[HN Gopher] Atari System V Unix - Unofficial Website
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Atari System V Unix - Unofficial Website
Author : rbanffy
Score : 141 points
Date : 2022-01-28 09:56 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atariunix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atariunix.com)
| kloch wrote:
| I didn't realize Atari made a 68030 machine. It's too bad they
| didn't pivot to high end engineering/academic workstations to
| compete with Sun/SGI. They definitely had the engineering talent.
| Torwald wrote:
| They definitely had the engineering talent.
|
| Atari, Commodore, Digital, Digital Research, were lacking the
| management talent.
|
| They had the nicest gear, but the suits botched it primetime.
| That's why I drink.
|
| Now, more to the point of the parent: Sun and SGI had the
| management talent. They had a good run. But that run ended
| anyway. At some point they run out of ideas to compete with
| "industry standard" hardware.
|
| So, to come to the point of the parent: would a very successful
| Atari UNIX station, based on the 68030 made a difference?
|
| NeXT used the 68k processors as well. And Apple. Even with the
| Mac's success the PowerPC eventually run out of steam against
| Intel. Would an additional load of many, many Ataris made a
| difference here?
|
| What did ARM do differently than all of those mentioned above?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| ARM and its licensees stayed focused on embedded after
| walking away from the Acorn machines. Power usage became
| their focus. And so they were right there as pretty much the
| only good option when the portable and embedded market blew
| up.
|
| So now with that under the belt it can return to desktop.
| rbanffy wrote:
| IIRC, ARM was low-power from the start. I remember the
| story of a board with one of the first ARM CPUs, that
| powered up even though Vcc was not connected. It was
| working from leaked current from the other signals being
| fed into the processor.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In an alternative universe where IBM would have succeed in
| preventing the reverse engineering done by Compaq, they could
| very well had survived.
|
| It was the PC clone market that killed them, more than
| management errors.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Atari, Commodore, Digital, Digital Research, were lacking
| the management talent.
|
| There isn't much they could have done. The good-enough x86 PC
| steamroller would have crushed them anyway. When the cheap
| average PC you could buy had VGA and a Sound Blaster, these
| platforms quickly ran out of gas in the gaming space.
|
| If, and that's a big if, both Commodore and Atari managed to
| get cheap Unix (or Coherent) workstations out, at prices
| similar to PCs (which were generally more expensive), they
| could, perhaps, carve themselves a second niche as cheap Unix
| workstations.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| They tried at the end (with the TT/030) but it was too late.
| They folded two years later.
|
| I remember a snippet about Unix on the TT030 in UnixWorld from
| around then: "Up from toyland." They weren't going to be taken
| seriously.
|
| Atari's last two years of engineering were excellent between
| the TT030 and the Falcon030 and the last versions of TOS after
| they hired Eric R Smith to fold his open source MiNT project
| into the official OS.
|
| But at that point in time nothing could compete with x86 and
| the 68k architecture was end of life. Even Apple had a rough
| time of it (after switching to PowerPC) and barely held on for
| the next 10 years.
|
| EDIT: I should also mention the Atari Transputer Workstation
| project around this time, which was a multiprocessor Transputer
| + some pieces from the Mega ST attached as a controlling
| terminal. Another attempt to get into the higher end research &
| workstation market. Didn't sell any really though.
| bluGill wrote:
| Apple, Atari, and Commodore had all suffered under bad
| management for years by then. I don't know if they could have
| stayed relevant, but management not being the best harmed
| them. Apple had just enough with the mac to not die.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| NeXT also ran on 68k at the time.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| And was also trying to get off of it before they stopped
| making hardware altogether. Motorola fumbled the ball by
| declaring 68k pretty much over, pushing their doomed 88k
| arch then killing that and moving to PowerPC just a couple
| years later.
| rbanffy wrote:
| IIRC, Motorola was never able to put an 88K CPU, FPU and
| MMU in a single package. They were also unwilling/unable
| to make it inexpensive enough.
|
| A sensible Motorola would have made the price target of
| the low-end 88K the same unit price of a 68030.
| rjsw wrote:
| You might like to search a USENET archive for old posts
| in comp.arch. I'm fairly sure that the 88120 did combine
| everything in a single package.
| 6581 wrote:
| That was the 88110. The 88120 never saw the light of day.
| rjsw wrote:
| The 88120 wasn't sold but apparently it did work fine
| before the project was cancelled.
|
| The architect of it regularly posts to comp.arch.
| whartung wrote:
| My modern NeXT lament is that was had an extraordinary
| machine that ran Unix with a Postscript based windowing
| environment, and some rather remarkable applications,
| written in a "slow" C language, on a 25Mhz '040 with 400M
| of disk and 20MB of RAM.
