> The real point is more that on a PC, just switching from one window to 
> another always seemed to take forever, whereas on an Amiga it was 
> instantaneous unless the machine was under heavy load.

Yeh, I remember my friend had a 33 MHz PC, and just closing a window it took 
several seconds for his desktop wallpaper to repaint itself, slowly scanning 
down the screen line-by-line.  I think the difference was, that Windows was 
always designed to use the hard disc as additional RAM, whereas the Acorn 
was specifically designed not to do this.  Of course it meant you sometimes 
had to quit applications if you ran out of RAM, but it also meant that you 
never got slowed down by the OS thrashing the hard disc.  In fact, if you 
didn't want anything extra loaded at startup, the hard disc wouldn't be 
accessed at all.

They also ported some really cool vector art package that was originally 
written for the Acorn (I think it was called Artworks on the Acorn and Xara 
on the PC).  At some computer show I went to they had both packages running 
on a latest Acorn and PC at the time, and of course the Acorn was something 
like 8x faster at drawing complex shapes with lots of graduated fills and 
transparency.  It had fininshed drawing the entire picture, while the PC was 
still drawing the background fills.

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