The Amiga had a full port of Unix | Hacker News Reader

The Amiga had a full port of Unix

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25 pointse1ven31 comments

The A3000-UX was too little, too late. By the time it came out, m68k UNIX workstations had been left in the dust by RISC.

You could get a low-end SPARC for roughly the same price, and have 2x the CPU power. If m68k was enough power, you could get a used Sun-3 for half the price of an Amiga, and have 10x as much available software.

It couldn't compete with the low-end, either: you could get a i386 UNIX for under $500, and run on any hardware you chose. (SCO, BSD/OS, Interactive, Coherent, AT&T SVR4 all ran on PCs by this time.)

To contrast with the $500 i386 Unix: if you had a non-UX Amiga 3000 and wanted to get a copy of Amiga Unix for it, the price was $1,000. But this was for a version that would only allow two users to be logged in simultaneously. This included "users" like root, uucp, etc. If you wanted unlimited users, the cost was $1,200.

Er, yes....?

I confess I'm surprised this is regarded as enough of a revelation to reach the front page. A relatively popular piece of hardware had an uncommon but far from unheard of variation. It's a few years before my time in the scene but I suspect it would have been advertised at least occasionally...

Let's see, other bits of tech trivia:

* Amiga ports of Linux and NetBSD also existed (somewhat later) and had reasonable market traction. BSD's Matt Dillon produced an Amiga C compiler called 'DICE'.

* Microsoft had a version of Unix called Xenix which they ran internally for many years (apparently into the early 90s). Can't find it just now but I've heard before that early versions of Windows may have been developed on Xenix machines and cross-compiled.

* Linus Torvalds' learnt computer programming on the rather obscure Sinclair QL.

* Tux wasn't really chosen as the 'Linux logo'. There was a competition to mark the release of 2.0 and it didn't win, but Linus mentioned he liked Penguins and Tux got taken up in place of the rather dull chosen entries.

Go on people, see what else you can come up with :-)

I remember DICE! That was my first C compiler. I had to spend a summer mowing lawns as a teenager to get the Rom Kernel Reference Manuals.

I remember getting an updated version of DICE that supported dynamically linked libraries and just trying to get my head around the concept. Computing was so much simpler then.

Xenix was not just internal, they also sold it.

Sorry, yes, I didn't mean to imply that. It became SCO Unix in the end.

So? With a 32 bit CPU and the capability to have more than a megabyte of memory, the Amiga was obviously capable of running Unix.

More interesting are the cheap 8 bit computers that could run Unix-likes. For instance, the 64K TRS-80 Color Computer could run OS-9, which is still in use today as an "embedded Unix".

OS-9 is and never was an "embedded Unix". It has a genealogy independent from any of the Unices. It was originally developed in assembly, as an OS on which to run BASIC09 on a Motorola 6809. BASIC09 is interesting in itself: it compiled to an intermediate byte-code, which made it very fast compared to other interpreters.

OS-9 did, however, have something called a "unix emulation shell" - which basically means an sh clone with some unix compatibility libraries to back it. Sort of like the posix libraries for Windows.

Linux has a genealogy independent from Unix, too. Only pedants would argue that it isn't a Unix. Sure, OS-9 has more differences from Unix than Linux does, but it's obvious that it was designed to be Unix-like. You're not going to get POSIX-compatibility in 64K of RAM, but OS-9 did a pretty good job.

I miss the time when you could buy a computer that was actually different from an IBM PC...

Just buy a phone.

You know it's not the same. You don't hook up your phone to an external monitor and a full-sized keyboard and you don't run desktop software on it.

OTOH, a current phone could emulate an Amiga in real-time without much effort. I could, conceivably, run an Amiga desktop off any HDMI equipped phone with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

I've been playing with an Insignia Infocast -- basically a trivially rootable, ARM-based Chumby computer that costs 100 bones at Best Buy.

I dunno, bochs is pretty fucking slow on my 3GS...

http://www.lemote.com/en/products/Notebook/2010/0310/112.htm...

All-Free Software (BIOS, firmware) netbook with a Loongson MIPS CPU. RMS uses this.

Also very expensive (350 euro? wtf). You can get an OpenRD for $250, or a Guruplug for $100, or the tiny little Gumstix Overo and a breakout board for something in between. They're all ARM, they're all decent, they all ship with Linux.

Of course, you can still buy SPARC and POWER systems from Sun and IBM, respectively.

If you want a bare-bones ARM, the BeagleBoard is probably the best choice. What I'd really like is a good-quality ARM netbook with Free firmware and BIOS. The Lemote netbook seems to be well-built according to reviews.

The Beagleboard is a little too bare-bones for me, since it lacks onboard ethernet (USB ethernet is no excuse).

At least a Guruplug costs $50 less and has ethernet right onboard.

I tried at one point to port some software to Amix, way back when it was released. Mostly the OS was OK, but there were some issues with the floating point handling that stopped the port from working properly.

And Apple had A/UX long before OSX. Not great but it made a decent XTerminal.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/A/UX

There was also GNO/ME - UNIX for the Apple IIgs - http://www.gno.org/gno/

They also had MkLinux. I have used it extensively as a workstation and Xterminal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux

And Microsoft had Xenix before that!

I've used the SCO Xenix port of MS Word - way before the Windows version.

My first *nix was Microsoft Xenix on a TRS-80 / Tandy 6000. I think we had 6 terminals attached to it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Model_16.2C_Model_16B.2C...

I remember seeing about 5 or 6 users on a Compaq 286 running Xenix accessing an application built around Informix. :-)

The Amiga had an m68k-series CPU, so Linux will run on it too, just as it will on old Macintoshes.

For more info, http://www.linux-m68k.org/

JFTR: Some people in Debian try to reactivate the m68k port. There is even a tarball with a basic Debian chroot available http://people.debian.org/~tg/f/m68k/

The TRASH-80 had a full port of Unix -- Microsoft Xenix, for the 68k-based Model 16, 1982. The only other Unix workstation on the market at that time besides the Sun.

The model 16 series were not really workstations for a single user. They were explicitly intended for multi-user, multi-terminal applications. They had practically no graphics capability.

Apollo was arguably the first "Workstation" vendor, selling affordable 68000-based systems, before the 68010. (If I recall correctly, before the 68010, in order to handle a page fault, you had to set up a system with two 68000s. Only one would execute at a time. In the event of a page fault, one CPU would halt, and the other would begin executing.)

By 1982, with the advent of the much-friendlier 68010, there were a number of UNIX workstation vendors. The notable survivors of that era were Apollo, HP, SGI, and Sun, but there were others. Even AT&T had a line of UNIX workstations in the early 80s.

don't forget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Computer

These were really neat machines. When I worked with them, the dominate language was Pascal and I think they were running a version of X Windows (or at least a similarly powerful windowing system). The funnest part was that we had these utilities that would allow you to do things like 'melt' another workstation's screen (this pixels would all start to drop to the bottom of the screen). It was hilarious. PCs in those days just had character based screens and Macs were still B&W. Amigas were the most interesting micro...

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