Telecom Australia ComputerPhone), motherboard upgrades (Gold Card, Aurora), and up-specced clones (CST Thor, Thor II, Thor XVI), and subsequent compatible machines (Q40, Q60, Q68), and hardware boards for other PCs (QXL card), and its OS continued on other hardware (SMSQ/E).

An impressive legacy for a "flop".

[snvzz]

>It was more usable than the Amiga at base spec (512kB RAM, 1 floppy) because the OS in ROM meant much less disk swapping.

Amiga also has the OS in the ROM. Much more of it even (256KB ROM).

[lproven]

> Amiga also has the OS in the ROM.

Yeah, no. I own one. This is deeply disingenuous.

It has Kickstart in ROM. That is, broadly, the bootloader. All the rest is loaded in from floppy.

The classic Amiga is a legendarily poor experience with a single floppy drive: disk-swapping agogo. It was famous for it 35 years ago.

With an ST -- or an Archimedes -- you can turn on and with no media at all reach the desktop.

You can insert a disk with a desktop app and run that app from that disk with no other media at all.

Both of these are impossible on an Amiga, and with any Mac, 680x0 or PowerPC, except a single model: the Mac Classic, which has System 6.0.3 in a ROMdisk.

https://lowendmac.com/1990/mac-classic/

[snvzz]

>With an ST -- or an Archimedes -- you can turn on and with no media at all reach the desktop.

Correct. It's a little more direct than the Amiga.

With the Amiga, you need two extra steps:

- Initialize dos.library (which is in the rom). This is done by the bootblock of the floppy you boot from.

- loadwb command (starts workbench, which again resides in the ROM)

>The classic Amiga is a legendarily poor experience with a single floppy drive: disk-swapping agogo. It was famous for it 35 years ago.

This is not how I remember the Amiga.

Due to dynamic library support, LIBS: is the library path, assigned to SYS:Libs by default, where SYS: is the filesystem you booted from.

Thus, if you booted with your workbench floppy then loaded a program from another floppy, it'd keep requesting to insert workbench: back every time it needs a dynamic library. (or font, or printer driver...)

The workaround, if you knew how to use your Amiga, would have been to assign the program's floppy as the first in the list for libraries, preventing this.

But, generally, you'd boot with the program's disk, to use a specific program, that is easiest.

[snvzz]

>Yeah, no. I own one. This is deeply disingenuous.

Uh, I own six, and disagree, profoundly.

>It has Kickstart in ROM.

That's the name of the ROM images, yes.

>That is, broadly, the bootloader.

This is not just "broad", but outright wrong.

The ROM contains, e.g.:

* exec library (kernel)

* graphics.library (display routines)

* intuition.library (windows and menus)

* amigashell (the CLI shell)

* workbench.library (literally, the Workbench)

dos.library, input.device, FastFileSystem and so on.

And, in 2.0+ ROMs, it even contains a bunch of shell commands (dir, echo etc) that reside in sys:c on older ROMs.

What's loaded from disk is your user programs and your data, besides any other libraries you might need (like diskfont.library, which is used to load fonts from disk, if you don't like the ROM provided one).