7 hour video by NCommander: "Commodore Had UNIX On Amiga?!"

[Amiga_CDTV]

This was streamed yesterday, it was a fascinating watch!

[ Show youtube player ]

[ma693541]

Yep. A3000UX. Not many of those.

[Paulee_Alex_Bow]

I own a 3 button 3000UX mouse, it’s pretty cool.

[jayminer]

I started watching it yesterday, it's fascinating because it's something I never knew existed until the days of the internet and finally seeing it in action is kinda cool. However I'm really hoping for a cut down summary of the interesting things that happened during the stream. I like long videos but 7 hours is a little too long even for me

[Noth]

I've watched it all and can sum it up:

- He demonstrates how the install goes (and redoes it once or twice) but never patches to the latest release.
- Discovers the installed gcc and it's too old but instead of using the amigaunix.com packages decides he can build gcc himself. Which of course fails because it's AMIX. Also he manages to mount his fileshare via NFS.
- Goes down the rabbit hole of creating a crosscompiler in Linux using various gcc versions from newer to older till getting to v2.95.3 which he then starts debugging to work out why it won't compile. His knowledge of gcc seems really extensive. This goes on for hours as he tries to fix gas as well. He does once manage to iink and build with binutils but that gets discarded. At the same time he tries compiling bash v3 on the AMIX WinUAE session, which fails.
- Around the 6th hour he gives up, installs packages. Neofetch is decided to be beyond reach so he gets pfetch which will run on bash 3.0 from packages. Last 30 mins are spent modifying it's output to make it pretty and accurate for AMIX.

It's a shame he didn't pursue the crosscompiler aspect, if that worked with 2.95.3 (and even just having a working version of that for AMIX) would move things forward considerably. Good interesting video!

[grond]

When I was in uni, we had 030 based UNIX workstations with incredibly large monochrome monitors running at, I think, 1280x1280. Of course, there always was an Amigan around that pointed out that the right Amiga could run UNIX just as well as those workstations.

[jbenam]

If Commodore had any business sense back then, it should have gone all-in on the A3000UX.

Considering how expensive were competing UNIX workstations, it could have sold so many of them that it could have almost reversed Commodore's fortune.

[Pyromania]

I’m super happy they were able to edit this down a little bit. After all it used to be a 700 hour long video.

[r.cade]

That UNIX version is also supported on the Amiga 2500 (A2000 with A2630 board + 2090/2091 SCSI)

This was also sold as the A2500UX...

[Noth]

Originally Posted by grond

When I was in uni, we had 030 based UNIX workstations with incredibly large monochrome monitors running at, I think, 1280x1280. Of course, there always was an Amigan around that pointed out that the right Amiga could run UNIX just as well as those workstations.

Where the systems coloured black or light grey? If black they might have been NeXTstations, if grey maybe SUN Sparcstations.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Noth

Where the systems coloured black or light grey? If black they might have been NeXTstations, if grey maybe SUN Sparcstations.

I know we had NeXTstations (black cubic computers) but the one I refer to wasn't one of those. Perhaps it was a SUN but I'm not sure (it was light grey). Later when I was working as a microelectronics engineer I worked on a UltraSparc so I may be mixing up things. I clearly remember the micro-lettered "SUN" wallpaper/backdrop pattern but I don't know whether this memory really comes from the 030-based UNIX workstation I was talking about.

[mousehouse]

Hijacking this thread now for nostalgia :-)

When I was in microelectronics in the 90s we used HP9000 machines with X (with motif) on color X terminals. Although I found HPUX to be a bit funny it was better than SUNs Solaris with Openlook. Routing circuits and stuff would be really slow though with many people using the same machine… when I joined VLSI I got my own HP9000/735, which was much better :-)

I’d read about AMIX and really wanted to play with it but never saw one until many years later. Probably around the same time I saw the SGI Indy…

After spending nearly a decade collecting all the parts for the 3000UX including the tape drive (A3070) and A2410 I sold it a few years ago. Yeah, needed to pay bills…