I 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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abanana 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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?".

	▲	Keyframe an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yeah. one thing is not like the other. While AmigaOS was pre-emptive, Mac System - 6-8 weren't. It was co-op. Everyone who used 6 and 7 can remember copying file meant you couldn't do anything else, and 8 got multithreaded support in Finder finally, but it was still co-op. At the time I used various platforms daily. Namely, AmigaOS, Mac System 6-8, IRIX.. the difference was obvious. IRIX and hardware of course being from the future, but at at least 10x the price.
	▲	gblargg an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Even Mac OS classic was just cooperative multitasking. Near the end it got some very limited pre-emptive capability, but most only usable to do calculations.

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smokel an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

There were early multitasking operating systems starting with the 386, 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 :)