Amiga vs Mac vs Atari vs QL: Battle for the Best GUI of the 80's -

[@simonebernacchia5724]

In the Amiga you could use either the top right gadgets or the key combination Amiga/M or even drag down the screen to switch between application, each application could have different screen resolution

[@RetroBytesUK]

Very enjoyable video. When you mentioned the horrific default colour scheme for the Amiga, that made me smile. I'm not sure even most Amiga owners would say it was the best colour palette selection. Apparently the blue/orange colours where chosen as they intended the Amiga to be usable with the worst cheap CRTs available (rather than a dedicated monitor) and work out of the box. When testing they discovered the blue orange scheme was the most readable on the worst screens. This approach of support low res, low quality screens out of the box is also why so many of the applications for the amiga where full screen. As there was just not the screen resolution to get everything on screen when in a window. Oddly my own first experience with the original Mac was just how painful it was to use, the machine had no memory expansion, and 1 disk drive. So it felt like I spent most my time swapping disks. Once I finally starting using the DTP app the Mac had been bought to run, it ran out of memory editing the first page, then the whole OS died and my work was lost. It was not the best first impression.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

Ooh, thank you for sharing the Amiga story. I was curious as to why they chose such an odd color scheme. Yes, I also got to use an original 128K Mac and recall the constant disk swapping.

[@RetroBytesUK]

@@8BitRetroJournal Oddly I found the GUI for the Apple 2 GS far more usable at that point, even though they both looked very similar to me.

[@TheThore]

Also the colors can be changed. This is just a default set. Also the Icons and the mouse pointer can be painted freely. All with standard prefs tools from the workbench.

[@vcv6560]

In Steven Levy's book Insanely Great, The Life and Times of the Macintosh the 128K version was so unpleasant to use it was ripped apart by the critics. No surprise when the Mac Plus came out two years later 1 Meg was the configuration.

[@rijjhb9467]

Really? the Amiga color scheme and graphics look surprisingly modern. It wouldn't be out of place on a Linux distro today, while neither of the other ones could be mistaken for anything else than early primitive 80s attempts at a GUI.

[@TheWareek]

I embarrassed myself when I was forced to move from Amiga to IBM. Put a floppy disk into the drive and then wondered were the icon was on the screen. did this several times and actually rang IBM support and ask about it. To be informed that on IBM you actually had to go looking for it unlike Amiga which assumed that because you had put a floppy in a drive you actually wanted to do something. LOVED THAT MACHINE.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

That's a great story. Same happens with the Mac. My one pet peeve on the Amiga is that I wish it would ping the drive differently then constantly hitting it physically.. The Mac doesn't do that. Also, I'm looking to see if anyone every tried to do an auto-eject feature, which would be pretty cool.

[@TheWareek]

@@8BitRetroJournal the other thing I loved about the Amiga was there were a number of very good programs out of France and you could tell them just by the graphics.

[@dave24-73]

There is a story around the strange colours on the Amiga, they were designed to give the best picture on old crt tvs as not everyone could afford a monitor. There is a story where Commodore went into a tv shop and asked for a tv with the worse picture, clearly they got an odd look but insisted give us the tv with the worse picture possible, the default palette was designed around this, believe it or not. The odd thing is the A500 default composite out is black and white, so would be interesting to see those colours in black and white. They later revised it to greys and blues in later versions of workbench.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

What's weird is that the Amiga 1000 didn't even come with a built-in RF modulator, you had to get it as a extra attachment. I don't know if it was included but if not then the idea of choosing the color theme is kind of dumb since most folks likely used a monitor or composite (and I'm guessing composite would have been fine with other colors).

[@AndrewTSq]

Never heard anyone thinking the Amiga had a wierd colorpalette back in the days. Wierdest part was that the Amiga-pixels was not square cause of the resolution :-) Most of us changed the palette on the Workbench anyway so it was nothing wierd. I acutally used the shell more in Amiga than the graphical userinterface. One thing only the Amiga could do was show you 2 a low resolution picture behind the workbench screen. Then you had all awesome functionalityes of the Amiga like Arexx, the assign functions, ramdisk.. and so on.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

@@AndrewTSq I played with the preference settings but they were pretty limited. Unlike Windows 1 (one of my least favorite GUIs) which could change colors on different elements, on WB 1.3 you could never change the window's background to be different form the desktop's background. It kind of made the interface look a little flatter.

[@dave24-73]

@@AndrewTSq sorry should probably have phrased that better, the Palette was good on the Amiga, the colours chosen for use within workbench orange and blue were chosen as they give the best possible picture on old equipment, and to be honest I prefer them to the Atari ST green which I felt looked terrible. From workbench 2 onwards commodore revised their colour choice for workbench to blue and grey as better monitors became more affordable and the norm.

[@AndrewTSq]

@@8BitRetroJournal ok i never used anything older than workbench 1.2 and my memory is bad. But I remember this software that let you change the gui completely on the amiga. And you could also add shadows to the windows. But maybe it was wb 2.x ?

[@Vebinz]

I'm likely in the minority in actually liking the Amiga's blue color background. Fun and bright and appeals to my inner child.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

I actually like it better than the grey scheme.

[@valenrn8657]

Amiga Workbench's background color can change.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

Yes, but that changes the background color of the windows as well...can't separate that on WB 1.

[@valenrn8657]

@@8BitRetroJournal For Workbench 1.0 to 1.3, I usually change the blue color into grey with a blue tint.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

@@valenrn8657 I've played with the settings trying to make it look like my Amiga 600's WB 2. There is a great response on one of the comments here regarding why Commodore thought blue/white/orange was optimal.

[@valenrn8657]

@@8BitRetroJournal For Workbench 1.3, 3rd party tools are needed for Workbench 2.0 palette, 8 color mode, and icon set changes e.g. kzbin.info/www/bejne/sHzQf6dmf71sbsk Amiga 1000's original chipset can support Workbench 2.0 palette and up to 16 colors mode (for 640x200p/256p resolution).

[@8BitRetroJournal]

​@@valenrn8657 Still can't seem to have a different desktop color from background window color, which makes it look one-dimensional. I'm assuming this software works with Workbench 1.1 (from 1985) since that's what I was comparing things to (1.3 came out 3 years later). With all the changes that the video shows, it doesn't, in my opinion, improve the interface. The Mac had this nice consistency and elegance that's hard to beat, even in black&white.

[@CFalcon030]

Interesting video. You are running Emutos which is far off in terms of usability from TOS 1.0 You are also not running the ST on high resolution but on the medium resolution. This means you don't get square pixels. I think that for the ST you didn't do enough research. For example TOS 1 doesn't have a command line interface but it did come with a VT 52 emulator. It also came with a control panel that you could use to change some settings. These were on the language disk.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

Oh, good catch and yes, a fair assessment that my Atari knowledge is not as complete as the others. I just tried TOS 1, and on STEEM it still doesn't give high resolution and worse, no command shell. So assuming the STEEM emulator refuses to show the high-res mode, I'd give it a wash between the two features. Also, many videos I've watched of the original Atari ST seems to show the squashed screen that medium resolution gives you...perhaps you needed a high-res monitor then to show that resolution, or was there some other reason most ran it in medium? I would say, all things considered, it likely shouldn't fall below the QL's interface since TOS 1 does allow for drag & drop. Though, a lack of command shell in the original version makes it hard to argue it should be any higher than it placed. Certainly not on par with the Amiga. Since the QL's GUI was an add-on and just a file manager, the Atari probably ended up where it should have. Also, I didn't just base it off of what I showed in the video, as I've had experience using all but the Atari and for it, I tried to watch some videos on its use. In my video, I tried to highlight some of the strengths and deficiencies of each., but not all. For instance, the QL doesn't have movable and overlapping windows, with only a main window showing the content of the current drive clicked. It would have been too long if I got into every bit of detail on each (well, at least for the three I know pretty well). So in the original Atari ST OS (TOS 1), all you had was that interface then, no other way to manipulate files? With it also being a single tasking OS, that would have been a very disappointing experience. The Amiga and QLalso provided a multitasking OS and the Mac eventually added in a few years later.

[@CFalcon030]

@@8BitRetroJournal the mono monitor is more like a VGA monitor than a TV. 31khz horizontal and 71hz vertical refresh. Most people wanted to play games, so they went for a colour monitor. But if you wanted to type anything, you needed 80 columns hence the medium resolution. Emutos is much closer to TOS 2.06 which I think is a very good iteration of GEM. As for the comparison with the QL, I didn't get much of what the QL os does but TOS is much more complex than what you describe. It consists of 5 parts, bios & xbios (interface to the hardware), gemdos (the dos part), vdi( the graphics driver, it controls everything you see on the screen and other devices such as printers etc), aes, (the windowing system, handles stuff like the windows, menus, interprocess communication etc) and the desktop. What all these do is provide an API for applications to use. Not a good APi, but an API. It also has cooperative multitasking with the use of desk accessories.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

Given all that, do you think TOS 1 should have fared better than Workbench 1? That's the question I would have missed using the wrong version. Having played with it on STEEM, I feel that TOS 1 is more primitive than EmuTOS and I"m comfortable where I placed it. I wasn't trying to compare the best version of each since then things get really out of hand because you are looking at Mac System 7, 8, 9, Workbench 2 or 3, etc. Plus the QL would just be in last place by default since it only had one iteration, or I pick a different interface (there is a modern QL GUI interface developed in the 90's and early 2000's on hardware that never existed). So looking at the whole of it, I think that with TOS 1 tied for 3rd is a good spot. This is in no way trying to diminish the improvements and any add-ons that it got through its life. I think all these GUI's tried to modernize and mimic what we have now. What intrigues me historically is just how each camp looked at what they thought a GUI was before they became the norm. With regard to complexity of ICE on the QL, it also had a Window manager (which I talk about next week) and one cool thing that does, in conjunction with the QL's preemptive kernel, is the ability to multitask stuff that other computers could not. I just finished a DOScember video where a base QL (other than adding 512K of memory and a disk controller from the same era) is able to run two PC emulators in parallel using the ICE's window manager Choice. Pretty cool to see it working and something I haven't been able to repeat on the Amiga (the other preemptive kernel).

