CompuServe Messages

You lose on the motherboard argument. To my knowledge (and please correct me if I'm wrong) there is nothing on the PC motherboard of a 386/486 that makes it particularly bad for multitasking. A large number of good true multitasking OSs have been written for and work very well on the PC platform (SCO Xenix, Sun's Solaris, NextStep 486, Novell Netware, OS/2 and Win NT to name a few). The bottleneck of the 16bit 8Mhz ISA bus has been broken with the now almost standard 33Mhz 32bit VESA local bus, the EISA bus and the forthcomming Intel PCI local bus. A number of companies offer PC's with one or more of the listed bus's and also allow multiple CPU's allowing at least NT to not just multi-task but multi-process. Most PC graphics cards even have there own custom processors and accelerators to take the work off the CPU, a feature that made Amigas stand out early on (we have a $400 2M VESA local bus ATI Ultra Pro that screams at 800x600x24bit). With PowerPC and Alpha chips being put on much the same mother boards (there will even be a PowerPC chip that fits in a 486 chip slot) the power, expandability, and number of hardware and software options available for PCs blow the Amiga away. I'll give you some slack on your OS points. OS/2 isn't that popular, NT is new, and Win 31 ain't too pretty under the makeup. But all are hardware independant and so allow you to write programs not drivers and the tools you can get are like nothing I've ever seen. I'll admit some OS bias (Windows in all it's incarnations) and platform bias (PC) but facts are facts. BTW, got and installed the software. Haven't managed to get my wife, Kerry, away from it. She's the real artist, I just talk.