Commodore UNIX, some questions

[Florida]

Is that version of UNIX still under copyright? I mean, isn't each version it's own? Obviously I don't know much about law, ha, ha. I just saw that WinUAE supports Linux. That is news to me. Does that mean that you would be able to run the Commodore UNIX under WinUAE?

[Pentad]

Is that version of UNIX still under copyright? I mean, isn't each version it's own? Obviously I don't know much about law, ha, ha. I just saw that WinUAE supports Linux. That is news to me. Does that mean that you would be able to run the Commodore UNIX under WinUAE?

The last time I checked on this, WinUAE does not support an 030 with the MMU which AMIX needs.  I too think it would be cool to boot AMIX on WinUAE but Toni has kind of nixed the idea.

I used AMIX in college on 3000 UX and 3000 TUX machines.  The 3000 TUX even had the 3070 tape drive mounted inside which was pretty cool.

AMIX (Unix SVR4) was pretty amazing for the day.  Dual booting was pretty radical at the time and most people who saw it were suitably impressed.  However, AMIX is a pretty old Unix compared to today.  Xwin is B&W (Without the 24bit 2410 card) and it does not support DHCP among a whole list of other things.  Of course, emulating the 2410 board would be pretty easy I would think and that would give Xwin color under WinUAE.

Still, do I think it would be cool to boot Amix on WinUAE?  Sure!  I think very few people have actually seen AMIX let alone had to chance to sit down and play with it.  Commodore did a wonderful job.  SUN was so impressed they wanted to resell Amiga 3000s with AMIX under their label.   Alas, like most things Commodore (management/marketing) they screwed the whole thing up.

As I said, it was a great port of SVR4!  They had many demos and examples included on the tape so people could jump right in.  Using it, you couldn't help but think it really was an entirely different machine.


Good times,
-P

[Matt_H]

As of v2.6.0 (released this week), WinUAE has full MMU support, so Amix, etc., should all work now!

As to copyright, yes, it still technically is, but the current owner probably doesn't even realize they're the owner, and I doubt they would care if they did. And they'd need an army of lawyers to prove it. Besides, the source code is lost. Amix is a historical artifact, of interest only to historians and hobbyists like us.

[kolla]

http://www.amigaunix.com

[danbeaver]

Although Unix is part of the SCO X/Open group, Linux is available as a more updated install over the 1980's version of System V R4.  My opinion only.

[mingle]

I'd be very interested to hear if anyone manages to get Unix running under WinUAE...

The above website has a hard disk image of an Amix 1.1 install - I might have a go at getting it to run...

Cheers,

Mike.

[TCMSLP]

I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has any success with this!

[olsen]

The last time I checked on this, WinUAE does not support an 030 with the MMU which AMIX needs.  I too think it would be cool to boot AMIX on WinUAE but Toni has kind of nixed the idea.

This seems to have changed with the most recent WinUAE release (2.6.0). I can't tell if it actually did (got a full plate right now), but once I find the time, I'm going to make disk images of my Amiga Unix machine and give it a spin.

I used AMIX in college on 3000 UX and 3000 TUX machines.  The 3000 TUX even had the 3070 tape drive mounted inside which was pretty cool.

Gee, they actually shipped A3000T units with Amiga Unix? I always wondered about that.

AMIX (Unix SVR4) was pretty amazing for the day.  Dual booting was pretty radical at the time and most people who saw it were suitably impressed.  However, AMIX is a pretty old Unix compared to today.  Xwin is B&W (Without the 24bit 2410 card) and it does not support DHCP among a whole list of other things.  Of course, emulating the 2410 board would be pretty easy I would think and that would give Xwin color under WinUAE.

Um, emulating the A2410 (TIGA graphics hardware) may not be such a hot idea after all. If I remember correctly, the X server which supported the card was X11R4 and it suffered from memory leak bugs. Source code was unavailable, which made fixing the bugs difficult.

One might have better luck with a Picasso II emulation and installing the matching X11R5 server, but I'm speculating: this is still really hard to do.

[AmigaFreak]

I have a (sort-of) insite on this subject. UNIX v1-7 (called "Ancient UNIX") are now open source, I'm running the SIMH PDP-11 emulator on a FreeBSD machine. It is running a clean install of UNIX v6 that was installed from a rip of a PDP-11 tape of the UNIX 6 distro. I don't think Amiga UNIX, like that of UNIX past v7 is free.

[olsen]

I have a (sort-of) insite on this subject. UNIX v1-7 (called "Ancient UNIX") are now open source, I'm running the SIMH PDP-11 emulator on a FreeBSD machine. It is running a clean install of UNIX v6 that was installed from a rip of a PDP-11 tape of the UNIX 6 distro. I don't think Amiga UNIX, like that of UNIX past v7 is free.