[@TheJeremyHolloway]

@@8BitRetroJournal How can you fairly rate something you don't have any background knowledge or experience with?

[@CFalcon030]

@@8BitRetroJournal @8BitRetroJournal i wouldn't say it should fare better since workbench is definitely more feature rich even though I believe that TOS is much more suited for the systems of the time. For example, multitasking without memory protection and on 512K of memory is not a good idea. I also feel that workbench is uglier than TOS but that is subjective. Also workbench is much more hardwired to the Amiga while TOS can be easily ported to any other system, including the Amiga. As for ICE, like I said I know nothing about it, seems like it was very well designed, but seems to be providing less to the programmer than TOS, does, especially in terms of abstraction. Again going back to my first point, 128k is too little for multitasking. I think TOS was amazing for what it was at the time and the perfect OS for the machine. Of course creating a GEM program, with menus and windows and dialogs is a very non trivial task, and I ve heard workbench is easier, but from the Amiga applications I have seen, they seem very inconsistent which is not the case for GEM programs.

[@DavePoo2]

For me. The lack of a command line interface on the Mac was the show stopper. They have it nowadays but they took their merry time putting it in. The lack of kickstart in ROM on the original Amiga was poor, but it wasn't something they wanted, it's just that the ROM wasn't ready in time for production. All later models fixed that. They also had 256kb at launch which just wasn't enough for the Amiga OS. On the whole though, I think Amiga got a lot of things right, but the Mac with it's cleaner and crisper monochrome display was always going to win the DTP world.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

I mean, I completely agree with you. I wrote one back in the early 90's for the Mac that had a build-in easy-to-use scripting language and you could do all sort of cool things...and it didn't sell very well at all. So Mac users just didn't want it. I think it goes to the fact that the GUI design was really well thought out that you could do many things without a command shell (similar to how modern Windows has many users not even knowing a command prompt exists). So give credit to Apple for understanding the point of a GUI. Again, personally, I fully agree with you, I need me a command shell in any GUI environment I use so I appreciate the Amiga and QL in that case (well, the Atari too but that only had a single tasking OS, so that turns me off as well).

[@davidblackuk]

Great video. Is that shell you use on the ST part of vanilla TOS? I thought it came with EmuTos? For my STs I usually use MiNT and mupfel. Don't think it would effect the result to much, though the QL may have finished third

[@8BitRetroJournal]

No, you are correct, the shell came with EmuTOS...my bad.

[@davidblackuk]

@@8BitRetroJournal Absolutely not a criticism. When i think of my ST from the late eighties into the early nineties, I remember a very different machine to the one you showed in your video in all it's default lack of glory. I had a unix shell and an alternative desktop using Gemini. that's well worth a look. So many open source extensions and updates that I scoured from many, many FTP sites. Back then the computer wasn't a device, it was THE hobby. Tinkering was all. Once again thanks for the great video

[@ConsciousRobot]

I don't know much about this as I've inexplicably become fascinated with old tech very recently. Was ST designed to look squished, or is because of the virtual environment? I feel like I have seen it before without the squished look on monitors from that era. Your main critique seemed to be how it appeared squished. Is it a fair comparison, or am I missing something?

[@8BitRetroJournal]

I believe it depended on what hardware you got. There was a higher resolution mode above that, where it doesn't looked squished, but it would require a monitor that could handle it, which was not the common one used (it didn't allow for color, i.e. it was monochrome) Also, I wouldn't say that was my primary concern with the ST's interface, just an element that didn't help it in that category. It's been a while since I did the video, but part of the look of each interface was also the font face and to me, the ST had the least likable of the four machines. Apple invested a ton of money in its GUI design, so why it was ahead of the others. The Amiga came in 2nd, though it's GUI does seem to have that more "thrown together by engineers" look.

[@dsblue1977]

Very interesting video. I would have liked a more in depth on what each GUI could do. For example, the Mac interface had a full toolbox that could graph circles and round rectangles. Other OS of the time did not provide that.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

That would be a cool video. Likely would require perhaps one in-depth for each platform to really get to that level.

