h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

First, I'm not a programmer, so I may not know what I'm talking about ... not that it bothers me ...

I recall the early days of the PC (I know ...), around DOS 2 - maybe the mid 80's? Anyway, I read an article about the first guy who decided to write a "TSR" (Terminate and Stay Resident) program. Like maybe a spell checker that could be called up immediately with a "hot key" - it was always in memory, but wasn't on screen (DOS was not really multi-tasking).

As the story goes, a programmer was trying out the new version of DOS when he printed something. The screen first read "Resident portion installed ..." (or something like that). "Resident portion?" he said, "Hmmm ..." I eventually had maybe six or more TSR's running at once.

Very good entry, BTW. I never had an Amiga, but some of my work mates who knew their stuff used them.

The Amiga had its equivalent of the TSR - they were called Commodities. Although Commodities were genuinely multitasking (i.e. you start one, and it just sits there as a background process doing its thing), whereas a TSR just stayed in memory so that if you *called* it it could execute straight away. AFAIR.
Commodities/TSRs are good, providing you have lots of memory. Amigas very rarely do though, neither did DOS2 machines.
CtS

Sounds like Commodities were a step up.

You're correct that TSR's were not running in background, they were just more easily available - the machine I was running DOS 2 on had no hard disk, so any program had to be loaded from 5.25" floppy (or cassette?!?), unless it was a TSR. In that case you loaded them when you booted, then hoped you had enough RAM to run the non TSR app (singular). AFAIR.

Short on memory is right, also, I had to add an extra card to get from 512k to 640k RAM, I guess from the motherboard limit to the DOS limit. But there were some great programmers back then doing amazing things with that small RAM. The one I recall is "Flight Simulator" by SubLogic, I think, (before Microsoft devoured it). I had to get a monochrome graphics card (Hercules) since there were no hi-res (or any-res color graphics, but it was great for its time.

I'm sure the Amiga had similar geniuses.

It's a pity that Micro$oft specified that memory limit so rigidly (BillG: "640k of RAM should be enough for anybody"), because if you made a computer now that had straight 256Mb of fully retargetable RAM, it would run so much FASTER than the current system (win.com loads in the first 640k, then calls virtual memory managers like himem.sys and emm386.exe and les diverses autres), BUT wouldn't be a PC compatible so nobody would buy it.

But that's OK, I don't use M$ software anyway. The recent problems with the Microsoft Infinitely Insecure Server don't bode well for the proprietary masses.

But yes, the Amiga has many geniuses. Unfortunately I'm not one, I'm just a fan.