> but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected

This was not the case for Windows 95/98 and ME, either BTW IIRC. Only with Windows XP Microsoft introduced memory protection for the mass market.

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mmustapic 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No, Windows 95 had memory protection for 32-bit apps. Usually when a 32-bit app crashed, the rest of the OS worked fine.

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tialaramex 20 minutes ago | parent [-]

There's definitely a difference in magnitude in how likely crap software is to set the world on fire and ruin your day between Win95 and Amiga.

One big problem is that Amiga "multi-tasking" while not co-operative like Mac or Win 3.x, can be switched off as a convenience for programmers. So all that needs to go wrong is a program switches off multi-tasking to do something and then gets stuck before restoring it. The program which crashed is dead but you can't fix that because it turn off multi-tasking.

	▲	vidarh 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In all the years I used an Amiga, I don't think I ever had the machine crash because they used Forbid(). I'm not saying it never happened to people - I'm sure there were badly misbehaving programs in use -, but using Forbid()/Permit() outside of very tight sections was very firmly frowned on, and Forbid was overall relatively uncommon apart from games which took over the system on purpose.

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thijson an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Windows 3.11 was pretty unstable, because it wasn't using protected mode. I remember how unstable the Macs were back then too before the introduction of OSX.

Applications also had to voluntarily give up control of the CPU, cooperative multitasking. That's bad when an application crashes and takes down everything with it.

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jorisw 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Probably Windows NT rather, which turned into Windows 2000 (and then XP)