6 Feb
2020
6 Feb
'20
11:58 p.m.
On Thu, Feb 06, 2020 at 09:50:39AM -0600, Michael Parson wrote:
No offense taken. It's not so much that
it's "likeable", at least, any
more than playing with any old software is "likeable". It only crossed
my radar because someone mentioned that it was available for Atari UNIX
(ASV), would those bits be able to be used on Amiga UNIX (AMIX)? I was
Just nitpicking a little :)
I know Amiga UNIX is often referred to as AMIX, but 'in the day' there
was an actual 'AMIX' which was an CBM in-house only port of SVR3.2
to 'A2500UX' labeled machines. (basically 68020+MMU equipped boxes)
These ran the internal email and file distribution network, but was
never publicly released. Quite noticeable as it boots into an ASCII
console with a bright orange background.
Same background that some of the 68020/030 cards boot ROMs show when choosing
the 'boot UNIX' option.
Worked on that old platform for some time.. Part of my projects was to migrate
some of the tools to the 'next version' which was..
The actual product sold as 'Amiga UNIX'. (not 'AMIX' ;) )
This was the SVR4 port in a V1 and V2 version with the latter getting a bunch
of updates to streamline it on the platform.
V1 was really only sold/used to launch-customers while V2 was more
publicly available. (V1 was trivial to hack around the '1 user' base
license with a little 'od' and binary patching ;) )
Interesting issue at the time was that, according to the internal grapevine
at CBM at the time, the Amiga UNIX SVR4 was not m68k ABI compliant, so it
could not run pre-packaged m68k-svr4 software that did use this interface.
Reason was rumoured to be that CBM (in ther never-ending efforts to do
things 'cheap') got the cheapest source license they could get for SVR4 which
AFAIK was for the 3B2 or similar AT&T platform and they did not get an actual
m68k source and license.
Never got that really verified, but I do know that at the time the lack
of support for the m68k ABI was a big hurdle for acceptance.
but it requires setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH to load the
ASV X11 libs, so, I
thought, if I could get my hands on the source, I could compile it against
the AMIX supplied libs, then maybe try and get Mosaic compiled as well.
The SVR4 Amiga UNIX used CDE and all bits for the X11 environment,
so the binaries should all be there.
No sources were available to people outside the CBM UNIX group at the
headquarters at the time, but perhaps they got out onto the net when it
all went down.
The UNIX group inside CBM got disbanded way before they went totally out
of business, so it may have well gone into the shredder at some point.
Quitting the CBM-UNIX group was done very crudely I might add with some of
the guys from the US being over in europe when they got told that they were
fired and their company creditcards got blocked at the same time.. classy...
Bye, Arno.