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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?
by rob74 9mo 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?
- 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"!
- icedchai 9mo agoA lot of 90's stuff ran great on SunOS 4.x!
- spijdar 9mo agoYes, 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.
- icedchai 9mo agoVery true. SunOS 4.x is still my favorite 90's Unix. I had a Sun 3 box for a while, then got a low end Sparc Station at home! Eventually in the late 90's I gave in and installed Solaris. 2.4 and earlier was kinda rough, but it was pretty decent by 2.5.
- hnlmorg 9mo ago> but a lot of 70s and 80s "Unixes" don't exactly resemble what we think of as "Unix" anyway And that's exactly why the term "early Unix" suggests "pre-SVR4". Once a platform has matured, it's not "early" anymore. The whole thing is weirdly written. For example: > Like many early Unix variants, Amiga Unix never became wildly popular Except SVR4 was popular. So they're either saying Amix was early Unix, then the GP is correct that it wasn't early Unix. Or they're saying that SVR4 was unpopular, which is also untrue. I don't think the blurb is intending to suggest either of these points though. I'm sure people maintaining a fan site for Amix would understand their history. So I just think they've written the blurb very poorly. Poor enough that the default conclusion people are likely to draw is a technically incorrect one.
- ThatGuyRaion 9mo agoMaybe "Early System V"? but even still that's a stretched token.