Re: Apple IIGS still rules!

["mm" <mark6546@aol.com>]

"Supertimer" <supertimer@aol.com> wrote in message
20010926003751.21307.00000787@mb-fr.aol.com">news:20010926003751.21307.00000787@mb-fr.aol.com...
> "mm" <mark6546@aol.com> wrote:
.
>
> The Atari ST and the Amiga were great machines too but the
> Atari ST wasn't expandable like the IIGS and its internal
> sound system was far less advanced.  The Amiga was a very
> cool system but it had a poorly implemented GUI that was
> very ugly.  The core OS was sound and was one of the first
> semi-mainstream PC for consumers that could really take
> advantage of multitasking, but the GUI half was far behind
> the IIGS.


The Amiga GUI could have been much better, bit of an afterthought. Possibly
they were worried if it looked/felt too much like a Mac, they'd get a
lawsuit from Apple! It was the first COLOUR gui though and did improve
considerably over the years.

>
> I much preferred my IIGS to either, though, because I was
> mainly into synthesis and what the IIGS offered on the sound
> front was far in advanced of ANY personal computer of the
> time.

True but it was just an off the shelf Ensoniq chip.

>
> Speedwise, yes the Mhz rating of the CPU sounded poor
> but in reality, the Atari ST and the original Amiga couldn't
> really run their GUIs/operating systems faster than the IIGS
> could.  All three performed slowly as did the Mac but none
> was as bad as watching a 16Mhz 286 trying to run early
> Windows.

The Amiga OS was initially coded in BCPL, which could account for its slow
pace.

Actually if you want a really cool old system, try an Acorn Archimedes/RISC
sytem sometime, this english computer is arguably the best of the lot. 32bit
RISC architecture, 8MIPS, 1280x1024, 4096 colours, 8channel PCM sound AND
multitasking back in 1987! Unfortunately like everything else, its been
rendered obsolete by PC's. Was a popular schools computer over here, like
Apple in the states.