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Nitpicking, but the Motorola 68000 was/is a 32 bit CPU, with 8 32-bit data registers (D0-D7) and 8 32-bit address registers (A0-A7, the latter used as a stack pointer). But CygnusEd probably took advantage of the Amiga co-processors for its gorgeous smooth scrolling effect...


Totally correct. For some reason I was thinking of the 68008 used in the Sinclair QL and thought "hah! that is the 8 bit version, then the 68K is 16 bit!". Yeah, but that was about addressing, not data registers width. ...Big oooops! (and I learned Amiga programming with 68K asm... (ducks and covers) :-)

About the coprocessors, surely Amiga offered a lot in this context, but I can't believe that today video cards cannot do the same with specialized hardware a hundred times faster (if we only take pure clock speed into account). There is something wrong with today software: machines get faster and faster, yet basic stuff like manipulating graphical elements didn't gain much in usability although more speed must have at least brought better granularity in dealing with events. OS complexity surely plays a role, AmigaOS occupied hundreds of Kilobytes -that's about 1/1000 of a modern OS core- but come on.... having to stuff a multicore 1GHz+ CPU plus fast GPU just to have a browser surf the net without dying is plain ridiculous.




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