At 12:19 PM 10/27/96 -0600, Peter Seebach wrote:
>Sun's interest in the 3000UX was rather that Amiga Unix was a fully functional
>SVR4, briefly compliant with the ABI (but changed slightly due to a gcc bug),
>and was a *damn* good implementation... They were going to take advantage of
>the ABI to guarantee compatability, trade a few drivers, and end up with
>Solaris 2 for the Sun 3 series.

Sweet. I never heard of it from the point of view of the Unix world. My
friends were/are the Software Distillery guys (many of which developed
parts of the disk-resident part of AmigaDOS). I heard the story from the
AmigaDOS point of view. 

>Commodore backed out because they wanted to get more money, and Sun decided 
>not to do the port themselves.

Dumbasses. 

>This is probably one of the more vivid examples of why commodore died; to this
>day, many of us still suspect that the management was bought, rather than
>merely stupid.

I think it was a couple of *really* *greedy* guys at the very top.

Ever seen "The Deathbed Ritual, and other Tales of Digital Angst"? It
was made by Dave Haynie (most visible Amiga hardware dude out there, also
a Pearl Jam fan) on the last day of Commodore. It's a blast, lots of fun,
and has serious info in it. 

>
>It is a shame; Amiga Unix was probably the best SVR4 I've ever used, modulo
>a couple of bugs which would have been fixed if they hadn't fired all of the
>developers.  A *nice* system, and one of the few commercial Unices to ship
>standard with a wide selection of GNU tools.

1) At one point they had all of 1 dude maintaining it. He had really really
long hair (yeah! yeah! Hey, I'm working on it, alright?)

2) Commodore developers were the best out there. They were highly skilled,
and they *cared* about their machines. They were true *believers* in the
machine, and they treated it like a loved one. 

Commodore management was a bunch of screwups who couldn't run a computer
company anywhere except into the ground. 
--
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