At first release - GEM did indeed seem a little more "polished" than the Amiga. But I can't say enough about the Amiga's ground breaking, full-on, honest to goodness real multithreaded multi-tasking. That alone made it worth the somewhat "meh" UI.
OS/2 was very polished. It was also quite the resource hog. I gave it a go, but ultimately got the nope.
BeOS was indeed quite stunning - I think it could have easily become MacOS. But then we'd have missed out on the second coming of Jobs and all that brought to Apple, as well as a fully POSIX compliant OS that we got with OS X.
Regarding belittling, Quarterdeck hawking text-mode DESQview task-switcher at trade shows would hand out decks of cards saying that's all you needed to play Solitaire (popular game built in to Windows).
At first release - GEM did indeed seem a little more "polished" than the Amiga. But I can't say enough about the Amiga's ground breaking, full-on, honest to goodness real multithreaded multi-tasking. That alone made it worth the somewhat "meh" UI.
OS/2 was very polished. It was also quite the resource hog. I gave it a go, but ultimately got the nope.
BeOS was indeed quite stunning - I think it could have easily become MacOS. But then we'd have missed out on the second coming of Jobs and all that brought to Apple, as well as a fully POSIX compliant OS that we got with OS X.
I agree the Amiga having real multitasking so early was impressive, but that UI (at least the early versions) looked so clunky to me.
Regarding belittling, Quarterdeck hawking text-mode DESQview task-switcher at trade shows would hand out decks of cards saying that's all you needed to play Solitaire (popular game built in to Windows).
Wow! That is a great example of how much PC folk initially hated GUIs.