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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
The Amiga 3000 Unix and Sun Microsystems: Deal or No Deal?
icedchai wrote 10 hours 56 min ago:
I remember hearing this rumor back in the day (early 1990's.) I also
owned an A3000 at the time. It never seemed believable since Sun
already had 680x0 systems and they were clearly moving to Sparc.
680x0 was long in the tooth by the early 90's. All Unix vendors (other
than NeXT, which eventually gave up on hardware) had moved to RISC.
762236 wrote 20 hours 14 min ago:
I've always associated Amigas with AmigaOS, and this is the first I
heard about Unix. Why would you replace AmigaOS with Unix? Is it
because it would be substantially cheaper than other 68030 Unix
workstations?
pavlov wrote 18 hours 7 min ago:
As mentioned in the story, everybody with a 68k or RISC computer in
the 1980s tried their hand at making a Unix workstation because the
market was so lucrative.
In addition to Commodore there were Apple, Acorn, and Atari also
making these upscale plays with Unix. Sun and NeXT were native to
this market. And non-Unix workstation vendors like Apollo were adding
compatibility.
It was a crowded market and Commodore didn't bring anything unique to
it. The Amiga's multimedia strengths were practically wasted running
X Windows.
fulafel wrote 13 hours 28 min ago:
Nitpick: This was the 90s already. 68k based Sun gear was in the
80s but 90s was the RISC era already for Unix boxes. (except for
NeXT I, they continued launching new 68k models into the 90s and
got left behind)
pjmlp wrote 15 hours 31 min ago:
Amiga OS was a kind of plan B, as they originally were thinking of
UNIX, when we listen to history from Commodore employees.
I was really happy they went and did their own thing, classical
UNIX was never great at multimedia.
rhet0rica wrote 17 hours 17 min ago:
And yet... !
AMIX was actually one of the first gcc targets, as mentioned here:
[1] It seems it may have had a pivotal role in the history of the
FSF. So, clearly, someone found value in it!
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga/comments/1ikyw0s/the_fsf_fr...
pjmlp wrote 15 hours 37 min ago:
GCC was largely ignored until Sun became the first UNIX vendor to
have different SKUs for developers and plain users, quickly
followed by other vendors.
Only then folks started reaching out to GNU, as means to avoid
paying for UNIX developer licenses from their respective vendors.
Sun even had multiple levels, one of the reasons Ada didn't took
off, was that UNIX vendors like Sun had it as an additional SKU,
the developer license would only get the classical UNIX stuff,
alongside C and C++ compilers.
evaneykelen wrote 20 hours 22 min ago:
I remember getting one on loan from Commodore Netherlands around
1992-1993. We were an ISV back then, and CBM provided these machines to
allow us to talk to their engineers back in Pennsylvania via email and
Usenet. While the emails are not preserved, I did find a post I highly
likely made using an A3000UX [1]. We had the machine dial in once per
day to sync email and Usenet posts. Phone costs were high, so we had to
keep the phone line open as short as possible. It was actually quite
handy because picking up the phone in the Netherlands to talk to an
engineer in the States was prohibitively expensive (around $9 per
minute in todays money, iirc). It was my first use of The Internet.
[1]: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.multimedia/c/Vyt00F...
pram wrote 20 hours 41 min ago:
A brand new 68030 system in 1990 seems DOA to me.
ido wrote 18 hours 23 min ago:
It was not - 68000 and 68020 (and 68030 of course) based systems were
still sold later than that. The highest end mac in 1990 was 68030
based ( [1] ) and was prohibitively expensive. New 68030 models were
still being introduced as late as 1994.
[1]: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_ii/specs/mac_iifx.htm...
pram wrote 4 hours 7 min ago:
The IIfx wasn't expensive (or fast) because it had a 68030, also it
was DOA lol
icedchai wrote 2 hours 51 min ago:
680x0 systems weren't "DOA" in the consumer space yet. I would be
another ~4 years until the Mac PowerPC transition.
pram wrote 1 hour 49 min ago:
You’re eliding the point by saying “680x0”
The NextStation had a 68040 and it released in 1990. I didn’t
say the entire 68k architecture my dude.
fredoralive wrote 17 hours 50 min ago:
It’s a bit mixed, by 1990 most UNIX vendors were moving to
various RISC architectures so a 68k based workstation would appear
rather old fashioned for that market. People paid Serious money for
a UNIX system to do Serious work, so why cheap out on yesterdays
technology?
A/UX didn’t seem to do that well in the market either.
pjmlp wrote 14 hours 2 min ago:
A/UX failure had more to do with Apple's approach to it, and
their relationship with IBM, than anything else.
gxd wrote 16 hours 36 min ago:
My uni had these, as I mentioned in a reply elsewhere on the
thread. I'm curious to know what kind of Serious Work people here
saw back in the day.
I was a student so I had relatively rare access to the high end
stuff... Most of my time was spent in cheap-ish sun terminals.
Later on, as a last year student, I became cooler and got access
to the RISC 6000s and started hanging out with the graduate
students.
