Firstly, please bare in mind, that the AMIGA Operating system will in fact run with half a MB of ram and 
 fully run programs off a small 10 MB hard drive.   Now, having said that, we are talking running a small 
 application that is running on an "old Amiga A500" here,  The old Club Keno used to run off 1MB of ram
 A500 and off a floppy disk, every morning they would "boot up" off the floppy and run the entire KENO at each
 registered club, amazing, considering it was controlling a Keno display screen  while updating via the land
 line modem connected to Keno headquarters, often anywhere from two Kms away to well over 1,000 Kms away.


 It is a true "pre-emptive multi-tasking" machine, unlike the PC which one can refer to as "quick time slicing" 
 to make it appear as multi-tasking


 This was achieved in the Amiga's multi-tasking is achieved by very specialised dedicated and very clever designed 
 architecture custom chips.


 It's a pleasant FACT to know, now having said that, we all live in the "real world" and know fully that in order 
 to run programs, one must have hard drive space sufficient to hold all of one's great programs. 
 The Amiga was very very byte efficient. The whole OS fits in 6MB


 Each and every other computer platform family works with specifically tailored software 
 for that platform and in reference the operating system level as well as on the 
 application level. When you install specific software that is designed to make 
 the computer that you have purposely execute and run other that its native DOS 
 system software , the you have what is known as software emulation or put anther
 way, a computer with software and/or hardware so that it's able to use software 
 written for a different platform, this process is called emulation. The Amiga is 
 sort of a "world champion" when it come to the realm of emulating

 If Gold medals were given for the amount of other platforms that any computer can 
 emulate , the AMIGA has it in "the bag" !. The Basic AMIGA emulates platforms like the 
 Apple II, Apple Macintosh, Mac Quattra, VIC 20 and C64, Atari ST , MSX-8Bit Computer 
 Sinclair Spectrum, Sinclair QL, ORIC-1, and moving on up to the A1200 running PC-Task 
 as a MS-Dos Windows-98 emulator (A1200 with 060 recommended),and A4000,or A4000T both with 
 060 processor one can emulate the MS-Dos® and Windows® type environments via software or 
 a add-in Card called a "BRIDGE BOARD ,for A2000, A3000, A4000 and A4000T, these cards have 
 been available since 1987. Note Windows ® requires in excess of 80MB of hard drive space 
 to fully install on a hard drive, so there is a noticeable size difference.

Is the Amiga MS-DOS ® or Windows ® or IBM ® compatible?

 NO,...not as such. But !... AMIGA INTERNATIONAL builds its own computers, they are not clones of
 other platforms, but a radical new concept in computing thinking, they run native AmigaDos or Amiga 
 OS as it is known . Now,  thanks to the flexibility of the Motorola 680x0 microprocessor, it is 
 possible to emulate and run  many different platforms the same time, depending on Ram, 
 hard drive and of course, speed. It is amazing to see MS-Dos, Mac software and the Amiga 
 all running, co-existing and multitasking all at once, seamlessly and the Amiga owner smiling 
 all the way to the bank, one machine only required !, AMIGA,  for his or her applications. 
 Then there is PC.Task, a software package written specially to cater for MS-Dos® users,
 where Windows® 3.1 is installed into a partition created by PC.Task on the hard drive and 
 one can run most MS-Dos® software.


 It is said that PC Task version 4.4 supports Windows® 95 PC TASK has 80486 compatibility. 
 It is the fastest software PC emulator for the Amiga and uses Dynamic Compilation for speed and has 
 support for up to 16MB RAM (15 MB extended) under MS-DOS with pp to 2 floppy drives and 2 hard drives 
 supported, it also supports multiple hard disk files and hard disk partitions also high density floppies 
 and CD-ROM support and the user can select from MDA, CGA, EGA, VGA and SVGA (512K-2MB) video modes with 
 support for up to 256 colours on AGA machines.


 PC TASK is compatible with graphic boards (eg. Cybergraphics, EGS Spectrum, Picasso) and has 
 Parallel, Serial and PC speaker emulation and full Mouse support, including Serial Mouse emulation.

 PC Task will run multiple PC-Task processes on the same machine and also run MS-DOS applications in a 
 window on a public screen (eg. Workbench) and transfer files between your Amiga and MS-DOS.

 Support for David Salamon's GoldenGate bridge cards compatible with MS-Dos© Windows© 3.0 - 3.11 
 Note: Windows® 3.1 requires a minimum of 1.5 MB contiguous RAM and sufficient hard disk space 
 to accommodate windows 3.1. If you are contemplating using Windows® 95, set aside at least 120MB 
 of hard drive space for the Windows® 95 GUI (operating system) Leave some space for Workbench which 
 needs 4.5 MB of Hard drive space maximum.

 
 Running MS-Dos and Mac disks on AMIGA A4000 there are several ways to achieve MS-DOS 
 compatibility . With the current AmigaOS 3.1 versions, you can read and write disks directly 
 in MS-DOS format to grant easy data exchange via crossdos. For low demands on processing speed 
 there are software MS-DOS emulators (like PC-TASK) that fake a whole compatible PC purely in 
 software and allow you to run standard DOS applications. For higher demands there are hardware 
 emulator cards that contain their own "IBM Type" processor, thus offering full working speed.

Is Amiga Macintosh compatible ?


 Again, No  ...   But there are Mac emulators like the highly stable software emulator "Shapeshifter" or the Popular
 
 "EMPLANT" board which runs both Mac and IBM compatible platforms simultaneously with Amiga OS 3.1 which is 

 currently available,   it transforms the average Amiga into an almost native Macintosh without any loss of speed !.
 
 The first thing one notices is the fact that it appears to run slightly faster than the Mac ...ooops, sorry Mac People!

 In doing the "maths", this is a far cheaper option than buying a Mac computer, again ooops, .... sorry Mac people!