17 comments

[ 474 ms ] story [ 693 ms ] thread
Very honest warning there :)
> 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 ;-)

> 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
OpenLook is nice but it's a bit of a shame it doesn't have its own version of Workbench.
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?
Maybe "Early System V"? but even still that's a stretched token.
I hope someone decompiles this.
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.

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
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.