Well that sounds disappointing. These days you're probably better off just running Linux or NetBSD on your old Amigas. But the ability to run true multiuser Unix on cheap desktop hardware was probably immensely valuable to businesses at the time, so it might've been worth it, even if you forgo much of the Amiga's Amiganess. The Tandy Model 16 family was not an Amiga by any stretch, but they had 68000 CPUs and were Unix capable in the form of Xenix. So they ran a lot of small business back office stuff until well into the 90s I'm guessing, despite first coming out in 1982.

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bink 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sun and NeXT also sold 68k Unix workstations at the time. IMHO, The thing about Amiga was that it was not seen as a business machine. Commodore in general was seen as a home computer, and really one aimed at gaming first. AFAIK they didn't even have computers with the specs to compete with what Sun, SGI, HP, and others were doing.

	▲	bitwize 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The Sun and NeXT machines were pricey. Commodore may well have been trying to break into the business market by releasing an affordable business-attractive OS for the Amiga. They were also starting to sell PCs around this time. It certainly tracks with their scattershot marketing efforts late in their history. There were video and multimedia applications at the time that could ONLY be tackled by an Amiga unless you wanted to pay $10,000 or more for specialized equipment. Besides the Video Toaster, which 'nuff said, Amigas also provided teletext-like TV information services in the USA, such as weather forecasts and the Prevue Channel (a cable channel that scrolled your cable system's program listings). Teletext itself never really caught on here. Anime fan subtitling was also done almost exclusively on Amiga hardware. Amiga gained a reputation as a glorified game console in the wider market, but those who knew... knew.

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cmrdporcupine 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Atari Corp was doing the same thing around the same time as Commodore was, with their own branded SysV fork. Both were trying to get into the later stages of the workstation market because it was seen as a new revenue source at a time when the "home computer" market was disappearing.

http://www.atariunix.com/

and the background:

https://web.archive.org/web/20001001024559/http://www.best.c...

But I distinctly remember an editorial in UnixWorld magazine (yes, we had magazines like that back then you could buy in like... a drug store...) with the headline "Up from toyland" talking about the Atari TT030 + SysV. Not exactly flattering.

The reality is by 1992, 93, 94 the workstation market was already being heavily disrupted by Linux (or other x86 *nix/BSD) on 386/486. The 68k architecture wasn't compelling anymore (despite being awesome), as Motorola was already pulling the rug out from under it.

And, yeah, many people just ran NetBSD on their Atari TTs or Falcon030s anyways.

	▲	kalleboo an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I imagine any home computers manufacturer looked at the workstation 68000 machines like Sun and said "we have the same CPU, if we have a Unix we can market our computers as workstations at a fraction of the cost". You also had Apple release A/UX for their 68k Macs.
	▲	an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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