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Comment by zengargoyle | Hacker News Reader

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28081181

The OS was close enough and wonderful under the hood. So many UNIX people bought one for home just because it was so easy to port UNIX code. I wrote Amiga apps on a Sun3/50 using Sun's compiler and just transferred the binary over to my machine. The Amiga Pascal software even had a special program included to transfer binaries over serial/parallel from a UNIX box (usually a Sun). You mostly just needed to link to a different crt.o / clib.

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Maybe I am missing some context here, but are we talking about AMIX or AmigaOS? I am asking because the latter never looked particularly UNIX-like to me. But maybe that's because I never worked with MS-DOS, so, being only familiar with Linux, Windows, and AmigaOS, I might be overestimating the difference between UNIX and AmigaOS.

Edit: btw, the AmigaDOS developers manual says that there was also a cross compiler (and serial transfer tool) for MS-DOS. I am wondering whether anybody every used that.

I'm talking about AmigaOS. Bits and pieces were based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPOS and the kernel itself had a lot of UNIXy sort of features. In the late 1980s if your work job is sitting in front of a Sun workstation you bought an Amiga for home instead of a Mac or DOS machine. I would dial my Amiga into work before going to work and remote shell in (rlogin/rsh/rcp) and just shuffle things back an forth without effort. One could do CS homework both on the Amiga and on the SunOS systems just by linking to a different library. I never even had a C compiler on my AMIGA, didn't need one. I can't imagine writing some code on UNIX and that trivially making it run on a Mac or DOS machine. People even build stub UNIX libraries for AmigaOS that faked the user/group/permissions and other bits of the UNIX experience. It was just a pleasant experience for those late 80s compared to the alternatives.

AMIX is a whole different can of worms, they did that much later and I'd expect it was like porting between HP/UX, AIX, BSD etc. Probably pretty easy by then.

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