OS Personality Quiz

Operating System Personality Quiz

I got suckered into taking this quiz today. About half way through I was already loosing patience, but I finished it. Funny thing was, for me it was right on the money. It said I was an AmigaOS personality type.

You are Amiga OS. Ahead of your time. You keep a lot of balls in the air. If only your parents had given you more opportunities to succeed.

I was given a Commodore 64 in 1982 for Christmas, which I used until I could afford to buy my own computer, which was an Amiga 1000 in 1985. I later followed it up with an Amiga 3000 that I still have in my closet. My A3000 was the fastest computer I've ever owned (in terms of the user interface). It had a good GUI, it booted in about 10 seconds, and it was very responsive – running at only 25MHz on it's Motorola 68030 microprocessor. The SCSI drives really helped make it fast as well.

After Commodore filed for bankruptcy and continuing to use my Amiga after everyone else had switched to Windows or Macintosh operating systems, I eventually had to move on as well. The hardware/software became too dated and I couldn't connect to the internet and run the development software I needed to.

I used both Windows and Macintosh for a while, then had a brief fling with BeOS (until they too filed for bankruptcy… sigh). What a fun OS BeOS was! Now I use Linux with the exception of one Windows machine for playing games and running iTunes. My OS's of choice are Ubuntu and Debian. I was into Gentoo for a while, but got very tired of compiling all the time – especially on my slower machines that would take a full week to compile when a major software package (like Xorg) was updated.

Part of me holds out for the next Amiga/BeOS. There are quite a few upstarts trying to fill that niche, however it would take a lot for me to switch OS's at this point. I have a lot of custom code that is Linux based. And I really like screen. A more reasonable change would be to a new faster GUI on top of Linux with X emulation.

[The AmigaOS] remains one of the great operating systems of the past 20 years, incorporating a small kernel and tremendous multitasking capabilities the likes of which have only recently been developed in OS/2 and Windows NT. The biggest difference is that the AmigaOS could operate fully and multitask in as little as 250 K of address space. Even today, the OS is only about 1MB in size. And to this day, there is very little a memory-hogging CD-ROM-loading OS can do the Amiga can't. Tight code – there's nothing like it.

I've had an Amiga for maybe a decade. It's the single most reliable piece of equipment I've ever owned. It's amazing! You can easily understand why so many fanatics are out there wondering why they are alone in their love of the thing. The Amiga continues to inspire a vibrant – albeit cult-like – community, not unlike that which you have with Linux, the Unix clone.

– John C. Dvorak (1996)