[@retropaganda8442]

The Amiga operating system provided standard libraries, like graphics.library or intuition.library, with numerous drawing routines, which were actually fast, thanks to the underlying specialised hardware, which the Macintosh totally lacked. So, while you certainly could draw still images on the Macintosh, only the Amiga made it a practical thing.

[@AnachronyX]

Perhaps you could have also included Risc OS in the GUI comparison.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

Yes, I looked at the Archimedes GUI and it seemed great. A couple of reason I avoided it: a) I know very little about it and b) it was a bit later (1987/88) and I was focusing on 84/85. Things moved quickly and in the latter half of the 80's, even Windows would need to be looked at.

[@vcv6560]

No doubt the Mac was the best build, the product having a large team to focus on the task. However the multitasking which came with the initial Amiga release is really suited to the multi-window desktop (and multi screen resolution environment) and ithat feature ultimately made its way to the Mac and of course the PC via Windows. R.J. Mical received a patent on the right-button context menu, technology that was also pioneered on the platform. On integration the big award has to go to the creator of Copy and Paste and in modern interfaces the data independent nature makes it critical to all our uses now. As far as I know the Mac was the first place it appeared.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

I agree, a windowing system without some form of multitasking is pretty unusable. Even Windows 1.01 in 1985 had built-in a cooperative multitasking system (I won't call it a kernel since it ran on top of DOS).

[@davidspencer7254]

100% agree, I've had Mac, Amiga and QL out of that and yeah...

[@valenrn8657]

Amiga 1000 can be upgraded with the recent AmigaOS 3.2 and PiStorm accelerator with RTG. Mac Classic with System 7.5, it's a "this disk cannot use on this computer" error. Mac Classic with PiStorm is nearly useless.

[@cathrynm]

That pull down to load the command shell on ST didn't exist back in the day. That's part of ETOS.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

Yup, I realized that I wasn't using an original version after the fact...but I'm still happy where the ST ended up as It didn't impact its overall score (i.e. I think it should have been ahead of the QL).

[@cathrynm]

@@8BitRetroJournal Yeah, eTos is pretty close to TOS otherwise.

[@zo1dberg]

Nice one. And if you compare multitasking ability, the Amiga would blow everything else out of the water with this pre-emptive muiltitasking. It was superior to anything else at the time, and superior to Windows and MacOS throughout the 90s as well.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

I actually do and it doesn't 😕The Exec kernel was a bit of a mess and other platforms in the mid 80s did a much better job implementing preemptive multitasking..

[@zo1dberg]

@@8BitRetroJournal which ones?

[@8BitRetroJournal]

@@zo1dberg Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of the Amiga Exec kernel (see May 22, 2024), but just at the process scheduling part, QDOS does much better (see April 1, 2024). Then there is the stability of the kernel, where the Exec just crashes if the machine runs out of memory or freezes up with a simple infinite loop (see both August 16 and 21, 2020), whereas QDOS runs much more stable in those instances. So that's just some comparison between Exec and QDOS. I'm slowly starting to dig into other preemptive kernels in the mid 80s...presently looking at MS-DOS 4.0, which isn't so good, and have looked at Concurrent DOS, which was interesting.

[@zo1dberg]

​@@8BitRetroJournalI only just learned that qdos had pre-emptive multi-tasking. But given that machine wasn't well known, the Amiga was the only popular machine that could do it, aside from Unix based machines, which only large businesses could afford. This was true through to the 90s as well, until Windows 95 had it for 32bit applications, and Windows NT. And, of course, Linux. MSDOS didn't have any multitasking let alone pre-emptive. All you had d TSRs, but that's about it. Everything else at the time was cooperative multitasking.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

@@zo1dberg The QL was only known in the 80s...in fact Amiga had a strategy meeting about it at one point before they released the Amiga 1000. Personally, I'm only looking at the 80s for these systems since things become a bit moot in the 90s as the Mac and PC persevere and battle it out until this day for who had the best platform...of course the PC won.😕 I will be looking at a 1985 version of MS-DOS that sports a preemptive multitasking kernel according to documentation. It was dumped for OS/2 but released in Europe. Video will be coming out in December for this year's #DOScember, so stay tuned for that. Obviously, there's OS/2, which I should dig into as well. I already looked at Concurrent DOS (December 9, 2023), by Digital Research, which was a multitasking DOS that was pretty interesting.

