the truth is not that MICROSOFT copied off from LINUX. for instance, using AMIGA OS, you can hold the shift key, and click a text block- what will happen? it will become selected. and this OS is from 1985. it is believed it has been prototype for WINDOWS!
and nowadays, virtual AMIGA can even use WINDOWS directory as hard drive.
i made this video to give you an idea of the computing power of this game console. crunching (here called imploding) of a 600K file takes about 3 minutes!
and of course, nowadays it is not required anymore. a real amiga 500 would be much slower as well.
this is a 68040 system at high speed, megabytes of memory, and large hard drive.
so if you do not want to use WINDOWS and WORD all day, why not try the AMIGA OS? it can use files from your windows hard drive, even USB if you want to. but the old 1.3 OS can not show JPEG pictures, or play movies. if you look for such features, you need the 3.1 AMIGA OS, or something different.
you can use the AMIGA for text writing, for old games, to learn C programming! fully legal, and much better than under LINUX. later it was watered down into many different OS types, like on LINUX, but traditionally, there is only 1.3, 2.0, and 3.1 OS. they used to be shipped with real AMIGA computers until the year 1994.
if you use later OS, like the 3.5, 4.0 or AROS, you can have most features you find on WINDOWS etc, but it is not the same thing anymore. there are even POWERPC amiga's manufactured freshly as of today (in small numbers).
you could use such an amiga for video animation (it can record to a video recorder, or display on TV screen much easier).
if you just want to discover the AMIGa, try the 1.3 or the 3.1 OS (and ask someone for some cool game titles).
besides, you can have a file shell, including multitasking, and a graphical workbench if you wanted to. there is no one stopping you to use it as windows shell (besides that performance may go down a little). it depends what you want to do with it. by default, you can for instance repeat previous commands, can assign real volume names, can have complex scripts...and all this since the 1.3 OS.
installation is not very dramatic. AMIGA OS 3.1 can fit into less than 1 megabyte if required (most game players do not need the system commands). you could delete them, but why would you want to? because you can use hard drive easily.
it could even be said that there is no installation (at least, under 1.3 OS). just attach the floppy disk image!
however, making programs work under 1.3 requires special knowledge, which even can not be found in the official manuals. for instance, you need to know the program names, where to download them, and how to install additional libraries (for instance, file requesters, think it was the year 1987!).
it is unknown how many new people the amiga platform will or still can attract.
most users will be from the 1980s with real experience.
but i like it much more than linux.
what amiga os 1.3 is doing can be explained on 1 or 2 thousand pages, and the commands are maybe 50 or the like. it can startup within a few seconds, and is not doing very much on its own.
http://groups.msn.com/68k
