With a lot less fanfare, Apple launched System 7.5.1 in March of this year. It wasn't a major update, it merely added additional flexibility, but it is the current (as I write this piece) version of the Macintosh's operating system. Workbench 3.1 has been around for well over a year now. Licensed from Commodore before they went bust by Village Tronic, this will be the operating system most familiar to our readership. But which one is the best?

Workbench 3.1
Let's start at home with Workbench before moving on to more exotic climes. Everybody should be familiar with the six disk install set consisting of Workbench, Extras, Fonts, Storage, Locale and Install. The whole process takes only about 5 minutes provided you already have a suitable hard drive partition set up. Workbench 3.1 also comes with a Kickstart ROM which needs inserting in place of your current Kickstart chip, this obviously increases the time needed for an installation but the amount depends on how accessible the Kickstart chip is in your machine. Of the three operating systems on review here, Workbench is by far the smallest. It doesn't even come with a game (Windows comes with one game on the CD, a patience game, minesweepers and further games on the Plus Pack CD, System 7 comes with a number sliding puzzle and a jigsaw, there's also a demo version of a patience game on the CD version of the OS). More important though is the fact that Workbench comes with very little by way of additional utilities. This is because Workbench has always been geared towards a floppy-based machine. Hopefully this will change now that we have Amiga Technologies at the helm - proper CD-ROM software, built-in support for networking and the Internet, improved printer and colour support are all needed in a modern operating system, none of them are incorporated into Workbench. Some of the functionality of the other two OSs could be implemented too. Copying files is a good example. On both Windows 95 and System 7, when you copy one or several files, you get a progress meter showing how many files remain to be copied. On Workbench you just end up with the sleepy pointer and no way to cancel a long operation. Sure, unlike the other machines, you can continue to use the other programs you have running at full efficiency, but it's not very user-friendly. Another touch is the usage of text-based directory windows. The Mac's 'Show by Name' function is much more developed than the similar function on the Amiga with the ability to have nested directory listings inside one window and also to choose how the list is sorted by clicking on the appropriate heading in the window. On the Amiga you need to go back up to the menus to change the sorting order.

System 7.5.1
System 7.5.1 (System7 from now on) is the operating system for all Macintoshes. It comes on a CD-ROM or eight high density floppy disks taking roughly ten minutes for a full install from CD. Once installed the Mac presents a very friendly face to the novice user, with an almost patronising attitude to mere humans at times. As an example, should the machine crash, or you switch it off without going through the shutdown process, when you next boot it up a window will appear saying that you should use the shutdown menu item next time. Fine, if it was your fault, then you can accept that. But most of the time it was because the machine crashed, not you! System7 also suffers from the same problem as Windows in that all applications are run on the same screen with windows overalying windows if you are running more than one application. This can result in a confusing display, particularly when you are using a standard resolution Mac monitor, which is smaller than the Amiga's HiRes Lace. Unlike the Amiga's screen depth gadget, the Mac has an applications menu allowing the user to jump to different applications or hide them to clear up the screen a bit. System7 could also really do with the same standard of multitasking as the Amiga. All too often you end up waiting for an operation to end before you can do something else. Again, formatting disks is a good example. Under Worbench you could format four disks and still be able to do anything that doesn't require floppy access. System7's method of determining what to do with a file is based on what application created the file in the first place, the information being contained in the file's icon. This means that you can simply double click on any file and its creator program will load and load the file. System7 could certainly benefit from the Amiga's AppWindow and AppIcon facility and while it now has Drag and Drop functionality for a few things, Drag and Drop is certainly not systemwide.

Windows95
Well, what can you say about the world's most popular operating system? 'It sure is big', would possibly be my first comment. Windows95 takes about 45 minutes to install depending on what hardware and software you already have installed on your machine. The optional Plus Pack will bump up that figure by about half an hour. The software of choice for businesses the world over has all you would expect from a modern operating system excepting, perhaps, friendliness and a little bit of soul, if that's not an oxymoron. The metallic greys that grace every menu and window get a little wearing after a while and the conspiratorial attitude of Windows towards its users is somewhat annoying. All three operating systems are fine is all you ever do is fire up that word processor or paint package, work, save your files and then switch the machine off again. But of the three, I would have to say that Windows95 is the most baffling to get deeper than the surface with. System7 practically doesn't have any depth and although Workbench can be quite daunting from a shell, at least the files are organised into directories. Windows95 is files, files and more files only referred to by cryptic eight character filenames and their three character extensions (Windows95 now supports filenames with up to 255 characters, but you can bet that a lot of software won't use them until Windows95 is well and truly established), dumped into one big directory. The hardest thing to get to grips with is the degree to which Windows95 abstracts the desktop environment. On a desk, if you want to write a letter, you pick up a pen. On the Mac or the Amiga you can click on a word processor icon. However, on the PC you would click on a button on your desktop that would then hand you the pen from in your drawer. Fine until you need to look for the pen yourself. Microsoft have obviously worked hard on improving the user-friendliness of the package, and it shines compared to Windows 3, but I certainly don't envisage PC support companies going out of business in droves because Windows is now so easy to use.

But Windows95 is a stunning piece of software, particularly when compared to its predecessor Windows 3.11. When I was researching the article I asked a Windows expert whether Windows had a system like WBstartup. At first he challenged me to come up with tools that wouldn't be duplicated by the functionality of the OS, then he came back at me with the fact that not only did it still have a wbstartup-type feature, different users using the same machine could each have their own personal set of start up tools. This kind of comprehensiveness goes some way to explaining why Windows95 can take as much as 90MB of hard disk space (yes, 90!). W95 felt comfortable when I used it on my test machine, a 486DX66 with 8MB RAM and graphics accelerator, but the machine I was using it on would really be a base machine now, you might even want a faster machine and you would almost certainly need more ram if you want to use several applications at once. Some of the new features feel somewhat gimmicky like the file moving across the requester when you copy files, but overall Windows95 is a competent piece of software. Why pundits figure that $14 million is going to have to be spent on retraining staff to get to grips with the new interface is beyond me, but I guess Bill Gates is probably already looking at starting up a training company.

At the moment, you don't have very much choice which operating system you are going to be using. If you've got an Amiga, you've got Workbench, if you've got a Mac, then you'll be using System7, and if you've got a PC, well, if you've got a PC you actually already have quite a wide choice between OS/2, WindowsNT, Windows95 or Linux. But in the future you will be able to run MacOS, WindowsNT (and almost certainly Windows95) on different platforms, and if Amiga Technologies do work on porting AmigaDOS and Workbench onto PowerPC or some other RISC processor, then you'll be able to run Workbench on whatever nameless computer you'll be using. Don't look out for Workbench to be ported any time soon, though. It will take at least 18 months to convert the system over and more likely more than two years. In the end, although it might seem that I prefer either Windows95 or System7 to the Amiga's Workbench, I don't. I think that Workbench still remains the most fluid of all the operating systems I have worked with, and the fastest. A lot of the gloss in Windows95 is just that. Nobody really needs an animated pie chart display demonstrating the amount of memory in use. For a start the display itself is probably using a significant amount of ram! No, Workbench is still my operating system of choice, unsurprisingly really, but my opinions may change if it isn't brought into the nineties with alacrity.

I have produced a table of comparisons between the three here