@Hammer

What is this “X-Windows� you speak of?

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@kolla

https://amigaunix.com/lib/exe/fetch.php/a3000ux_born_to_run_unix_svr4.pdf
Page 4 of 8, "X Windows"

From Commodore - The FInal Years,
Quote:

A Mysterious Fate: The A2024 Monitor (skip) Since 1987, Luck had built up his Boing! company around selling a piece of software called the X Window System for the Amiga Unix operating system (Amix), as well as a three-button Amiga mouse. He had also partnered with Hedley Davis to build the A2024 monitor, which would allow impressively high resolution screens in either AmigaOS or Amix. Commodore had also begun designing network adapter cards for the Amiga in mid-1988, which would be used for networking under Amix or AmigaOS. It was all coming together beautifully to create a powerful Unix system for a fraction of the price of other Unix machines. And Luck himself had negotiated a deal with Commodore whereby he would include copies of Amix with his X Window System. His X Window sales would also spur sales of the A2024 monitor. The relationship was mutually beneficial but his plans depended on Commodore delivering the products. However, progress was unusually slow and by early 1989 Luck began feeling frustrated waiting for Commodore to manufacture the A2024 monitor. He told INFO magazine, “Commodore seems to have learned a few lessons in hardware, but they did make some real mistakes in the past and they continue to have problems. I'm aiming at the workstation market with X Window and many of the machines I’ll be in competition with have higher standard screen resolutions than the Amiga. I've been waiting for two years for the A2024 monitor, which has a 1008x800 display. The things that slow up delivery often should have been dealt with at a design or engineering level long before they ever got to manufacturing.� Despite his friendship with Hedley Davis, he obviously blamed the delays on the design of the monitor rather than the manufacturer. “Commodore also has quality control problems which in a proper computer company would be fixed at the engineering level and not patched at the manufacturing level. They don't bite the bullet when they should. They're more into covering their ass than in kicking ass.� Commodore had signed a contract with ADI in 1988 to manufacture 5000 A2024 monitors. However, the problematic design meant that production started and then stopped several times. In May 1990, ADI started again and finally achieved 5000 units later in the year. It also took Commodore until the end of the year to finally produce an updated manual for the A2024 that addressed the new AmigaOS 2.0. In the end, Commodore chose to manufacture no more than the first 5000 units.

For timeline context, copy and paste in full section from Commodore - The Final Years,

1. For Amiga OCS, 5000 units of A2024 high-res grey scale monitors are too small formmainstream 3rd party developers.

2. Dale Luck provided X Window System port for Commodore's AMIX ahead of Coherent 4.0's 1992 release with X Window.


Against Coherent 3.0.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)
PC Magazine called Coherent 3.0 a "time capsule" that captured the state of Unix in the late 1970s, without support for mice, LANs or SCSI disks, good for learning basic Unix programming but not for business automation.

Commodore's Unix team completed and modernized Coherent's baseline into UNIX SVR4 compliant.


From Commodore The Final Years,
Quote:

The Unix Group Following the debut of the Amiga 2500UX Unix machine at CeBIT, it was time to get serious developing the Unix operating system. Up until now, Johann George had created a proof of concept of Commodore’s version of Amiga Unix, which he nicknamed Amix. Now he needed to flesh it out. Johann George was an immaculately dressed programmer who came from the Coherent Unix team. He had worked at Commodore since 1986 as a contractor on an Amiga version of Unix. Now the Unix project required fresh blood. “Johann George came in to run the Commodore Unix group,� recalls Bryce Nesbitt. “He had some special relationship with Henri too. They were both from South Africa if I remember right.� Later that year, Henri Rubin began promoting the upcoming Unix machine by defending Unix as an operating system. “English is a complex and illogical language, yet it is still the most widely used,� he said, using English as a metaphor for Unix. “Purists take delight in the inconsistencies that frustrate others. Yet if the language is widely used, its technical faults become irrelevant.� (skip) Ominously, Commodore's engineering group jumped from 49 engineers in 1987 to 86 engineers in 1988. It was the C900 project all over again, one that had proven costly and helped bring Commodore close to its destruction. “That was definitely a failure of management, one that I didn't fully appreciate at the time, but in retrospect I can see it was just fatal,� says Nesbitt.

R&D funds are not being focused on the Amiga core graphics upgrade.

Quote:

Layoffs For the past few years, Commodore’s engineers had felt overworked and understaffed. Jeff Porter had pushed for and succeeded in increasing their ranks, though they were still not up to levels comparable to Atari or Apple. Then in mid-1991 Mehdi Ali sought to reduce Commodore’s engineering department, a risky move considering how thin the ranks were already. Those cuts would include some of Commodore’s most skilled and seasoned engineers, along with engineers who had been underperforming. Johann George and his entire Unix group (except for one engineer to support Commodore’s existing Amix user base) were laid off by Ned McCook. This was predictable and understandable given the results of the Unix group.

Nuked.

Commodore pivots to Jeff Frank's Amigas for low-end while PCs for mid to high-end SKU plans.

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@Kronos

Quote:

Kronos wrote: @Hammer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Unix No mention of it being based on Coherent (and neither in the brochure you linked). Which is no surprise as it would have made 0 sense from a technical point. Hence why I don't care about these "I did such great things while failing to achieve anything" books.....

WIki's information needs to be updated with Commodore enginner's internal statements.

Commodore enginner's internal statements > Wikipedia's information.

Last edited by Hammer on 30-Aug-2024 at 01:36 AM.

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@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote: Commodore enginner's internal statements > Wikipedia's information.

Only your quotes aren't that for most parts.

It's C= engineers/managers/external personal paraphrasing what they remember other C= engineers doing at that time getting compiled into a context by an author who clearly had no clue about the topic.

In the end you get 2 or 3 stories mixed up into one that doesn't make any sense.

A story where C= licensed AT&T UNIX (which comes with sources) builds HW required for the 68k version of that UNIX (020+MMU+FPU or 030+FPU) only to then throw out most of the core OS, replaces it with an older clone/unlicensed fork, massages that code to be compatible with the current official version UNIX and as a final bonus gets AT&T to sign of it being a proper version of their UNIX.

On wikipedia you get a story that is perfect inline on how any official UNIX port was done sprinkled with the usual C= incompetence and delays.
A coherent story ( ) where whatever came of that ill fated Coherent project plays no role.

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@Kronos

You haven't posted any primary sources.

OPEN LOOK specification was a collaboration between Sun and AT&T, hence certain Sun and AT&T licenses would be needed.

The Open Software Foundation (OSF) created the Motif GUI as its alternative to OPEN LOOK.

Last edited by Hammer on 30-Aug-2024 at 05:12 AM.

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Amiga 500 (rev 6A, ECS, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 4B/Emu68)
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB

@Hammer

Neither have you....

Point is one story makes sense, the other is clearly the result of garbage_in_garbage_out.

_________________
- We don't need good ideas, we haven't run out on bad ones yet
- blame Canada

@Kronos

Bullshit. You haven't supplied valid counter information to override Commodore - The Final Year's AMIX story.

To complete Coherent's Unix clone, Commodore needs to execute additional work such as SCSI, network cards, network stack, XWindow, graphics drivers) and would need licenses from AT&T and SUN e.g. OpenLook.

Last edited by Hammer on 30-Aug-2024 at 05:24 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 30-Aug-2024 at 05:20 AM.

_________________
Amiga 1200 (rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32/RPi CM4/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (rev 6A, ECS, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 4B/Emu68)
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB