Amiga also has the OS in the ROM. Much more of it even (256KB ROM).
Yeah, no. I own one. This is deeply disingenuous.
It has Kickstart in ROM. That is, broadly, the bootloader. All the rest is loaded in from floppy.
The classic Amiga is a legendarily poor experience with a single floppy drive: disk-swapping agogo. It was famous for it 35 years ago.
With an ST -- or an Archimedes -- you can turn on and with no media at all reach the desktop.
You can insert a disk with a desktop app and run that app from that disk with no other media at all.
Both of these are impossible on an Amiga, and with any Mac, 680x0 or PowerPC, except a single model: the Mac Classic, which has System 6.0.3 in a ROMdisk.
Correct. It's a little more direct than the Amiga.
With the Amiga, you need two extra steps:
- Initialize dos.library (which is in the rom). This is done by the bootblock of the floppy you boot from.
- loadwb command (starts workbench, which again resides in the ROM)
>The classic Amiga is a legendarily poor experience with a single floppy drive: disk-swapping agogo. It was famous for it 35 years ago.
This is not how I remember the Amiga.
Due to dynamic library support, LIBS: is the library path, assigned to SYS:Libs by default, where SYS: is the filesystem you booted from.
Thus, if you booted with your workbench floppy then loaded a program from another floppy, it'd keep requesting to insert workbench: back every time it needs a dynamic library. (or font, or printer driver...)
The workaround, if you knew how to use your Amiga, would have been to assign the program's floppy as the first in the list for libraries, preventing this.
But, generally, you'd boot with the program's disk, to use a specific program, that is easiest.
Uh, I own six, and disagree, profoundly.
>It has Kickstart in ROM.
That's the name of the ROM images, yes.
>That is, broadly, the bootloader.
This is not just "broad", but outright wrong.
The ROM contains, e.g.:
* exec library (kernel)
* graphics.library (display routines)
* intuition.library (windows and menus)
* amigashell (the CLI shell)
* workbench.library (literally, the Workbench)
dos.library, input.device, FastFileSystem and so on.
And, in 2.0+ ROMs, it even contains a bunch of shell commands (dir, echo etc) that reside in sys:c on older ROMs.
What's loaded from disk is your user programs and your data, besides any other libraries you might need (like diskfont.library, which is used to load fonts from disk, if you don't like the ROM provided one).
