|
 |
>> They don't! If I open a blank Word document, that's 10 MB.
>
> ...which begs the question, "what are you using 10 MB for?"
I couldn't really care less. 10 MB is nothing on modern machines. My
digital camera generates 10 MB per shot, it's not really making me lose any
sleep.
> There used to be word processors that would run inside less than 60 KB of
> RAM. Sure, nobody could argue they had the same features. And sure, I can
> see how adding lots more features would require quite a bit more RAM. But
> 10,000 KB? That's not "quite a bit more". That's 170 *times* more!
You have more than 170 times more RAM now though.
> ...the point being that software for the Amiga was designed to not
> *require* more than 2 MB in the first place.
What if you had an Amiga with only 512K or 1MB RAM?
What Windows software requires more than 1 or 2 GB of RAM anyway?
> (Because if it did, you just massively reduced your potential market.)
> Back then, software only used memory if it was absolutely, unavoidably
> necessary. Which is kind of my point...
Because you only had 2MB to spare, of course you couldn't include 600K of
fancy bitmaps in RAM, a thesaurus, dictionary and grammar checker, you made
a "bare bones" word processor that basically did the bare minimum to produce
documents. Now you can do all that cool stuff and of course it uses more
RAM. What's your point?
> (To actually answer your question, if you ask AmigaOS for 2.5 MB of RAM
> when only 2 MB of physical RAM exists, you get a message that amounts to
> "no, go away". One of the ways they kept the Amiga cheap was by not
> including the hardware necessary for implementing virtual memory...)
So what if you take an AmigaOS program that tries to use eg 1.5 MB of RAM
and run it on an old Amiga that only has 1MB? It doesn't work. What
happens when you try to run a modern piece of software on an older PC? It
works ... but very slowly.
If you prefer the Amiga option, then just switch off virtual memory in
Windows.
Post a reply to this message
|
|
