My Name is Michael, and I’m A Wannabe Amigan

I had a TRS-80 Color Computer 25 years ago. That gives me the dubious distinction of being “old school”, however if in your opinion that just makes me old, I won’t argue.

My first PC was a 386, and frankly I was underwhelmed. Yeah Hoyle solitaire and cribbage were fun, but nothing my Sega Genesis couldn’t do and do better. Don’t even get me started about Wing Commander 2 and the 10 floppy voice expansion. 90 minutes to install and then go to bed while it expanded overnight. Yawn. The internet wasn’t viable back then, and I got tired of underpowered, underwhelming computers that weren’t as fun as my $199 game console.

By the time the Pentium era rolled around I was a computer science major and had fallen in love with unix via a shell account on a DEC Alpha server at my school. At home, I was just as unimpressed with Windows 95 as I had been with MSDOS and Windows 3.x. This was around 1995 or so, and I installed my first linux distro on my home pc. Linux was enough to get me interested, even though I had some beefs with the system I had to admit that it was better than Solaris, SCO or BSDI, which were the commercial unix variants that ran on a PC at the time. I also played briefly with BeOS, which I didn’t fall in love with the way many did. About six months into linux usage I installed FreeBSD for the first time, and I’ve been running FreeBSD ever since. The reasons I find it superior to linux are another article.

Of course linux and *BSD have both come a long way in the last thirteen years and offer a lot more comfortable desktop than they used to. In some ways the Xwindows desktop is still light years behind what Windows and OS X offer, but it is much improved.

Around the beginning of 1996 I got my first copy of OPENSTEP, NeXT’s operating system. OPENSTEP had enough going for it that I ran it as my primary workstation for the next six years, until I bought my first Mac. For those who haven’t been paying attention, OS X is the evolution of NeXT’s Mach OS, formerly known as NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP.

The problem with OPENSTEP was that it lacked commercial apps, and it’s unix compatibility was suspect. Yes, under the hood the unix layer was based on an older version of BSD, but it was proprietary enough that porting applications to work could be a bear or impossible for someone who didn’t have the expertise to rewrite it.

OS X answered pretty much all of my prayers and has been my main workstation since 2002. In the meantime, Windows and the free unix variants have all become a lot more usable.

I suffer from curiosity and always looking for greener grass, keep a keen eye on alternative operating systems. I’ve missed some over the years:

1. I never had a chance to run an old Atari with whatever arcane blend of MiNT/Gem/TOS alphabet soup it took to run a fairly modern GUI desktop on one.
   
   
   
   

   Atari desktop




2. I never had a chance to run RISC OS on an Acorn, something that was a lot more accessible for my friends in the UK.
   
   
   
   

   RISC OS desktop




3. I came very close to joining the Morphos fold and almost bought a Pegasos. I’m glad I didn’t because as cool as Morphos looks, it also looks like it’s turned into a dead end at this point in the game.
   
   
   
   

   MorphOS

I never had a chance to run an Amiga either. Perhaps if I had purchased an Amiga back when I bought my 386 my love affair with computing would have started sooner. Certainly no platform or operating system has such a devoted following, and the Amiga community is still going strong, years after Amiga has ceased to be a major player for the consumer desktop.

I grew hopeful when Amiga resurfaced several years ago. The screenshots of AmigaOS4.0 looked promising, and the new Amiga hardware, the AmigaOne, wasn’t too far behind what Apple was using for it’s Power Macs.

Then the Amiga legacy kicked in and there were snafus with the hardware and the development of the OS that kept that dream from being realized. Amiga as it exists today truly does seem to have some sort of curse attached to it.

At this point, there is no Amiga hardware being produced, but the OS just got a point upgrade to 4.1, and I have to say that it looks nice. There is also something very sexy about a system that boots in ten seconds and is light on resources. Recently there was an announcement that a version of the Amiga operating system would be made available for Acube’s SAM440ep board, which is available at this time starting at 465 euro for a motherboard and systems starting at 596 euro. That’s a lot of money to risk on a compulsion to check out a neat-looking OS, but I have been looking at it since the announcement.

AmigaOS4.0

It seems that Amigas were a lot more prevalent in Europe than they were in the States. I would love to hear from Amigans, both current and ex, especially if you’ve had your hands on AmigaOS4.0, to see what you thought of the system. Am I really considering spending that much money on a toy OS when I already have OS X and FreeBSD, two operating systems that I have been using for years and am completely happy with?

Am I trying to make up for missing the Amiga train the first time through? Am I foolish to invest that kind of money in an operating system with an uncertain future?

Is the grass ever any greener?

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