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Comment by kloch | Hacker News Reader

I didn't realize Atari made a 68030 machine. It's too bad they didn't pivot to high end engineering/academic workstations to compete with Sun/SGI. They definitely had the engineering talent.

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They tried at the end (with the TT/030) but it was too late. They folded two years later.

I remember a snippet about Unix on the TT030 in UnixWorld from around then: "Up from toyland." They weren't going to be taken seriously.

Atari's last two years of engineering were excellent between the TT030 and the Falcon030 and the last versions of TOS after they hired Eric R Smith to fold his open source MiNT project into the official OS.

But at that point in time nothing could compete with x86 and the 68k architecture was end of life. Even Apple had a rough time of it (after switching to PowerPC) and barely held on for the next 10 years.

EDIT: I should also mention the Atari Transputer Workstation project around this time, which was a multiprocessor Transputer + some pieces from the Mega ST attached as a controlling terminal. Another attempt to get into the higher end research & workstation market. Didn't sell any really though.

NeXT also ran on 68k at the time.

And was also trying to get off of it before they stopped making hardware altogether. Motorola fumbled the ball by declaring 68k pretty much over, pushing their doomed 88k arch then killing that and moving to PowerPC just a couple years later.

IIRC, Motorola was never able to put an 88K CPU, FPU and MMU in a single package. They were also unwilling/unable to make it inexpensive enough.

A sensible Motorola would have made the price target of the low-end 88K the same unit price of a 68030.

You might like to search a USENET archive for old posts in comp.arch. I'm fairly sure that the 88120 did combine everything in a single package.

That was the 88110. The 88120 never saw the light of day.

The 88120 wasn't sold but apparently it did work fine before the project was cancelled.

The architect of it regularly posts to comp.arch.

My modern NeXT lament is that was had an extraordinary machine that ran Unix with a Postscript based windowing environment, and some rather remarkable applications, written in a "slow" C language, on a 25Mhz '040 with 400M of disk and 20MB of RAM.

Meanwhile, getting Linux to run on a R Pi is a major endeavor.

I don't know how light you can get a Unix with, I guess, X running on it today.

My first Linux box was a 386SX with 3 megs of RAM. This was in the 0.99.x kernel days. I later upgraded to a 486/100 with 16 megs. Linux (Slackware, kernel 1.0!) ran like lightning on that thing, including X and an early browser like Netscape. I would often have over a dozen users logged in remotely (telnet...) Things are incredibly bloated today.

I have run NetBSD on my Mac Quadra 950 with X, only ran a few xterms but it was fine.

Love your story! R Pi seems ok these days though. Just loaded Armbian on an SD card and away it went. Descent performance even.

> Meanwhile, getting Linux to run on a R Pi is a major endeavor.

I don't really think downloading a disk image and copying it to a microSD qualifies as a major endeavor.

Considering that a Pi CPU sill runs about 50 times as fast and has 100 times more memory than a NeXT had, whatever Unix you get running on it doesn't have to be "light" by OP's measure.

With a 25Mhz CPU and 16MB of RAM, every cycle and byte has to be accounted for.

OK, but Linux is the default OS for the RPis. They spin their own distro based on Debian.

I did run NetBSD on my MIPS-based IBM z50 w/ 16MB of RAM, complete with ethernet and X and twm.

But then a 16MB RISC Unix workstation wasn't really low-end

Sadly, it wasn't possible to make it boot directly to BSD - it always needed a pass through Windows CE

Were those not mostly lightweight MOTIF apps? RPi Linux distros running heavyweight GUI desktops are the problem.

Apple, Atari, and Commodore had all suffered under bad management for years by then. I don't know if they could have stayed relevant, but management not being the best harmed them. Apple had just enough with the mac to not die.

They definitely had the engineering talent.

Atari, Commodore, Digital, Digital Research, were lacking the management talent.

They had the nicest gear, but the suits botched it primetime. That's why I drink.

Now, more to the point of the parent: Sun and SGI had the management talent. They had a good run. But that run ended anyway. At some point they run out of ideas to compete with "industry standard" hardware.

So, to come to the point of the parent: would a very successful Atari UNIX station, based on the 68030 made a difference?

NeXT used the 68k processors as well. And Apple. Even with the Mac's success the PowerPC eventually run out of steam against Intel. Would an additional load of many, many Ataris made a difference here?

What did ARM do differently than all of those mentioned above?

ARM and its licensees stayed focused on embedded after walking away from the Acorn machines. Power usage became their focus. And so they were right there as pretty much the only good option when the portable and embedded market blew up.

So now with that under the belt it can return to desktop.

IIRC, ARM was low-power from the start. I remember the story of a board with one of the first ARM CPUs, that powered up even though Vcc was not connected. It was working from leaked current from the other signals being fed into the processor.

> Atari, Commodore, Digital, Digital Research, were lacking the management talent.

There isn't much they could have done. The good-enough x86 PC steamroller would have crushed them anyway. When the cheap average PC you could buy had VGA and a Sound Blaster, these platforms quickly ran out of gas in the gaming space.

If, and that's a big if, both Commodore and Atari managed to get cheap Unix (or Coherent) workstations out, at prices similar to PCs (which were generally more expensive), they could, perhaps, carve themselves a second niche as cheap Unix workstations.

In an alternative universe where IBM would have succeed in preventing the reverse engineering done by Compaq, they could very well had survived.

It was the PC clone market that killed them, more than management errors.

I had several STs starting with the initial developer offer, I never saw any of the 030 machines advertized for sale in Europe, Atari could have made a better job of marketing them.

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