[@epremeaux]

I mostly agree with your assessment. But on two occasions you dip into system 7 on the mac to illustrate a "better feature" of the GUI. I feel this is a bit unfair to the other OSs, as now you are talking about 1995 GUIs, not early 1980s GUIs. Apple released TWENTY-TWO updates with SIX major revisions to get to 7. Sys 7 would struggle to install and run on a 1984 mac. It probably would not run at all. In the case of Amiga in 1995 (System 7 era), Amiga OS 3.1 would be the comparable choice. The Jump from WB1.2 to 3.1 is a MASSIVE improvement, and did it over a span of just 5 releases (WB 1.3, WB 2.0, WB 2.1, WB 3.0 and WB 3.1. Even so, 3.1 would work just fine in an original A500, or modified A1000. ROM switchers were also common hardware by the 90s on early Amigas. When you are talking about Sys 7 resources, I'm not really certain what that's about. only casually used a mac at that point in time. But it SOUNDS like datatypes on Workbench 3.0+ As for the Atari, by 1995, TOS4 was out in limited use (Falcon only). But most older Atari users could have at least upgraded to 2.06. Granted, GUI improvements on TOS versions are very minor, with most improvements "under the hood." By the way, the first Mac to support color was the Mac II, in 1987, and running System 4.1 (NINE updates later). So at time 8:05, talking about the Mac color functionality, on System 7, really is totally unfair to the other three operating systems, which had color from their beginnings. If the need for a CLI is part of your GUI evaluation, then considering the MACs flat file system limitations under system 1.1/2.0 should also be a part of that discussion. Really, anything pre System 2.1 was pretty to look at, but absolutely terrible under the hood (and hard to wrestle if you wanted to do even limited customization). Sys 1.1 and Workbench 1.2 were both clunky, cludgy systems. Both kind of terrible, just in different ways. It was the early days of GUI and there were no benchmarks to say "THIS is a good GUI." IMO, Mac classic did not start getting "good" until sometime in the version 3 era. Even so, without color and terrible sound, it was certainly not enjoyable for gaming. The crisp monitor and high contrast made it excellent for productivity compared to the other though. It "looked professional." Both WB1 and TOS, with their bright colors and thick icons/fonts looked toy-ish. Workbench grew out of that with 2.0 but TOS never did.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

Thanks for the response. The two times I dipped into System 7 was to point out things in System 1.1. The first (at 8:05) was to show how little the interface had changed from the first version to one of the better versions (IMHO System 7-7.5 was the best...I didn't like the 3-D approach of System 8 and beyond). This was to demonstrate how well designed the look of the original system was, not to showcase its later versions. For the second time, the only thing I was trying to articulate was that the Mac System OS had figured out a way to tie graphical information (i.e. the icon and other elements) directly into the file with the resource/data fork split from the start. I just used System 7 because I had ResEdit conveniently there. So I wasn't trying to sneak in a more modern OS for the Mac's benefit. I've seen the modern Amiga OS and it indeed looks nice. I wouldn't say all GUI upgrades of all modern OSes are improvements. I don't like the modern Mac OS look and probably feel the same about Windows 11 (love Windows XP and Windows 7, and maybe Windows 10 is slowly growing on me though some of the configuration dialogs/windows are just too much). The flat file system was pretty odd in the Mac. If I remember correctly, it looked like it had a directory structure with folders, but those weren't really hierarchical. The same goes for the QL, which does not add directory structures. Still, a command shell, even without directories is still useful (i.e. I grew up on the QL with no directories and it never made a difference in me using the command line environment). I wrote a command shell for later Macs (System 6 & 7). I wonder if I could integrate the virtual folders somehow into the shell so users would think it was hierarchical. Wouldn't it just be keeping track in the program of those virtual folders to make it appear like a full path?

[@radem5874]

After showing multitasking on Amiga we will not speak about competition anymore. Workbench crush all of them. Amiga was an unbelievable machine. F... Commodore and their management.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

The Amiga's Exec kernel was not very good for its time. It's easy to crash if you just create a program with an infinite while loop. It's priorities are only real-time so you can easily freeze up the system (just watch my video from the beginning of this month to see an example). The Sinclair QL had a much better multitasking kernel and it came out almost 2 years earlier. The Amiga had nice graphics hardware but it wasn't a perfect computer.

[@RApdx74]

You are right the Amiga workbench was very advanced for its time with a lot of features. Otherwise it was really slow on a standard Amiga in the 80s and the first versions were unstable - so working with it was always a pain. My first choice would be RISC OS and then Mac OS at the end of the 80s.

[@vix_in_japan]

I've made the point elsewhere, but whilst the strange color scheme of the 1.x Amiga environment is put down to tweaking it for the worst possible display, I will never understand why they felt it was necessary to punch down to the lowest possible output device on a personal computer that was marketed as being a great leap in 1985. It's like taking a sports car, and putting my Japanese Kei car's engine in it, why would you do that? Yes the colors can be changed but the whole 1.x look is quirky if I am to be charitable, but in reality just looks weird when it could have been made to look so much better out of the box with little more work. I think someone noted the Apple IIgs environment below which ran in a similar resolution but higher colors (16?) that looked so much better. The other issue is the Intuition 1.x is quite poor when it comes to constructing user interfaces, whilst it offers some distinct advantages over the Mac Toolbox, it wasn't until 2.x that a simplified way of creating many types of user interface "gadgets" was created with gadtools.library. Don't get me wrong, Amiga OS is fantastic, but it was hiding inside a Terry's Chocolate Orange with a goofy smily face painted on it until 1990.

