Amiga Unix (Amix)(www.amigaunix.com)
91 pointsby donatj11 hours ago10 comments
  • mjg593 hours ago
    It's a somewhat weird product. There's no real access to any of the hardware that made the Amiga impressive at the time, without an add-on graphics card you're going to have a bad time in X, and it replaces AmigaOS entirely so you don't have any ability to run Amiga software at the same time (it's not like a/is in that regard). It's an extremely generic Unix, and I don't know who Commodore really thought they were selling it to. But despite all this is was cheaper than a comparable Sun? Extremely confusing.
    • kristopolous15 minutes ago
      It wasn't given enough time or resources to be awesome. Being an SGI alternative was probably being floated.

      The early versions of most products suck. It's a matter of throwing down enough time and resources to get through that phase

    • bitwize2 hours ago
      Well that sounds disappointing. These days you're probably better off just running Linux or NetBSD on your old Amigas. But the ability to run true multiuser Unix on cheap desktop hardware was probably immensely valuable to businesses at the time, so it might've been worth it, even if you forgo much of the Amiga's Amiganess. The Tandy Model 16 family was not an Amiga by any stretch, but they had 68000 CPUs and were Unix capable in the form of Xenix. So they ran a lot of small business back office stuff until well into the 90s I'm guessing, despite first coming out in 1982.
  • kevin_thibedeau3 hours ago
    It's interesting to see color OpenLook. I only ever saw it on B&W or grayscale Sun boxes.
  • rob748 hours ago
    It's a bit strange to call Amiga Unix an "early Unix variant", if you consider that in 1990 Unix was already around 20 years old?
    • spijdar5 hours ago
      If you count 70s and 80s "Unixes" then on its face it is a bit strange, but a lot of 70s and 80s "Unixes" don't exactly resemble what we think of as "Unix" anyway.

      If instead you think of SysVR4 as the first "Unix", then Amiga Unix was indeed a very early Unix. I think this is a useful distinction, because de facto most of the software interfaces we associate with "Unix" are just System V (especially R4) in a trench coat. Note that POSIX and and SysVR4 released the same year (1988); they're technically unaffiliated efforts but represent a consolidation of a bunch of competing ideas into a ... tacit compromise.

      Or, being more practical, SysVR4 is the absolute oldest "Unix" you're going to have a good chance of building modern (1990-2020s) software made "for unix" on. You can get a surprising amount of mileage out of a SysVR4 distribution -- but go any older, and you'll be in for a lot of "fun"!

      • icedchai4 hours ago
        A lot of 90's stuff ran great on SunOS 4.x!
        • spijdar4 hours ago
          Yes, but SunOS 4 was both extremely popular (enough that a lot of software had explicit support for running on it) and implemented a decent amount of System V and POSIX compatibility!

          Probably most notably, it implemented SysV shared memory (sys/shm.h) plus messages/semaphores, STREAM support, SysV termio, SysV libcurses, and probably others I'm not aware of.

          I'm not sure how much any of these helped run software, but it bears pointing out anyway.

    • daneel_w6 hours ago
      I think less strange considering that 1990 was 35 years ago.
      • vardump2 hours ago
        And 1945 was 35 years before 1990. Obvious, but feels somehow weird.
        • ojn3 minutes ago
          No, it wasn't.
      • CursedSilicon5 hours ago
        36 years ago
        • jama2114 hours ago
          Depends on when in 1990 ;)
  • TheChaplain9 hours ago
    > Its kernel, libc, and much of its software is closed source, so when Commodore folded its story was over.

    I am certain someone have the full source code somewhere, I just hope that they eventually say "f--k it, it has been 36 years, let the world have it".

    • SyneRyder5 hours ago
      Not only that, isn't Commodore now owned/run by Peri Fractic / Christian Simpson? It seems if anyone is going to be open to these kinds of retro projects, it's going to be the new Commodore ownership.

      https://www.commodore.net/team

      • icedchai4 hours ago
        "Commodore" is, but "Amiga" isn't. There was a split many decades ago. I lost track of all the drama.
        • zozbot2343 hours ago
          AIUI the rights to old Commodore Amiga stuff (pre 4.x) are now held by Cloanto which so far has been reasonably friendly to the new Commodore folks.
    • icedchai6 hours ago
      Probably. Most of AmigaOS (Workbench and Kickstart) got "released" on github about 10 years ago.
  • mepian9 hours ago
    OpenLook is nice but it's a bit of a shame it doesn't have its own version of Workbench.
    • rbanffy3 hours ago
      Acorn’s UNIX had the IXI desktop, which was, back then, the absolute pinnacle of user friendly Unix. IIRC, IBM’s AIX for the PS/2 also had it or something very similar.
  • Sharlin9 hours ago
    > Did I mention it hasn't been updated in a decade? Put your Amiga UNIX machine on the net with no firewall and you may see it rooted faster than a Win98SE box running IE5.

    I presume this was written back around 2005 or so, but honestly color me impressed if there has ever been malware targeting Amix in the wild.

    Also, ouch :D

    > Table 1: Unix standard → Amiga UNIX alternative

      mail   elm
  more   less
  finger Finger
  vi     emacs
  cc     gcc
  • stuaxo6 hours ago
    I hope someone decompiles this.
    • mjg593 hours ago
      The vast majority of it is just recompiled AT&T code. The Amiga specific stuff is provided in object form and largely shipped with debug symbols so it'd be pretty easy to get something approximating the original.
  • rabarar3 hours ago
    I bought an Amiga 3000 back in the day just for Unix SVR4! it was exceptional! the only disappointment was it ran Open Look and not the ever-more-popular Motif X-Windows Widgets out of the box
    • rbanffy3 hours ago
      OpenLook was always prettier though, but Motif was more fashionable with all those 3d buttons.
  • brongondwana9 hours ago
    Damn, $2000. I wish I'd kept my copy.
  • kunley9 hours ago
    Very honest warning there :)