alt Hacker NewsI don't know if the Amiga was ahead of its time or the PC was behind its time. AmigaOS was a pre-emptive multitasking OS whilst PCs had to wait for Windows NT/95.
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The release of Windows 95 was weird. There were PC users talking about how amazing Microsoft were, to have come up with all the things their marketing people were shouting about, such as pre-emptive multitasking and plug-and-play. Then all the Amiga (and Mac) users, completely underwhelmed, pointing out "we've had all these things for years, how has it taken so long?".
There were early multitasking operating systems starting with the 286, but for demos you'd typically use the entire CPU. Part of the magic was that video routines would run at an extremely constant 50 (or 60) Hz, perfectly in sync with the hardware. This, and color bleeding, resulted in a buttery smooth experience, that I still miss.
One particular example of this experience was that you'd use "raster bars" to time the performance of your routines. If your main loop is synchronized with the vertical retrace, then switching the background color after a piece of code would show up in the margins of your screen.
Animations were tuned to move in constant pixel offsets. All the anti-aliasing in the world cannot bring back the true demoscene spirit :)
Sort of both.
> AmigaOS was a pre-emptive multitasking OS
Yes, but without memory protection.
> whilst PCs had to wait for Windows NT/95.
While Windows 2 on an 8086 could pre-emptively multitask DOS apps, so long as they all fit into 640 kB at once. Windows/386 could do it in extended memory.
The innovative thing in W95 was doing it to Win32 apps as well.
OS/2 in 1987 or so could multitask OS/2 code on a 286.