From: bloc1469@ee.ee.uwm.edu (Gregory R Block)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: CBM mention on 12/11/92 Computer Chronicles
Date: 4 Jan 1993 02:59:41 GMT
Organization: Electrical Engineering Dept. University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
NNTP-Posting-Host: 129.89.2.33

In article <1993Jan3.203855.6910@sol.ctr.columbia.edu> jerry@msi.com (Jerry Shekhel) writes:
>The design purpose?!  It's obvious: to provide support for modern
>applications on a vast array of peripheral hardware.  That's just one

If that's the Windows philosophy, it explains exquisitely why Windows
is so incredibly fubar.

>sentence, but it implies things like the GUI, VM, and DIG.  Do you feel
>that this philosophy is less valid than the one behind AmigaOS?  Why?

I will first say that THAT doesn't imply a GUI, VM, OR DIG.  There's a
lovely quote I've seen in Mike's sig:  "Unix is the OS of the future,
and always will be."

MS-DOS provided support for modern applications, it just made them do
all the work themselves.

There's more to a philosophy to it than that.  What I meant by
philosophy is the "feel" one gets, the "understanding", the "basis"
for the design of the OS.  That is taken from not only the FEATURES of
the OS in question, but the user and programmers interfaces.

For instance, under the AmigaOS, there is a move towards taglists.
Gadtools.library is nearly 100% taglist.  Others are moving quickly.
(GT may be 100% taglist, but I'm not about to count.  I know that I
don't think there's much left of anything that isn't).  Operating
system calls are "layered".

One can see where Intuition.library is calling graphics.library to do
the work for you, kid of a "wrapping" of multiple functions.  Similar
things exist for the new buffering calls in graphics.library, and its
higher-level intuition.library counterpart.

The amiga bases around a "filesystem" motif:  Devices like serial and
parallel ports are accessed similarly to console: windows and files.
One can copy something from Ram: to SER:, type flubber.tex >PRT:, or
do named pipes, all through the same filesystem motif.  BTW:  You'll
note that Windows NT is EXTREMELY similar to this.  EXTREMELY.

As a result of this, one can simply "drop in" new filesystems, and
have them work.  Many people used FFS (the FastFileSystem) on floppies
back in the 1.3 days.

The Amiga is extremely elegant in most places.  Some places that
aren't?  There's still BCPL visible.  Not everything is documented as
nicely as it should be.  :)  Anyways, dos.library and filesystem stuff
is probably the last remnants of BCPL left in the Amiga, and they're
working toward ridding that.

Elegance.  Professionalism.  It oozes out of the AutoDocs, pal.
There's a definite order, a definite hierarchy to the way things get
done on the Amiga.  It's very clean, it's very concise, it's very
understandable.  If you'd like to see what a nice OS looks like, buy
the Includes & Autodocs.  They're getting better, too.  There'll be a
lot of happy people once 3.0's I&A are released.

>I'd like to know where you got this information.  Has MS let you look over
>the Windows source code?  If not, how did you determine that it has a bad
>internal architecture?

Because it has a bad EXTERNAL architecture.  The only thing I know
about the layering of windows is what I know from the OS calls
available.  Isn't that enough?

>You keep saying that Windows is badly designed, but you have no proof.

Know what OS calls are?  Try using them.

Greg

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