Most of the Serious Work I saw was email. There was some limited
running of simulations and research software from other
universities, but little that required a lot of processor power
on an ongoing basis. I think these were generally more useful due
to their native networking capabilities and software availability
than their raw CPU power. In a sense, you had to have them
because everybody else had one.
tyingq wrote 16 hours 33 min ago:
CAD/CAM was a pretty common reason to have an early Sparc
workstation.
toast0 wrote 23 hours 31 min ago:
That the suggested deals don't make a lot of sense doesn't mean there
weren't discussions. Maybe the discussions ended because the deals
wouldn't have made sense.
Maybe discussions happened during development when it wasn't so obvious
that they didn't make sense.
rhet0rica wrote 1 day ago:
The author seems to be unsure as to how widely the 2500UX was sold; I
can confirm first hand that it was a real thing; I obtained parts of
one from a dumpster dive at a Canadian university in the early 2000s.
Sadly the case was mangled by a friend who really wanted its floppy
drive for an SGI Indy we'd found in an earlier haul...
(I still have the 2500's accelerator card. The Indy is intact, boots,
and sitting dormant in a cozy heated garage on a farm somewhere.
There's also this hilarious story about how I tracked down the
machine's original owner and naïvely asked him for help with removing
the root password. He was amused and actually did so, though not
without throwing a fair amount of shade at the university for poor
hardware disposal practices...)
blackhaz wrote 16 hours 23 min ago:
I have always been fascinated - what are the reasons anyone would
want a Unix workstation at that time over DOS/Windows? Can somebody
come up with a few examples? Genuinely missing the knowledge, as I
was using MS-DOS in the 90s.
rhet0rica wrote 5 hours 53 min ago:
In addition to what the others have said, the specs were often a
generation or two of what was available in a generic Intel box.
When it was introduced in 1993, the Indy, SGI's lowest-specced
workstation, could handle 256 MB of RAM and was clocked at 100 MHz,
which was way beyond anything you could get for a PC, and that's
before even mentioning the dedicated graphics hardware for 3D and
video workloads. If money was no/little object, then the
workstation vendors were happy to take your hand. (And your
wallet.)
As efficiencies in cutting-edge hardware improved, the gap closed.
Intel and AMD leapfrogged the smaller design firms running these
companies, and more and more vendors threw in the towel on hardware
design, switching over to standard x86 hardware. By the early
2000s, distinctive OSes like Solaris and NEXTSTEP were just legacy
GUIs that could be installed on commodity PCs, although many
flavors were discontinued outright in favor of Linux, leaving these
companies (several of which were swallowed by HP) without any moat
or vendor lock-in. (Notably it happened to NEXTSTEP twice, once in
1995 and again a decade later when Mac OS X 10.4 was officially
released for Intel CPUs.)
pavlov wrote 15 hours 38 min ago:
Microsoft itself was a leading Unix vendor in the 1980s with Xenix.
Every Microsoft developer had a Xenix workstation for things like
email, access to network disks, running a decent C compiler, and
debugging.
DOS was practically a single-program environment with no memory
protection and no networking. Unix offered much better productivity
for software developers.
Engineering in general was a field that used Unix workstations
heavily. Microsoft didn’t become competitive until Windows NT in
1993.
zozbot234 wrote 15 hours 11 min ago:
Memory protection was not possible on the 8086 and quite
half-baked on the 80286 (you could switch to protected mode but
then you lost access to hardware BIOS facilities that relied on
real mode, and switching back to real mode required hard-faulting
the processor because there was no architectural support for it).
The Intel 80386 was the first fully-featured x86 CPU wrt.
running memory protected OS's.
pjmlp wrote 14 hours 4 min ago:
The reason being that they thought no one would care about
those legacy MS-DOS applications, everyone would be running to
adopt OS/2 on 286, hence no need to go back into real mode.
pjmlp wrote 15 hours 33 min ago:
In hindsight, Microsoft seems to have lost two opportunities to
already be on the forefront from UNIX, first with giving up on
Xenix, then by not really embracing the POSIX subsystem on
Windows NT.
Linux would never taken off in such alternative realities.
Not that it matters that much now with WSL, and Azure Linux.
helpfulContrib wrote 15 hours 46 min ago:
Multi-tasking that didn't suck.
Same as we use it now, to be frank. Unix workstations as an
interaction model have persisted so long because it works just
great.
I was writing a lot of Unix software in that period - database
apps, business logic, and so on. For me, using an MSDOS-based
system was a compromise, which I enhanced by using Desqview to get
multi-tasking - it allowed multiple MSDOS instances on a single
machine, in which I ran terminal software, compilers (our apps were
being ported to MSDOS...), and database admin tasks - just like
today.
What we have today in the form of MacOS or Linux workstations is
pretty much what we had back then, too. The power is inescapable.
gxd wrote 16 hours 45 min ago:
This is cool story! My uni's lab was all SGIs, IBM Risc 6000s and Sun
workstations.
But I visited the lab for the first time in 25 years last week and
everything got replaced by cheap PCs... :(
The 90s was perhaps the last gasp of high end, branded PCs. Man,
these were some good looking computers. Try keeping your SGI in good
shape, perhaps it will find its way to a museum one day.
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