CompuServe Messages

The Amiga uses pre-emptive multitasking, as does OS2. Windows use co-operative. they are not the same, or even similar. They can look similar on the surface, IF all the developers doing co-operative work VERY hard (they sure haven't under the windows operating environment!), but generally you'll see all kinds of performance degradations with co-operative that you do not with pre-emptive. Anyone who tells you that there isn't much difference between Windows and OS2 hasn't looked, or looked and didn't know what they were seeing. Windows, as always, has the software baase – OS2 kicks its fanny from here to Orion as a base operating system, and not only from the multitasking viewpoint (where it is vastly superior to Windows 3.1). The Amiga's multitasking has absolutely nothing to do with it's "chips". You can write pre-emptive multitasking for an 8-bit microprocessor in about 2k of rom; the Amiga's chipset shares some of the work of keeping the machine going, it's true, but then again a machine like a windows machines doesn't NEED to have a processor maintaining the display the way the Amiga needs the copper… because display cards on a PC "just do it" without help, or knowledge from the OS. Technically, the only hardware you "need" to build a pre-emptive multitasking system is (a) a "timer" that can signal the CPU through (b) a reasonably fast "interrupt" to stop what it is doing, look at the situation around it, and based on that, do something else for a while, coming back later to the original job. The Amiga's OS is probably most comparable to OS2, however, OS2 has many basic OS-level advantages such as intertask protection, virtual memory management, a standard graphics layer, and threading.