CompuServe Messages

Yes, things like OS/2 are huge, but it is important to take a hard look at what takes so much space. First, the Amiga too would use a swap file if it could do paging. Second, OS/2 has basically all of Windows in it, so there's a huge amount of duplication in many ways. Third, things that don't come standard on the Amiga like tons of help files, tons of utilities, bitmaps, sound files, etc, etc., take up tons of space. As far as NT goes, it's not possible to do a fair comparison with AmigaDOS, because NT has SO much more. Multi-processor support, hardware abstraction, networking built in, login and other security administration, enormous amounts of help files again (megs and megs and megs of them). The RAM requirements today are a bit ridiculous, but this may come down when it reaches a final release. It's important to realize that a PC powerful enough to run NT still only costs about $3500 and you've got one heck of a machine at that point that outperforms any Amiga. While some people will probably never allow themselves to get past the strangeness of ancient Intel architecture and the ugliness of MS-DOS, millions will happily take advantage of cheap and powerful computing capabilities. Microsoft certainly does a lot of things wrong, but they do more right, and most of that by sheer force. And their developer support is mind-boggling and free. If you want something on a PC comparable to AmigaDOS, get GeoWorks or even Coherent. They're tiny, elegant, efficient and inexpensive. Paul.