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Comment by ChainOfFools | Hacker News Reader

And probably the biggest "like living in the future" advantage out of all, true preemptive multitasking. However with the major Achilles heel of no memory protection; message passing done through pointer exchange was wonderful for insanely fast lightweight contact switching but terrible for system stability.

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It’s not like anything with a comparable price had memory protection - windows at the time was equally unstable and lacking protection, and it didn’t even have preemptive multitasking.

The later Amigas (3000 for sure, don’t remember about 2000) did have the memory protection, used e.g. by Enforcer.

"Enforcer" did not provide full memory protection. It only protected the lower page of memory (which were used as lookup tables by the OS, example: address 4 which was the Amiga "Exec" base address), in addition to some unmapped areas of memory.

It definitely helped, but it did not prevent processes from writing all over each other like on a modern operating system.

There is an interesting "History of the Amiga" article in Ars Technica [1], and the sense I got is that the Amiga didn't win out for non-technical reasons.

It was, hands down, the best hardware/software combo out there. If I remember the article correctly, the Amiga failed for other reasons. Bad marketing, bad Commodore management decisions, etc.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/

It had preemptive multitasking when consumer windows was still stuck on cooperative technologies. Where one misbehaving application could crash the whole system.

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