@ Thomas Richter:
It seems you don't get it?
Typical case of technical blindness and without thinking about useability....
Again, please show me how the OS can be used after I turn on my Amiga?
What can you do with the Amiga without putting a disk in the drive?
I tell you: absolutely nothing! Not even keyboard access!! No mouse pointer, no user interface. I think it's not so hard to understand....any kid would be able to follow my words....
The Amiga behaves similar to a games console, which can't do anything other than display some sort of welcome screen (kickstart hand in the Amiga's case) before you put in a cartridge or disk.
Honesty, you are talking about some technical details what parts of the OS are already 'there' and could be activated, but you forget that they are not activated by default! The user needs to activate it manually with a Workbench disk (and it takes ages to load!!)
So, it is not 'there'. If it was 'there', then I would be able to access the computer after I turn it on. Instead it is like sleeping until activated by a disk. And that was a major design flaw of the Amiga.
The concept of being able to design your own boot disk might have been nice, but who made use of it? I have not seen any other OS disks than the original (or slightly modified) Workbench back then.
And even Commodore didn't release many different Workbench versions. Whenever they released a tiny bit different version, then it also needed a new Kickstart chip as well....so it was not that modular, after all.
But still, if they wanted it to design that way, then why id they not implement a default OS and minimal DOS ready from the start of the machine? In case it wold not suit for someone, then he can just easily load 'his' own Workbench, instead - where is the problem?
Like on the C64, I can load GEOS if I like, but I can also just use the built in OS.
The concept of 'boot from disk to be able to use the OS' failed miserably, and most Amiga users I talked with support this.
It might have suited well if there had been a hardisk in the Amiga like it was in the XT, but that was not the case.
It was even more stupid design with the Amiga 1000's kickstart disk even before the Workbench disk, but at least Commodore noticed that mistake and tried to correct it on the Amiga 500.
Unfortunately, they didn't succeed, but only did half of the job....
Another Amiga 500 flaw that I clearly remember (and which also has been mentioned a thousand times) is that the mouse/joystick ports were at the rear side, and required the user to find the port blindly whenever you wanted to use a second joystick instead of the mouse for a two player game.
At least this was corrected on later Amigas