[@amigaos2823]

Amiga Wins

[@8BitRetroJournal]

I love that kind of passionate support for a platform. That's how I feel about the QL, as it always ends up being my favorite computer to come back to. I did like the 68K Macs, and I had one, but for whatever reason I just never get that excited about using one. It's like the first car I had when I was young, doesn't matter what I drive today, I still miss that sometimes. Nostalgia is a powerful thing 🙂

[@dave928]

nice idea to judge "Best GUI". but then one of your criteria is "it doesn't have a CLI". THAT was and is the point. if it needed a CLI then it wasn't a good GUI.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

That"s a really good point and one I learned the hard way in the early 90's when I wrote one for the Mac. Still, a modern GUI integrates a CLI so I felt we no longer really see them as separate.

[@AndrewTSq]

maybe multitasking should have been one criteria. I remember playing music on my powerbook 540c and the music started to chop if I switched to other software, while on the amiga the music played like it should do. Amiga was the only one with pre-emptive multitasking (no idea about the ql since I never seen one irl)

[@8BitRetroJournal]

@@AndrewTSq The QL has a preemptive kernel (1983), the Mac integrated a cooperative kernel in 1987. I did a separate set of videos (4 in all) about two years ago regarding multi-tasking and there, the Mac got last (well 3rd since I didn't include the Atari as it was single tasking). The Amiga got 2nd as its Exec kernel crashes somewhat more easily compared to the QL which has a very stable one.

[@AndrewTSq]

@@8BitRetroJournal ah thats cool. did not know (as I said never seen a real QL or heard much about it :) The amiga did as you probably know lack memory protection of any sort since the cpu lacked mmu, did the QL have any protection of memory that programs run in?

[@8BitRetroJournal]

@@AndrewTSq The QL did have a type of memory protection for the OS, but not in an MMU. It was just that it's OS was ROM-based, which naturally protects it form being corrupted.

[@Archimedes75009]

No RISC OS ?

[@8BitRetroJournal]

I didn't include it for a few reasons. The primary was that I just didn't know it very well. I chose the three most popular computers out there (Mac, Amiga, Atari) and threw in the one that I know (QL). I did take a look at Arthur 1.20 and having watched a few videos on it, I don't think it would have risen above the Mac or the Amiga as the interface is somewhat primitive at that stage. It seems a cross between Windows 1.01 and TOS 1 in its initial release, with its colors, icons, pointers, widgets, etc...though better than Windows for sure. Note that I was only reviewing first releases of the GUI, not the refined ones. Also, Arthur 1.20 came out at the end of 1987, a full two years after all the others, (almost 4 for the Mac), which is a really long time when you consider how quickly things changed (look at System 7 on the Mac, 3 1/2 years later and at that point it's hard to compete anymore).

[@Archimedes75009]

@@8BitRetroJournal OK

[@AmstradExin]

Sure the Mac comes out first when you don't use System 4. :P

[@8BitRetroJournal]

The distinction here is purely about the interface, not the operating system as a whole. In the latter, between the Mac and Amiga in 1985, the Amiga was far more advanced with its preemptive multitasking kernel, command shell, etc. But here we look purely at how the GUI represented info to the user. Today we see the GUI as the operating system, but in those days it was, by many, considered separate.

[@animaze86]

lol super biased for old Dave Sinclair there.. awesome video. My opinion, as with many other people commenting on this video. The Amiga kicked fucking ass out of all other hardware and OS platforms. End of story. GG well done Mr Jay Miner we salute you.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

Who was Dave at Apple? I'm confused. This was not a video on who had the best hardware video graphics or gaming platform of the 80s, for that the Amiga would win hands down (well, until the game systems like Sega Genesis came out and started to give it a run for its money). Instead, I only looked at the user interface elements of early 16-bit machines and it feels pretty obvious that the Mac was miles ahead of everyone else in the 80s (and continue so through the 90s and 00s). The Amiga 1000's interface looked dated when it was released (awful color scheme and mismatched icons) and if not for it's integrated Unix-like command shell, would have fared worse. The Atari and QL weren't really close. Though I've owned/used all but the Atari when I was young, first an Amiga 1000, then a QL, and finished with a Mac IIsi, my personal favorite among those is the QL. Even with all the QL's failings, it was a pretty neat machine, So, I think I'm more biased towards it than a Mac, but placed it dead last (trying to keep things honest). I should do a parody on the QL, placing it above all others by pretending to be like an Amiga users, but for the QL, refusing to accept any flaws in it ...that might be a funny video.

