Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!killer!tness7!tness1!sugar!peter
From: peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga UNIX
Message-ID: <2176@sugar.UUCP>
Date: 25 Jun 88 13:52:16 GMT
References: <1985@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <4079@cbmvax.UUCP> <6811@cup.portal.com>
Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX
Lines: 33

In article <6811@cup.portal.com>, DMasterson@cup.portal.com writes:
> Let's try to bring this topic back to the original question (at least I think
> it was the original question -- its been so long off the topic, I forgot).  I
> think the question at hand is what it would take to implement Unix (or A VAR-
> IATION THEREOF) on an Amiga (not a souped-up Amiga).

Well, you can't implement enough of UNIX to make it worthwhile, because you
don't have any way of implementing the "fork()" system call without causing
a huge performance penalty. Now, people counter that most programs follow
a fork() with an exec(). I guess most do, but many interesting programs I
know of do things like "if(fork()) exit();", or "if(fork()) { do something
strange and bizzarre to file descriptors and signals and maybe even do some
I/O then exec(); }", or "if(fork()) server(); else client();", and so on.

> In that question, has
> anyone heard of/seen Amix by Lamplighter Software (I think).  Its been
> advertised in Amazing Computing, but, thus far, I haven't heard anyone say
> anything about it.

I called them. They promised to send more info. I haven't gotten anything
from them. I guess I could call again, come Monday. They claimed (over the
phone) that it's a nearly complete UNIX environment and it runs under
AmigaDOS. I think I managed to rule out a utility set like MKS Toolkit
and the MKS shell on the IBM-PC, but won't swear to it.

I am reminded of the responses I got when I asked substantially the same
questions of a company that was advertising UNIX for the Atari ST. They
claimed that it was substantially UNIX, but not that it ran under TOS. As
far as I know it never shipped.
-- 
-- `-_-' Peter (have you hugged your wolf today?) da Silva.
--   U   Mail to ...!uunet!sugar!peter, flames to /dev/null.
-- "A foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds".