Workbench


The Amiga's Workbench is the   Graphical User Interface  
that is used in conjunction with   AmigaDOS   to form
the Amiga's powerful   Operating System  

It is based around the Unix operating sytem, which is widely believed to
be the most powerful OS around.

Workbench is based around a drag-and-drop and mouse/point/click   GUI  .
This is very powerful and very user-friendly, because you can, for example,
double-click on a picture file and it will load your paint program with
that picture in the edit area.

Another powerful feature of Workbench is Datatypes.  This is a system
whereby any program with datatype support can load or save in any file
format that you have a datatype for.  For example, if, in your datatypes
draw, you have a PCX datatype, then you could load or save pictures in your
datatype-supporting paint program in PCX format.

Workbench/AmigaDOS do not require software drivers for additional
devices.  The Amiga does have what it calls "DOSDrivers", but these
are only settings files which the computer refers to and are not
required to be loaded into memory as on the PC, thus saving valuable
memory and hard-disk space.


Features of Workbench include:

   *  Full pre-emptive multitasking

   *  Complete integration with AmigaDOS

   *  Extreme user friendliness

   *  The ability to control files and programs from the GUI

   *  The configurability of the system

   *  Datatypes

   *  Requires one eigth of the resources required by Windows

   *  The ability to have multiple screens open at once

   *  The ease of upgradability 

Converted on 22 Aug 1996 with RexxDoesAmigaGuide2HTML by Michael Ranner.