[@animaze86]

@@8BitRetroJournal The default color scheme was horrible, but so was the ST color mode.. The mac didnt have to deal with this issue but the Atari's and Amiga's were designed with TV spec video signals like RF modulated, composite, s/video and component RGB and if you look at the original wb colors on a black and white tv they are still very legible. For me it was just more fun making new color schemes for all my different boot disks :)

[@retropaganda8442]

The fact that you gave a SLOW 1-bit monochrome display more points than a FAST color display is so illogical to me. 🤷‍♂️ I understand it's not a hardware comparison, but in this case, the massive hardware improvement makes such a HUGE difference on the GUI. At software level, you do mention the operating system superiority but only gave it like one point? I guess i disagree on your scoring choices. Some features or lack of features should have made like 5 point differences. In every case, except the cutty little font, which anyone can design over a weekend, the Macintosh is no way above 5/10. Its hardware was extremely bad. Its operating system was extremely lacking.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

But this video was solely about the GUI, not about hardware. The problem is that the Amiga folks did seem to just spend a weekend slapping together their design while the Mac folks actually invested a ton in its design. It's like an artist doing a black & white sketch and a kid using color crayons...there, color still doesn't win out (admittedly, that's a bit extreme but hopefully gets the point across). You think light blue on orange was a great use of its color capabilities? It's sad to think that with all the work on the back end, that's what Commodore and the Amiga folks came up with on the front end. It took them a few iterations to create a much better one (2.0) which would have in look-and-feel compared much more favorably. Though going past the look, the Mac also did such a better job integrating its graphical elements while the Amiga used .info files to give you some partial experience....Windows finally did away with that after years of doing something similar. In the end, design matters, not just what's under the hood...at least for this video. If I did a video about hardware and had the Mac platform win, then you have some valid points. As much as I like the Amiga, it was not without its flaws (like any other machine that was designed back then).

[@8BitRetroJournal]

Oh, and you probably don't want to find my videos comparing its kernel...because that also had its flaws, though not when compared to the Mac (that Mac was trash) but instead when compared to the QL. On my main page, it's the next two top videos (number 3 and 4), if you are interested. The audio suffers since that was one of my first few videos. Then, just at the beginning of the month I played with task priorities and that didn't go as well either. I'd be interested to get your feedback on that (i.e. do you see those flaws or think they aren't critical).

[@animaze86]

amiga + atari modes are interlaced hence 1/2 height.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

So the interlaced mode is separate from a TV's interlacing, right?

[@animaze86]

@@8BitRetroJournal well - technically PAL/NTSC didnt support 576p progressive scan on most TV's in the 1980s and 1990s - perhaps later 90s models, however the OCS+ECS chipset interlaced modes were also an interlaced 567i (ish) signal obviously - the support for VGA only modes on the ECS + AGA gave a full 31khz signal on prograssive scan non-interfaced 640x480 + overscan and similar 'productivty' modes.. to be the best of my recollection anyway.. but at 512x256 (non-interlace PAL modes) the icons were twice the height cos they were designed for hi-res

[@TheSimoc]

Just wish we still had even remotely that good GUIs in modern OSes. There was more and less development and refinement in GUIs since their beginning and till up to Windows XP and something around its contemporary Apple counterparts. Since then it has been steep demise and GUIs of all today's major OSes, including Windows, mainstream Linux distros, Android, as well as all of Apple's, are like a landfill of convoluted clutter. Ugly and cumbersome as hell.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

I agree. I actually would put Windows 7 into that category since it's not that different from XP. But with Windows 8 things started to go sideways. Mac OS 7.5 is still one of my favorites but I have not enjoyed the Mac OS X variants (I use one in my office for day-to-day stuff and just stumble on it constantly).

[@TheSimoc]

@@8BitRetroJournal IMO 7 was already a too big step downwards, but better still than anything newer. Well I use 7 as my daily driver at the moment, but I like way more the XP I have on another machine I stumble upon every now and then. Just has gotten the API support so much dropped that cannot rely on that anymore, otherwise XP would still be my daily driver. XP was the pinnacle of Windowses generally, even though I liked pre-95 concept of Program Manager more than the Start Menu concept. 7 is bad (UI design AND horribly bloated) but still barely bearable. 8, 10, 11 are pure hell and will never be my daily driver. I will keep on using 7 as long as possible, while slowly but surely migrating into Linux, hopefully finding some really lightweight distro with good UI, and/or learning to customize my own.

[@OptimusMonk01]

LOL Amiga wins. no comparison

[@8BitRetroJournal]

Really, you think its toy-like interface look is superior to the Mac?

[@OptimusMonk01]

@@8BitRetroJournal lol you can change the colour palette you know. Unlike on the Mac

[@8BitRetroJournal]

@@OptimusMonk01 You have 10 times more control of the color pallet on Windows 1 and that interface doesn't compare to the four I looked at so I decided not even to include it. So color palette choice is not a good marker. The Amiga's interface is very one-dimensional since the window background has to be the same as the desktop background, making the windows seem merely as outlines for the icons in it. Plus, not every file has an icon, so you have to create those .info files, meaning that you don't easily get full control of your files. I mean, the Amiga's GUI was better than Atari and the QL, but it's hard to argue it was the best.

