
The Amiga had a full port of Unix - e1ven
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Amiga_Unix
======
hapless
The A3000-UX was too little, too late. By the time it came out, m68k UNIX
workstations had been left in the dust by RISC.

You could get a low-end SPARC for roughly the same price, and have 2x the CPU
power. If m68k was enough power, you could get a used Sun-3 for half the price
of an Amiga, and have 10x as much available software.

It couldn't compete with the low-end, either: you could get a i386 UNIX for
under $500, and run on any hardware you chose. (SCO, BSD/OS, Interactive,
Coherent, AT&T SVR4 all ran on PCs by this time.)

~~~
mtviewdave
To contrast with the $500 i386 Unix: if you had a non-UX Amiga 3000 and wanted
to get a copy of Amiga Unix for it, the price was $1,000. But this was for a
version that would only allow two users to be logged in simultaneously. This
included "users" like root, uucp, etc. If you wanted unlimited users, the cost
was $1,200.

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eftpotrm
Er, yes....?

I confess I'm surprised this is regarded as enough of a revelation to reach
the front page. A relatively popular piece of hardware had an uncommon but far
from unheard of variation. It's a few years before my time in the scene but I
suspect it would have been advertised at least occasionally...

Let's see, other bits of tech trivia:

* Amiga ports of Linux and NetBSD also existed (somewhat later) and had reasonable market traction. BSD's Matt Dillon produced an Amiga C compiler called 'DICE'.

* Microsoft had a version of Unix called Xenix which they ran internally for many years (apparently into the early 90s). Can't find it just now but I've heard before that early versions of Windows may have been developed on Xenix machines and cross-compiled.

* Linus Torvalds' learnt computer programming on the rather obscure Sinclair QL.

* Tux wasn't really chosen as the 'Linux logo'. There was a competition to mark the release of 2.0 and it didn't win, but Linus mentioned he liked Penguins and Tux got taken up in place of the rather dull chosen entries.

Go on people, see what else you can come up with :-)

~~~
jff
Xenix was not just internal, they also sold it.

~~~
eftpotrm
Sorry, yes, I didn't mean to imply that. It became SCO Unix in the end.

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bryanlarsen
So? With a 32 bit CPU and the capability to have more than a megabyte of
memory, the Amiga was obviously capable of running Unix.

More interesting are the cheap 8 bit computers that could run Unix-likes. For
instance, the 64K TRS-80 Color Computer could run OS-9, which is still in use
today as an "embedded Unix".

~~~
teilo
OS-9 is and never was an "embedded Unix". It has a genealogy independent from
any of the Unices. It was originally developed in assembly, as an OS on which
to run BASIC09 on a Motorola 6809. BASIC09 is interesting in itself: it
compiled to an intermediate byte-code, which made it very fast compared to
other interpreters.

OS-9 did, however, have something called a "unix emulation shell" - which
basically means an sh clone with some unix compatibility libraries to back it.
Sort of like the posix libraries for Windows.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Linux has a genealogy independent from Unix, too. Only pedants would argue
that it isn't a Unix. Sure, OS-9 has more differences from Unix than Linux
does, but it's obvious that it was designed to be Unix-like. You're not going
to get POSIX-compatibility in 64K of RAM, but OS-9 did a pretty good job.

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rbanffy
I miss the time when you could buy a computer that was actually different from
an IBM PC...

~~~
eru
Just buy a phone.

~~~
rbanffy
You know it's not the same. You don't hook up your phone to an external
monitor and a full-sized keyboard and you don't run desktop software on it.

OTOH, a current phone could emulate an Amiga in real-time without much effort.
I could, conceivably, run an Amiga desktop off any HDMI equipped phone with a
Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

~~~
bitwize
I've been playing with an Insignia Infocast -- basically a trivially rootable,
ARM-based Chumby computer that costs 100 bones at Best Buy.

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phomer
I tried at one point to port some software to Amix, way back when it was
released. Mostly the OS was OK, but there were some issues with the floating
point handling that stopped the port from working properly.

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ja27
And Apple had A/UX long before OSX. Not great but it made a decent XTerminal.

<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/A/UX>

~~~
arethuza
And Microsoft had Xenix before that!

I've used the SCO Xenix port of MS Word - way before the Windows version.

~~~
ja27
My first *nix was Microsoft Xenix on a TRS-80 / Tandy 6000. I think we had 6
terminals attached to it.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Model_16.2C_Model_16B.2C...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Model_16.2C_Model_16B.2C_and_Tandy_6000)

~~~
arethuza
I remember seeing about 5 or 6 users on a Compaq 286 running Xenix accessing
an application built around Informix. :-)

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ctkrohn
The Amiga had an m68k-series CPU, so Linux will run on it too, just as it will
on old Macintoshes.

For more info, <http://www.linux-m68k.org/>

~~~
mrud
JFTR: Some people in Debian try to reactivate the m68k port. There is even a
tarball with a basic Debian chroot available
<http://people.debian.org/~tg/f/m68k/>

------
bitwize
The TRASH-80 had a full port of Unix -- Microsoft Xenix, for the 68k-based
Model 16, 1982. The only other Unix workstation on the market at that time
besides the Sun.

~~~
hapless
The model 16 series were not really workstations for a single user. They were
explicitly intended for multi-user, multi-terminal applications. They had
practically no graphics capability.

Apollo was arguably the first "Workstation" vendor, selling affordable
68000-based systems, before the 68010. (If I recall correctly, before the
68010, in order to handle a page fault, you had to set up a system with two
68000s. Only one would execute at a time. In the event of a page fault, one
CPU would halt, and the other would begin executing.)

By 1982, with the advent of the much-friendlier 68010, there were a number of
UNIX workstation vendors. The notable survivors of that era were Apollo, HP,
SGI, and Sun, but there were others. Even AT&T had a line of UNIX workstations
in the early 80s.

------
patrickgzill
don't forget <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Computer>

~~~
phomer
These were really neat machines. When I worked with them, the dominate
language was Pascal and I think they were running a version of X Windows (or
at least a similarly powerful windowing system). The funnest part was that we
had these utilities that would allow you to do things like 'melt' another
workstation's screen (this pixels would all start to drop to the bottom of the
screen). It was hilarious. PCs in those days just had character based screens
and Macs were still B&W. Amigas were the most interesting micro...

