The Amiga from Commodore shipped in October 1985 with a preemptive multitasking operating system designed to run many processes. The hardware lacked any support for virtual memory, and the Operating System never added it.

As a multitasking system, it worked very well, especially measured against similarly priced competition that lacked this feature. Indeed, most of the drawbacks of the Amiga OS would trace to lack of support for hardware protected memory, not the lack of support for virtual memory.

Protected memory is what allows a system to withstand corruption to kernel memory that is easily caused by errant application in a non-protected memory system. You might be familiar with the "Blue Screen of Death" famous on Windows systems in the past. On the Amiga, such crashes were a common occurrence. but had the less ominous sounding name "Guru Meditation" errors. Either way, you usually had to reboot the machine to recover.

The Amiga from Commodore shipped in October 1985 with a preemptive multitasking operating system designed to run many processes. The hardware lacked any support for virtual memory, and the Operating System never added it.

As a multitasking system, it worked very well, especially measured against similarly priced competition that usually lacked this feature (Sinclair QL, notwithstanding). Indeed, most of the drawbacks of the Amiga OS would trace to lack of support for hardware protected memory, not the lack of support for virtual memory.

Protected memory is what allows a system to withstand corruption to kernel memory that is easily caused by errant application in a non-protected memory system. You might be familiar with the "Blue Screen of Death" famous on Windows systems in the past. On the Amiga, such crashes were a common occurrence, but had the less ominous sounding name "Guru Meditation" errors. Either way, you usually had to reboot the machine to recover.

The Amiga from Commodore shipped in October 1985 with a preemptive multitasking operating system designed to run many processes. The hardware lacked any support for virtual memory, and the Operating System never added it.

As a multitasking system, it worked very well, especially measured against similarly priced competition that lacked this feature. Indeed, most of the drawbacks of the Amiga OS would trace to lack of support for hardware protected memory, not the lack of support for virtual memory.

The Amiga from Commodore shipped in October 1985 with a preemptive multitasking operating system designed to run many processes. The hardware lacked any support for virtual memory, and the Operating System never added it.

As a multitasking system, it worked very well, especially measured against similarly priced competition that lacked this feature. Indeed, most of the drawbacks of the Amiga OS would trace to lack of support for hardware protected memory, not the lack of support for virtual memory.

Protected memory is what allows a system to withstand corruption to kernel memory that is easily caused by errant application in a non-protected memory system. You might be familiar with the "Blue Screen of Death" famous on Windows systems in the past. On the Amiga, such crashes were a common occurrence. but had the less ominous sounding name "Guru Meditation" errors. Either way, you usually had to reboot the machine to recover.