CompuServe Messages

Bart, "I don't understand how a program can be more powerful and perform less at the same time." I have 10 years of PC and Amiga experience. Here's the deal… The PC has better business software because corporate buyers demand it. It's a matter of survival in the market. The company I work for uses Word 6 and Excel 5, running on a 486 or better, on every desktop. Because the PC's basic architecture is shot full of silly limitations, it has spurred an intense hardware development program that results in you and I being able to walk into any electronics store and walk out with a 100 MIPS PC. This is significant because the single tasking DOS/WIndows OS allows an application to *almost* take over the machine and use most of those 100 MIPS for itself. So feature-for-feature, it tends to be faster. The Amiga has a much more efficient basic architecture and OS. But hardware shortcomings by Commodore and Motorola have left the Amiga a generation behind the PC in CPU technology. The fastest Amiga ever made is roughly equivalent to a 486-50. No slouch, but about 1/4 the power of the fastest PC's today. Furthermore, Commodore never met a 7-MHz 68000 they didn't love; they stuck with that level of CPU power far too long (about 1 MIPS max). Additionally, that pre-emptive multitasking OS that we all love costs in application speed, because the application can't hog the CPU. Programs that managed to hog the Amiga's CPU died an early death, because users rightly felt they were the result of sloppy programming. Incidently, this issue is now present in the PC market as developers find that their first 32-bit NT-compatible applications run *slower* than their 16-bit equivalent under ordinary Windows. Bottom line is if you put equivalent machines side by side, say, an Amiga 4000/040-33 and a 486DX2-50 PC running DOS/Windows; then ran equivalent software, you would see the PC apps running faster. But over a long period of time, say a full day to a week, you would probably see the Amiga user *working* faster because the machine doesn't get in the way like the PC does. Under DOS/Windows, my 486-66 (about 40 MIPS) uses 100% of its CPU power to format a floppy! Take care. Tab Trepagnier Cruising on AutoPilot from Beaumont, Texas