Amiga 3000UX - dual booting Amix (Amiga Unix) and AmigaOS.

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Күн бұрын

This is my Amiga 3000UX (very similar to an Amiga 3000) which was released with Amix (Amiga Unix) -- a full port of AT&T Unix System V Release 4 (SVR4), installed along with AmigaOS. I replaced the 100mb Quantum SCSI hard drive with a SCSI2SD drive formatted to 900mb. This holds a full release of Amix along with a 200mb partition for AmigaOS. The SCSI2SD does not appear to make much difference to the overall speed of the system.
This particular machine was owned by a computer science (CS) undergraduate student at Virginia Tech (VT) back in the early 90s. While by today's standards, the machine seems slow, this would have been an amazing computer to have as a CS student. I believe it was a required purchase for CS students at VT at that time.

Пікірлер: 22

@randyhelzerman 2 жыл бұрын

Oh man, I would have killed to have this back in grad school. To be able to just sit and program in my Dorm instead of walking across campus to the Sun labs...

@75slaine 3 жыл бұрын

Lovely stuff, thanks Win. I was recently looking for some video footage of what you got with Amiga 3000UX.

@monolalia 3 жыл бұрын

Saw it in a magazine at the time, or an X server for the Amiga at any rate, and while I wasn't sure what I could possibly use it for as a teenage home user, I was dismayed at how much more clunky and lo-res and unprofessional AmigaOS looked by default...

@judewestburner 2 жыл бұрын

When I was a kid, UNIX envy was a real thing. This would have scratched that itch a bit had I known it existed

@commentarysheep 2 жыл бұрын

Thankfully, we have Linux and the BSDs now to satisfy those needs. The vast world of Unix(-likes) is awesome!

@brennocks 11 ай бұрын

I'm kinda impressed. For it's time it was awesome. even the shitty Unix. But I think people these days are comparing it to mmodern systems with SSD's faster than actual RAM or even CPU's could handle back then. Even modern hard disks have higher transfer sppeds than the RAM available in the late 80's and early 90's - at least in the consumer market.

@stocksj Жыл бұрын

Since Sun Micro was looking at using the A3000 as a low cost workstation, what version of SunOS could run on this system?

@wysoft 6 ай бұрын

I don't think it was ever done but it probably would have been trivial for Sun to port SunOS to the Amiga, since SunOS was already a 68K Unix and supported the 68030. Probably all it would need is a bootloader and some basic device drivers for the Amiga hardware.

@dna9838 Жыл бұрын

In simple terms, if possible, why was Amiga os so much faster on same machine? I’m guessing it was simplified and less capable than unix, but if so, what was Amiga os missing?

@emiespo Жыл бұрын

tl;dr: memory protection. AmigaOS was really powerful but also very easy to crash. The main "secret" to its speed is the flat-memory model that allowed different softwares ("tasks") to communicate without copying data, but just sharing messages using pointers. This of course was ok for a mono-user computer system of the 80s, not so ok for manipulating sensitive data. Other factors for its speed are the use of clever DMA everywhere (video, audio, floppy and in the A3000, a DMA SCSI controller), and a bunch of graphic coprocessors that control the display (once again: using DMA whenever possible)

@dna9838 Жыл бұрын

@@emiespo thank you, that's really interesting 😊

@ran2wild370 Жыл бұрын

LOL. I can imagine how scared people were when they were presented such a slow Unix machine!!! Where are our Apples and Windows they screamed.....

@michalpasternak 2 жыл бұрын

This is actually pretty slow. Is that a problem with your Amiga (not enough ram, slow drive) or it just was like this? Did anybody actually use this for some serious development? I remember booting FreeBSD on 386SX with 4 MB of RAM and for a single user it was, well, usable... for 2 or 3, not so much...

@wheagy 2 жыл бұрын

As far as I know, this is pretty much the speed at which they ran, but I don't have another 3000UX to compare it to. I did replace the SCSI HD with a SCSI2SD. Typically, the SCSI2SD runs about as fast as the old SCSI HD, but there are cases where they are slower...maybe this is one of those cases? Otherwise, this is a pretty standard config for the 3000UX. As I mentioned in the description, it was used by a CS undergrad at VT in the 90s. If anyone used them for serious development, I'm not sure. Once it booted and X was fully up, it was "Ok", but yes, not a speed demon. As you probably saw, when booting into AmigaOS, it was considerably faster. Anyway, cool piece of old tech.

@dagahanfdm 3 жыл бұрын

Song?

@wheagy 3 жыл бұрын

It's one of the stock audio clips with iMovie...I don't recall the name, sorry.

@fuzzywzhe Жыл бұрын

OMG! This is PAINFUL. I didn't even know this machine existed, and now I see why it DESERVED to fail. I had a Linux machine in 1993, 2 years after this was released. It was a 100x faster. I'm glad I wasn't aware of this, I might have been stupid and bought it. Slackware at 0.99 was the equivalent of my Sun workstation, easily - although the resolution was much lower, and it was quite buggy at the time. Still, I'm glad I went to that rather than this. It was like $700 total to build. The Amiga 3000UX cost $3,000. For 2 grand more, you'd have a Sun graphics workstation. This is abysmal. No offense to any of the engineers at Amiga at the time, but this is terrible.

@fischX Жыл бұрын

Oh it was comparable fast and compatible with sun workstations who used the same processor but you had to upgrade the ram chip ram costs half the speed

@kjetilhvalstrand1009 7 ай бұрын

Old X likes to send stuff over TCP/IP, and gfx on the Amiga used Planar graphics, while X windows framebuffer used chunky I guess, so there horrible GFX conversion going on.

@fuzzywzhe 7 ай бұрын

@@kjetilhvalstrand1009 Well, the graphics are not the problem so much for me. First, this looks like TWM which was one of the most basic window managers and I wonder how difficult it would have been to install FVWM. Compiler support was probably OK, but it lacked an MMU, which spells problem for memory management and you lack basic process protection without virtual memory. I'm also looking at the speed of the computer, it's relatively slow against a DX4-100. I'm not fan of the Intel architecture - in fact I think it was the absolute worst for the time, but it was cheap. This would have been mindblowing, in 1987. It reminds me of the HP-UX systems we had, which most people avoided in college because THEY were slow. I wouldn't say this compares very well to an Sun Workstation at the time. I had access to many of those, even working on an NCD wasn't too bad, but it wasn't state of the art by any measure. Despite it's problems (and there were plenty!!!) with Linux in 1993, I am still happy I went with a DX4-100 even though it LITERALLY took 3 days to setup, and even then, it was unstable for certain programs.