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by actionfromafar 354 days ago
Memory protection was basically impossible or at least "Research Level Hard" on the Amiga, because of how the OS was designed with linked lists and message passing of pointers. This was what made it so fast, but at a cost. (They would have needed something like Rust to balance that.)

Everything could have been fixed with the March of Moore. The OS could have gotten a hypervisor and been running each program in its own "VM" thinking it was the only program on the machine.
1 comments
cmrdporcupine 354 days ago
Later iterations of OS extensions on the ST got memory protection support, albeit a bit inconistently and with likely backwards compat problems. FreeMiNT I think supports MMU + protection on 030 machines.

Achilles heel for classic MacOS, too. Sins of our fathers.

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TheAmazingRace 354 days ago
Pretty sure MultiTOS (which was derived from MiNT IIRC) fully supported preemptive multitasking back in 1992 or so when it came out. This, plus the fancier graphics support, a proper 68030 instead of the rather cut down 68EC020, and addition of a Motorola 56K DSP, meant the Atari Falcon was superior to the Amiga A1200, at least on paper. I certainly adored mine when I owned it not that long ago as a part of my small collection.
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cmrdporcupine 354 days ago
Yeah I have two Falcons here. Not that I ever use them, but they're amazing machines for the time.
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