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Amiga Unix (Amix)
- mepian 9mo agoOpenLook is nice but it's a bit of a shame it doesn't have its own version of Workbench.
- rbanffy 9mo agoAcorn’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.
- kunley 9mo agoVery honest warning there :)
- brongondwana 9mo agoDamn, $2000. I wish I'd kept my copy.
- TheChaplain 9mo 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".
- icedchai 9mo agoProbably. Most of AmigaOS (Workbench and Kickstart) got "released" on github about 10 years ago.
- SyneRyder 9mo agoNot 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 https://www.commodore.net/team
- icedchai 9mo ago"Commodore" is, but "Amiga" isn't. There was a split many decades ago. I lost track of all the drama.
- zozbot234 9mo agoAIUI 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.
- ThatGuyRaion 9mo agoYes and no. Cloanto isn't like Bill McEwen's Amiga Inc., but it's litigious towards Hyperion and several others. They're not good people. Another greedy corporation milking the corpse of Commodore. Absolute... jerks. Trying to work on my language, but I'd love to call them worse.
- bogantech 9mo agoHyperion charge money for the OS and don't pay the developers at all, if anyone is greedy it's them
- ThatGuyRaion 9mo agoAFAICT Cloanto is milking Amiga, and Hyperion is actually updating OS 3.1/3.2 plus their OS 4 stuff.
- obarthel 9mo agoSomebody definitely had the full source code back in 1995 when I tried my best to figure out who to contact. While I succeeded in making contact with the right person, it quickly transpired that the full source code was subject to proof of having a valid Novell license. Needless to say, no such license was available at ESCOM at the time and an opportunity was lost, perhaps permanently. That said, I would be mighty surprised if the full AT&T SVR4 source code which was the foundation for Amiga Unix has never been accidentally/intentionally leaked. Could be a fun summer project to rebuild Amiga Unix from scratch ;-)
- Sharlin 9mo 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
- Keyframe 9mo agoShould've been vim since it originated on Amiga.
- Sharlin 9mo agoHuh, TIL. And that vim’s creator died in 2023, at only 63 :(
- sgt 9mo agoSadly yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37011324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37011324
- ThatGuyRaion 9mo agoA lot of good FOSS folks have died too soon. Joerg Schilling (cdrecord's author). He was a quirky, if genuinely talented fella.
- rob74 9mo agoIt did indeed, but the original vim was developed for AmigaOS, not sure if there was an Amiga Unix version available...
- Keyframe 9mo agocorrect
- tyingq 9mo ago
- rob74 9mo agoIt'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?
- daneel_w 9mo agoI think less strange considering that 1990 was 35 years ago.
- spijdar 9mo agoIf 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"!
- stuaxo 9mo agoI hope someone decompiles this.
- mjg59 9mo agoThe 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.
- kevin_thibedeau 9mo agoIt's interesting to see color OpenLook. I only ever saw it on B&W or grayscale Sun boxes.
- ThatGuyRaion 9mo agoOPENLOOK is nice overall
- edb_123 9mo agoFYI OpenLook did have a quite different default colour scheme in SunOS than in these Amix screenshots. Neutral grey window frames with a slightly muted cyan desktop background. In many ways it looked quite pleasant and fresh compared to the dark and colourful palettes of CDE-based Solaris.
- rabarar 9mo agoI 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
- mjg59 9mo agoIt'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.
- bitwize 9mo agoWell 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.
- bink 9mo agoSun and NeXT also sold 68k Unix workstations at the time. IMHO, The thing about Amiga was that it was not seen as a business machine. Commodore in general was seen as a home computer, and really one aimed at gaming first. AFAIK they didn't even have computers with the specs to compete with what Sun, SGI, HP, and others were doing.
- bitwize 9mo agoThe Sun and NeXT machines were pricey. Commodore may well have been trying to break into the business market by releasing an affordable business-attractive OS for the Amiga. They were also starting to sell PCs around this time. It certainly tracks with their scattershot marketing efforts late in their history. There were video and multimedia applications at the time that could ONLY be tackled by an Amiga unless you wanted to pay $10,000 or more for specialized equipment. Besides the Video Toaster, which 'nuff said, Amigas also provided teletext-like TV information services in the USA, such as weather forecasts and the Prevue Channel (a cable channel that scrolled your cable system's program listings). Teletext itself never really caught on here. Anime fan subtitling was also done almost exclusively on Amiga hardware. Amiga gained a reputation as a glorified game console in the wider market, but those who knew... knew.