Commodore UNIX, some questions

[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

[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.  :-)

[Pentad]

Speaking of source code, does anybody have the source code to AMIX?  Whoever that enity is, can't we ask for a copy of the source code?  In 2013, I'm not sure how you could make money off of it.

The last rumor I heard was that the source was accidentally destroyed by Gateway when they reformatted some media (HD/Tapes).

For that matter, who has the source code to Workbench and Kickstart?  Is it the same people?


-P

[Pentad]

That's easy for you to say. Think "lawsuit". Specifically, think "IP lawsuit": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group

As a University Professor who taught IP, Copyright, and Patents for seven years, I know all about this.  :-)

However, I think you misunderstood what I was saying...  I'm not sure the owners of AMIX (source code and all) could make any money off of it from a product stand point.  It runs on such limited hardware, would have such a limited market, and is so outdated that it is nearly useless.

On a side note, the SCO example would not apply to this particular situation.  I could explain why but it is long and complicated.

Actually, I think AMIX would be hard to defend for IP violations.  

-P