Interesting; I didn't know that there were so many 68k ports of SVR4 around. By 1992 Unix usage had started to tilt towards RISC platforms (SPARC and MIPS), and Motorola's 68040 did not exactly draw a crowd (although Apollo Computer/NeXT used the 68040 in a number of models).
Yes, that would explain why Commodore got out of the market, at breakneck pace. If anything, the management were cheapskates. Still, given the cost of the A3000 platform, it might have made a viable low-end Unix workstation had Commodore had more trust in building a business around it. Other entry-level workstations available in 1989/1990 were certainly much cooler, and there were whole "ecosystems" already in place which they fit into (e.g. Sun), but you had to pay a lot more money for this gear.
From what I learned in my 11 years at Sun, there was an honest attempt at licensing the A3000 and AMIX as a cheap/relabelled Sun supported unix system - it was unclear (to me) why the deal never happened
ta
TomUK
