We recently talked about Apple’s pre-Mac OS X dabblings in UNIX, but Apple wasn’t the only computer and operating system company exploring UNIX alternatives. Microsoft had the rather successful Xenix, Atari had ASV, Sony had NEWS, to name just a very small few. The Amiga, too, wanted in on the UNIX action, and as such, released Amiga UNIX, based on AT&T System V Release 4. The Amiga UNIX website is dedicated to everything you would ever want to know about this operating system.
This site is dedicated on preserving Amix’s history and sharing information and instructions on what Amix is, how to install it (either on real hardware or in emulation) and what can you do with it. Mainly, it tries to cater to people who wish to run AMIX for whatever reason on their hardware. By documenting experiences with it, it is hoped that subsequent SVR4 junkies will find the way more smooth than it might have been without any guidance at all. For even a relatively experienced modern Unix or GNU/Linux administrator, System V UNIX is sufficiently different to present difficulty in installation and administration. Not so much in moving around between directories, and using common utilities that persist to this day – although many of those are hoary and somewhat forgetful in their retirement – but of doing more in depth tasks and understanding the differences.
↫ The Amiga Unix Wiki
If you wish to run Amiga UNIX yourself, you’ll either have to have one of the original two models sold with it – the 2500UX and 3000UX – or one of the Amigas that meets the minimum requirements. Another option is, of course, emulation, and WinUAE has support for running Amiga UNIX.
This is one of those things I’ve been meaning to try for the longest time but never gotten around to it. I have an Amiga 2000 with a A2630 (supported 68030 accelerator) and I think within my circle of Amiga-nerd friends we do have everything needed to get harddrives (on a A2091) and networking (A2065) up and running.
Not that it would be very useful today, it would probably be a smarter thing to get a Linux dist up and running on it or maybe even some BSD flavor but it would be fun to see how the experience of the early 90s was.
One day…
It’s much easier with an A3000 as the requisite CPU and SCSI are already built in.
Amiga had it running at Uniforum way back when it was in Dallas (`1988?). That’s where I first saw it.
I’ve got an A2500 and I’ve run AMIX on it. Well, “run” is too strong a word. It crawled…but it wasn’t necessarily AMIX’s fault. The SCSI controller revision I have is great for AmigaDOS but apparently terrible for Unixes. I wonder if it’s better if I had used an NFS root.
Speed aside, it really just seemed like a half-finished project. It didn’t do anything that was really Amiga-specific so it just ends up being a run-of-the-mill SysV system.
What really stood out was how underwhelming it was compared to SunOS on a Sun 3/60. Side-by-side the Sun wins, hands down. The Commodore devs should have known that since it’s my understanding that early AmigaDOS development was done on a Sun3.
AMIX is quite slow, even on an A3000 which should be significantly faster than a Sun 3/60.
But you’re right, it’s basically a straight port to the hardware with very little effort to optimize it, as it was always a second choice OS and not the primary target for the hardware. Sun made a lot more effort.
But also consider that a Sun 3/60 would be running the older BSD based SunOS 3.x/4.x, whereas AMIX being SysV has more in common with early Solaris (SunOS 5.x) versions which were never ported to the m68k based Sun3 series.
FWIW there was a whole cottage industry in the 80s porting Unix to all sorts of 68K or x86 platforms. It was basically the same original codebase with a few platform specific tweaks in terms of certain bus/device drivers.
Amiga Unix being no different in that regard. It was just a quick and dirty port of the existing SystemV 68K codebase, that Commodore contracted one of those small unix porting outfits.
It really did not support much of the chipset. Which is what made the Amiga an Amiga.
The US government was consolidating around UNIX. The idea being any computer running a variety of UNIX could run the software the US govt was developing, with minimal porting headaches. This lead to every computer manufacturer scrambling to get something UNIXy running on their hardware, to enable those sweet government contract sales. It’s why we ended up with so many small-time UNIX workstation vendors, along with very non-UNIXy systems like the amiga and Macintosh getting often half-assed ports of SysV.
UNIX was seen as the future. In some ways they were right, but not in the way they originally thought.