Amiga Unix (Amix)
amigaunix.com137 points by donatj 2 days ago
137 points by donatj 2 days 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?
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"!
> 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.
I don't see how that's incongruent. It says many early Unix variants never became popular, not all early Unix variants.
My point is that if they’re talking specifically about SVR4, then it was popular. And if they’re not talking specifically about SVR4, then it’s not “early Unix”.
As I said, I’m not trying to claim that they’re “wrong”. Just that the whole thing is phrased poorly because it’s really not clear what their context is. And that’s easily demonstrated by the fact that we’re arguing over said context here.
A lot of 90's stuff ran great on SunOS 4.x!
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.
Very 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.
> a lot of 70s and 80s "Unixes" don't exactly resemble what we think of as "Unix" anyway.
As someone who was a UNIX developer (both kernel and userland) working for a UNIX support shop (Interactive Systems Corporation, later bought by Kodak and then Sun) from the mid 70's, starting with UNIX 6, through the late 80's and once gave a Usenix talk called "Everything you wanted to know about System V but were afraid to ask", where I held up the white System III manual and the black System V manual and joked that they had gone to the dark side, I find this comment utterly nonsensical. I can look through today's BSD man pages, or its code, and it's very familiar.
> If instead you think of SysVR4 as the first "Unix"
But of course it wasn't.
I think less strange considering that 1990 was 35 years ago.
And 1945 was 35 years before 1990. Obvious, but feels somehow weird.
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.
Wasn't there some government procurement rule that required any computers they bought be able to run UNIX? At least, that's the reason commonly cited for why Apple created A/UX, their Unix for 68k Macs, originally released in 1989.
Commodore wanted to shake their "just for games" reputation. They wanted to put the 'business' in Commodore Business Machines.
Their SVR4 was the first real port of SVR4 to a commercially available system that I know of.
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
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.
May be of interest - here's what running Linux and NetBSD on Amiga is like these days: https://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2025/02/running-netbsd... https://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2025/01/running-linux-...
Sun 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.
The 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.
Atari Corp was doing the same thing around the same time as Commodore was, with their own branded SysV fork. Both were trying to get into the later stages of the workstation market because it was seen as a new revenue source at a time when the "home computer" market was disappearing.
and the background:
https://web.archive.org/web/20001001024559/http://www.best.c...
But I distinctly remember an editorial in UnixWorld magazine (yes, we had magazines like that back then you could buy in like... a drug store...) with the headline "Up from toyland" talking about the Atari TT030 + SysV. Not exactly flattering.
The reality is by 1992, 93, 94 the workstation market was already being heavily disrupted by Linux (or other x86 *nix/BSD) on 386/486. The 68k architecture wasn't compelling anymore (despite being awesome), as Motorola was already pulling the rug out from under it.
And, yeah, many people just ran NetBSD on their Atari TTs or Falcon030s anyways.
I imagine any home computers manufacturer looked at the workstation 68000 machines like Sun and said "we have the same CPU, if we have a Unix we can market our computers as workstations at a fraction of the cost". You also had Apple release A/UX for their 68k Macs.
> 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".
Somebody 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 ;-)
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.
"Commodore" is, but "Amiga" isn't. There was a split many decades ago. I lost track of all the drama.
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.
Yes 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.
Hyperion charge money for the OS and don't pay the developers at all, if anyone is greedy it's them
AFAICT Cloanto is milking Amiga, and Hyperion is actually updating OS 3.1/3.2 plus their OS 4 stuff.
Probably. Most of AmigaOS (Workbench and Kickstart) got "released" on github about 10 years ago.
It's interesting to see color OpenLook. I only ever saw it on B&W or grayscale Sun boxes.
FYI 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.
OpenLook is nice but it's a bit of a shame it doesn't have its own version of Workbench.
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.
> 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 gccShould've been vim since it originated on Amiga.
It did indeed, but the original vim was developed for AmigaOS, not sure if there was an Amiga Unix version available...
Huh, TIL. And that vim’s creator died in 2023, at only 63 :(
A lot of good FOSS folks have died too soon. Joerg Schilling (cdrecord's author). He was a quirky, if genuinely talented fella.
Damn, $2000. I wish I'd kept my copy.
I hope someone decompiles this.
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.
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
OpenLook was always prettier though, but Motif was more fashionable with all those 3d buttons.
Very honest warning there :)