> You're assuming a lot about the environment though - my point (aside from
> joking about it) was that Amiga generally didn't do a lot of multitasking
> (though it was one of the early multitasking OSes IIRC), so it could
> actually have a more responsive interface than modern systems that are
> doing a lot more than an older system.

On the contrary, it seems to me that Windows tends to run absolutely 
everything in a single thread, meaning that if anything happens which 
takes some time (e.g., waiting for the CD to spin up, waiting for the 
network, reading from floppy disk), the entire system becomes 
unresponsive. The Amiga seems to be a lot more threaded; it might take 
45 seconds to load all those filenames from floppy disk, but the actual 
disk *window* opens faster than you can blink.

I think the other issue is virtual memory. The Amiga doesn't have it. 
The OS doesn't support it, and the version of the 68000 they used lacks 
an MMU, so you can't have it even if you want it. Around the 1990s PCs 
typically had nowhere near enough RAM to prevent excessive paging. Why, 
one of the PCs at college used to take *twenty minutes* to load MS 
Access. An SQL database under AmigaOS took about 15 seconds to load.

The other thing is networking. Windows seems to assume that all network 
shares operate at LAN speed. If you try to browse a slow network share, 
the whole system becomes unresponsive. The Amiga, by contrast, has no 
networking support in the first place. And nobody installs software onto 
a network share and expects an Amiga to run it at local speeds...

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