[@OptimusMonk01]

@@8BitRetroJournal Mac was B&W in the years you're comparing. Windows 1 was just a grid of characters, windows couldn't overlap or anything. That's why DOS has those weird window frame glyphs in its upper half of the codepage. Educate yourself before you profess to be an expert.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

@@OptimusMonk01 I have educated myself and I'm not blinded by nostagia. It doesn't matter if the Amiga had color and the Mac was B&W. It doesn't impact the overall elegance of the Mac interface, which persisted fundamentally like that for almost 20 years. At its essence, the Mac was the foundation of modern GUI's whereas the Amiga looked like something slapped together by engineers looking to copy the Mac interface.

[@giant000]

Mac may be pretty but....... No colour No multitasking No command line ...... I rest my case.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

I completely agree with you. Not until 1987 did the Mac's OS improve with a limited multitasking OS (cooperative vs the QL/Amiga's better preemptive). They did eventually get color too. However, this video was about 1st gen (so 84/85) and only focused on the GUI aspects. So command shell is valid but color and multitasking not so much.

[@Deucatryon]

​@@8BitRetroJournal"So command shell is valid but color and multitasking not so much" 😂

[@8BitRetroJournal]

@@Deucatryonwe are specifically focusing on user interface, so no, multitasking is not valid. Presumably you are on the Amiga side but even there, its multitasking kernel falls behind others (see my August 2020 videos on multitasking in the 80s). I do think color is important, but color alone not so much. I mean, just look at Windows 1.0 with its myriad of pastel colors...I don't rate Windows 1.0 very high among these GUIs at all.

[@Archimedes75009]

You can't even create a directory with the Workbench GUI, you must use the CLI. What a joke of a GUI it is ...

[@8BitRetroJournal]

You could on the Mac and on the Atari, and though I didn't note every deficiency of each GUI, that certainly was part of Workbench's overall rating...manifested in the fact there were things going on with the Amiga OS that weren't transparent on the GUI side and required use of the command shell (like not all files visible via icons...that you had to create .info files similar to how early Windows did things until modern versions started giving icons to each file). But that negative is also a positive in having the ability to integrate a GUI with a command shell similar to how most modern Unix/Linux systems are used today.

[@simonebernacchia5724]

You could, there is a "new Drawer" instruction in the File Menu (Workbench call directories drawers)

[@Archimedes75009]

@@simonebernacchia5724 No, it wasn't available in the early versions, that's why there was an empty drawer on one disk, and you could copy it. Such a joke of a GUI.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

​@@simonebernacchia5724 It doesn't exist under Workbench 1.

[@valenrn8657]

Copy the "Empty" folder. LOL.

[@bobweiram6321]

The Mac was the best hands down followed by GEM.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

I definitely agree with the Mac...I still like System 75 to this day better than some modern interfaces. You think GEM was better than Workbench though?

[@bobweiram6321]

@@8BitRetroJournal GEM was fortunate enough to have had avoided the lawsuits. The interface works most like the Mac UI in terms of look and feel. Actually, I remember it being even nicer in someways because it had color. It's too bad Linux didn't use it as the backbone for their desktop environment rather than the ugly X windows. Workbench and QL look they were designed for MineCraft; the icons are pudgy and blocky. Workbench, however, is definitely smoother in terms of window and cursor movements than System 7.5. QL is essentially a file manager and nothing more. The icons are pedestrian looking. GEOS and Apple IIGS OS were two other ones to try. GEOS worked well for something that ran on a C64/C128. Btw, MacOS System 7.6.1 is considered to be the best version of System 7.5 ever released. It was incredibly stable.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

@@bobweiram6321 I thought about including GEOS but decided to stay with the 32-bit architectures. I personally felt the icons for the QL were pretty nice looking but nice to get another perspective. The icons for the Amiga were a bit all over the place as one could create really large ones..

[@TheJeremyHolloway]

@@bobweiram6321 Atari Corp's version of GEM avoided litigation - unlike DRI's x86 version - because Atari had an extensive patent portfolio at its disposal that it could've hammered Apple with in response.

[@8BitRetroJournal]

@@bobweiram6321 I'm actually curious why Atari's GEM avoided the lawsuit and PC's GEM didn't. Any idea what the history behind that was? Apple was so litigious as they were trying to thwart anyone else doing what they were doing at the time (which I am not a big fan of).

[@werre2]

ST sucked most. Amiga was the most versatile.

[@MrFurious_666]

Seriously ?

[@8BitRetroJournal]

...on what part?