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Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

Part of the reason the Amiga was well received is it’s OS. It was exceptionally well designed, and everything except, I think, multiuser (which was missing) and process separation (which did not have proper hardware support at first, and not enough memory), was better than what Unix could offer at the time.

Iirc, porting Unix software was actually very easy. I don’t think the non-Unix of AmigaOS is the reason we’re stuck with windows

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I still remember the first time I used Unix after a lifetime on the 8-bit home computers and DOS/Windows PCs, and typed an ampersand after a command. It took me about five minutes to convince myself that what the computer said was happening was actually happening. It was like finding an advanced alien ship with an antigravity generator and not believing it actually works.

> It took me about five minutes to convince myself that what the computer said was happening was actually happening

And if you were on a terminal far from the machine, you wouldn't even see or hear the computer busy at work.

I remember using a windowing terminal (all text windows) that could have multiple sessions over a single RS_232 using a custom shell on the computer.

> I don’t think the non-Unix of AmigaOS is the reason we’re stuck with windows

It was not, but if the Amiga users who ventured past the GUI and into the command line interface were used to Unix, it'd be a much more natural migration path for them to move to Unixes than it was to move to Windows (as most did).

Also, if the Amiga was, even if by accident, positioned as an entry level Unix workstation, it'd certainly be very popular at computer labs everywhere. It cost a lot less than a diskless workstation back then.

UNIX never had anything like AmigaDOS and the way it was extensible via dyanmic libraries for file formats, or the volume mounts as done on AmigaOS.

All the UNIX ports, including the follow up AMIX, were a shadow of the multimedia capabilities of AmigaOS.

Irix, NeXTSTEP and Sun NeWS are the only UNIX based experiences, that had remarkable hardware.

All of them managed it, by being more than mere UNIX clones.

> UNIX never had anything like AmigaDOS and the way it was extensible via dyanmic libraries for file formats

That's true, but all that could have been added to Coherent. I'm stressing Coherent here because it was the cheapest Unix clone available back then.

> All the UNIX ports, including the follow up AMIX, were a shadow of the multimedia capabilities of AmigaOS.

That's a hardware enablement issue. The biggest drawback of Coherent (and most Unixes back then) was that it couldn't run from a floppy, so, the minimum viable Amiga would need a hard disk. It could be possible to slim it down, however, or, maybe, just adding a POSIX compatibility layer on top of the AmigaDOS base would suffice. My point is that, if Amiga users had an easier path towards Unixes or if universities got lots of Amigas instead of far fewer Unix workstations (for the same money), we'd have a somewhat different world right now.

To this day POSIX has zero support about anything multimedia.

It would be a superset of POSIX anyway. POSIX is the minimum common denominator and should work with an ASR-33 teletype connected to a serial port.

Which never happened in 50 years.

Being POSIX compliant never prevented an OS from having excellent multimedia capabilities. Perhaps Commodore management didn't see the value of a Unix-like OS for a home computer back then and, when they saw it, with the 3000/UX, it was way too late for the 68K.

Hence NeXT, Irix, and NeWS examples I gave.

Yet hardly anyone cared about POSIX, rather whatever was on top.

I find it sad that Commodore didn't include CPUs like the 68020 and 68030 in base Amiga models until many years after their initial release. Maybe with a bit more revenue from higher end CPU models, Motorola could have put more effort into advancing the product line. How different a world it would have been if IBM went with the 68000 instead of the 8088.

Does anyone else remember Fred Fish disks? They always had a bunch of ported Unix commands/utilities on them. Certainly all the important stuff like UUCP and whatnot.

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