13 Jul
2011
13 Jul
'11
3:25 p.m.
On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 08:23:41PM -0400, Jason Stevens wrote:
And then there was that whole SYSV to the Commodore
Amiga that SUN tried to
piggy back on.... There had to be a lot more to that then meets the eye.
The SVR4 Amiga UNIX implementation was an interesting oddball in itself as
CBM was of course 'cheap' and trying to save money on the project, so
they licensed the code-base for the 3B2 instead of the original M68k codebase
from AT&T..
The M68k codebase was much more expensive to license as I recall from my days
working at CBM
The result was that the 'port' was a real SVR4 and worked as such, but
it lacked the SVR4 M68K ABI support in the kernel, which meant that
nearly all available off-the-shelf applications for M68K SVR4
did NOT work on these.
Which 'slightly' hampered the rollout and acceptance of these UNIX machine
(understatement!).
Pity they disbanded the CBM UNIX devel group before it really got started and
an 68040 version was never officially released so the whole product fizzled
out.
I remember that the decision to axe the whole UNIX team inside CBM was
really made without anyone knowing about it. Some of the guys were off
on visits to CBM offices in other countries when they were told
they were fired :(
The previous (mostly un-released/internal) SVR3.2 port to the A2500UX'es
for 68020+MMU or 68030 (of which I still have one, just no SVR3.2 media..)
was AFAIK based on the real M68k codebase.
Not to mention Commodore not letting SUN OEM the Amiga
3000/UX was their
biggest mistake.
CBM in their late days were very good at making bad decisions ;)
Bye, Arno