A
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Amiga Unix (Amix)
It's interesting to see color OpenLook. I only ever saw it on B&W or grayscale Sun boxes.
  • rob74
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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?
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"!

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.

I think less strange considering that 1990 was 35 years ago.
36 years ago
Depends on when in 1990 ;)
> 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".

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.

https://www.commodore.net/team

"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.
Probably. Most of AmigaOS (Workbench and Kickstart) got "released" on github about 10 years ago.
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.
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.
I hope someone decompiles this.
> 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
  • tyingq
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https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/vulnerabilities/522
Should've been vim since it originated on Amiga.
Huh, TIL. And that vim’s creator died in 2023, at only 63 :(
  • sgt
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Sadly yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37011324
  • rob74
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It did indeed, but the original vim was developed for AmigaOS, not sure if there was an Amiga Unix version available...
correct
Damn, $2000. I wish I'd kept my copy.
Very honest warning there :)