In case someone wants to see for themselves how "instantly" it really was. Skip to ~9:50 when it gets real sluggish.

Edit: if you don't wear nostalgia glasses, you can watch the bits of screen being redrawn piece by piece after something moves or a menu closes. Everything is flickering. Opening and closing a menu takes up to one second. The text being typed in the editor lags. This is not more responsive than a modern system, far from it. Obviously.

amiga386 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

To give a corresponding example, try moving the mouse while loading from floppy disk on Windows 95, ten years later. The mouse pointer judders!

This does not happen on a 1985 Amiga, even with a fraction of the CPU power, which it needs all of it to redraw UI damage as seen.

The reason is that the Amiga system prioritised input processing above normal tasks, it had preemptive multitasking where hardware timers triggered aCPU interrupt to let the kernel switch to a new timeslice, and of course reading a floppy disk was done with hardware interrupts and DMA transfers because the OS knew exactly what hardware it was dealing with, while PC compatibles couldn't guarantee those transfer modes (https://wiki.osdev.org/Floppy_Disk_Controller) so Windows 95 would inevitable handle floppy drives with polling.

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mrob 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's a good article about this:

https://www.datagubbe.se/stupidslow/

(previous discussion)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40604972

The Amiga feels fast because its slowness is predictable. Modern systems have unexpected slowness, and unexpected things are always more noticeable.

	▲	b112 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I had a sidecar with my Amiga 1000, which allowed you to use an XT MFM hard drive + controller card for the Amiga side. Once kickstart + the software loaded, it was incredibly fast. It was weird having a full IBM PC + Amiga in one conjoined machine. But I agree that predictable slowness is a thing. One only need to discuss traffic jams vs a 20 minute car trip without them.

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dev0p 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hence the caveat "Aside from the loading times," :)

The "instantly" refers to user input: clicking a button, typing, or moving the mouse was as fast as it could possibly get because of how close the OS was to the bare metal, with no fluff bogging down the experience. Simply put, there were no wasted frames, as there were none to waste. Nowadays, at the very least, you get a couple millisecond of latency. That was not the case here.

Also, this is a machine from NINETEEN EIGHTY F//G FIVE, and it's still probably faster than your average PC running Windows 11.

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emj an hour ago | parent [-]

The GUI was fast because it was fixed layout, MUI on the Amiga was slow as well. We tend to go that way to get UI that is easy to create. You see the same in all GUI libraries the more CPU you have the more you use it.

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vidarh an hour ago | parent [-]

MUI was slow because it layered on a crazy amount of configurability. You didn't need things to get slow with resizeable/dynamic layouts even then.

	▲	amiga386 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		MUI was slow because it was written in C and went all-in on BOOPSI, as well as supporting fully dynamic layout. It could likely have been faster, but the sort of people who paid for it were also the sort of people who bought CPU accelerators.

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flohofwoe an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Not surprising since this is a floppy-based system. An HD-based A3000 cold booted faster than most modern systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-e3w7Hh9eU

Also gp talks about input responsiveness (e.g. key and mouse input), and that has indeed much less latency on those old-school home computers than on modern systems where each input event goes through layers and layers of abstraction bloat before causing a visible change on the display.