Ownership of the product has changed several times, too, which complicated things enormously.

Back when I was doing consulting work for Amiga Technologies GmbH we made an effort to obtain the Amiga Unix source code (which was not available among the assets acquired by ESCOM). It could have been useful

Searching through the available debris, I figured that it might be possible to contact the Amiga Unix authors who had ported the AT&T code to the Amiga, and written the Amiga-specific drivers. It turned out that one of these authors was still around, did respond to e-mail and was willing to help. The big catch was that for legal reasons he had to make sure that Amiga Technologies GmbH actually was legally entitled to receive the source code in question. This turned out to be practically impossible to prove, due to the big ball of mess that was the Commodore asset acquisition by ESCOM.

[Pentad]

Um, emulating the A2410 (TIGA graphics hardware) may not be such a hot idea after all. If I remember correctly, the X server which supported the card was X11R4 and it suffered from memory leak bugs. Source code was unavailable, which made fixing the bugs difficult.

One might have better luck with a Picasso II emulation and installing the matching X11R5 server, but I'm speculating: this is still really hard to do.

I just thought the 2410 card would be your best bet since Amix can use right on.  I'm have no doubts there are memory leaks in X11R4.  :-)

[nicholas]

Ownership of the product has changed several times, too, which complicated things enormously.

Back when I was doing consulting work for Amiga Technologies GmbH we made an effort to obtain the Amiga Unix source code (which was not available among the assets acquired by ESCOM). It could have been useful

Searching through the available debris, I figured that it might be possible to contact the Amiga Unix authors who had ported the AT&T code to the Amiga, and written the Amiga-specific drivers. It turned out that one of these authors was still around, did respond to e-mail and was willing to help. The big catch was that for legal reasons he had to make sure that Amiga Technologies GmbH actually was legally entitled to receive the source code in question. This turned out to be practically impossible to prove, due to the big ball of mess that was the Commodore asset acquisition by ESCOM.

I am no lawyer, but wouldn't the copyright return to the programmer once the company he wrote the software for went bankrupt? Especially since no one else bought the rights to it.

This is how many 80's games have been re-released recently.

[salax54]

Amix actually runs under UAE for a few months now, thanks to Toni Wilen's efforts on the MMU emulation front! Here's my try in full black & white LOL :

http://i298.photobucket.com/albums/mm242/salax54/COCKPIT%20AND%20AMIGA/BOTS%20N%20STUFF/AMIXSCREEN1_zps59115d53.jpg

It actually works by using the A2024 display mode. More details here:
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=67210

[danbeaver]

I have a (sort-of) insite on this subject. UNIX v1-7 (called "Ancient UNIX") are now open source, I'm running the SIMH PDP-11 emulator on a FreeBSD machine. It is running a clean install of UNIX v6 that was installed from a rip of a PDP-11 tape of the UNIX 6 distro. I don't think Amiga UNIX, like that of UNIX past v7 is free.

Open source has never meant "free" but under license. In essence the original Unix and subsequent developments form that source are "owned/licensed" but are in the Open Source domain which should include the Amiga version. Unix written for other hardware was not sold or transferred to the designers of that hardware but remained with the AT&T/Sun/BSD/SCO/XOpen group. You can use it, improve it, love it, but the software is not yours -- it remains open source and under license.

[olsen]

I am no lawyer, but wouldn't the copyright return to the programmer once the company he wrote the software for went bankrupt? Especially since no one else bought the rights to it.

Amiga Unix shipped with the source code to the Amiga-specific bits, and as far as I know these were never ever lost. You could rebuild the kernel, for example, changing the Amiga-specific code, but the portions which were not Amiga-specific were provided as object files in binary form only.

The portion we were after was the AT&T System V Release 4 source code itself, including Amiga-platform specific patches. In a nutshell, we would have liked to be able to rebuild the entire Amiga Unix kernel, userland files and everything, and turn Amiga Unix back into a commercial product.

Problem was, this wasn't a 1980'ies game, but some serious, very expensive code base which was valued north of US$ 500,000 at the time.

Well, it probably was a pipe dream to be able to upgrade the kernel code (support the 68040, support more peripherals such as DAT drives, for example). But we tried anyway, and we failed

But, thankfully, NetBSD finally came around at the time when we tried to revive Amiga Unix. It would have been very difficult to revive Amiga Unix, get it back into shape, since it was completely closed source. Given the state of the Amiga market at the time, I doubt that enough customers would have been willing to pay for upgrades (especially since Commodore did their best to burn any bridges it may have still had to the Amiga Unix user community).