|
| Meanwhile, getting Linux to run on a R Pi is a major
| endeavor.
|
| I don't know how light you can get a Unix with, I guess, X
| running on it today.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| Love your story! R Pi seems ok these days though. Just
| loaded Armbian on an SD card and away it went. Descent
| performance even.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Meanwhile, getting Linux to run on a R Pi is a major
| endeavor.
|
| I don't really think downloading a disk image and copying
| it to a microSD qualifies as a major endeavor.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I did run NetBSD on my MIPS-based IBM z50 w/ 16MB of RAM,
| complete with ethernet and X and twm.
|
| But then a 16MB RISC Unix workstation wasn't really low-
| end
|
| Sadly, it wasn't possible to make it boot directly to BSD
| - it always needed a pass through Windows CE
| icedchai wrote:
| My first Linux box was a 386SX with 3 megs of RAM. This
| was in the 0.99.x kernel days. I later upgraded to a
| 486/100 with 16 megs. Linux (Slackware, kernel 1.0!) ran
| like lightning on that thing, including X and an early
| browser like Netscape. I would often have over a dozen
| users logged in remotely (telnet...) Things are
| incredibly bloated today.
| rjsw wrote:
| I have run NetBSD on my Mac Quadra 950 with X, only ran a
| few xterms but it was fine.
| rjsw wrote:
| I had several STs starting with the initial developer offer, I
| never saw any of the 030 machines advertized for sale in
| Europe, Atari could have made a better job of marketing them.
| tom_ wrote:
| This must have been quite a sight in 1991 on the 19" 1280x960
| mono monitor.
|
| (The ordinary Atari mono monitor for the ST/STe/Falcon was really
| nice. Some slightly unusual phosphor, I think, which meant a very
| nice slightly muted contrast ratio, and no discernible flicker
| despite being 72 Hz. Decent 640x400 resolution as well. But... it
| was absolutely tiny.)
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Brings back memories of playing around in the shell on an Atari
| TT at CeBit '91 or so. Having had an apprenticeship in a company
| producing their own machines (Norsk Data) and porting System V,
| as well as having used Atari GEM graphic shells, made me want to
| avoid DOS or even CP/M for personal use and especially
| development at the time ;) Then used AIX and Interactive Systems
| professionally until Linux and the BSDs came about. There was
| also a short period in 1992 or so when I had the option to use
| A/UX (Apple's System V port at the time) as file server, though
| NetWare 2 and 3 were cheaper and better suited for DOS/Windows
| networking.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > until Linux and the BSDs came about.
|
| I assume you mean BSD/386 and successors? BSD itself was first
| released about eight years before AIX. AIX even has bits of
| 4.3BSD in it.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Sure; that was just the order I encountered these. I was also
| surprised that Linux' LVM was basically a clone of AIX'
| (whereas FBSD's vinum was a clone of Veritas).
| p_l wrote:
| IIRC LVM was based on HP-UX, EVMS was based on AIX LVM
| unixhero wrote:
| Ooh Norsk Data. How was it?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Not sure about the software, but the hardware was gorgeous. I
| have an eBay alert for the "Norsk Data" and "Nordata"
| strings.
| unixhero wrote:
| Some are stored throughout Norway. If you're willing to
| maintain it well you might find a donor in. Norway.
| http://www.sintran.com
| ojn wrote:
| There are a few collectors in Sweden too.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| NTNU's computer museum has quite a number of Norsk Data
| machines, but they are unfortunately not accessible to
| the public.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| > _How was it?_
|
| Good times! Ergonomic terminals, hamacas, happy hour on
| Fridays, smoking at the desk, SINTRAN ...
|
| To clarify, this wasn't in Oslo but in Kiel, North Germany,
| where they had a co-op with Christian-Albrecht-Uni for
| compilers (other than ND's own PLANC language), and also
| developed a system for public libraries.
| ojn wrote:
| LI-FI,,,
|
| It's sad how the ND-100/500 (and 5000+) families have
| almost completely disappeared, including online material
| about them.
|
| The IT department at my university was involved in NDIX
| development (BSD for ND-5000), I believe. This was a few
| years before my time so I didn't get first-hand exposure to
| that.
|
| I do regret not holding on to one of the Compact
| ND-100/110s that we had around in the late 90s, nor any of
| the Tandberg terminals that we had huge numbers of.
| unixhero wrote:
| Sounds great thanks for the insight :)
| bregma wrote:
| I would have loved to have had this. As it was, I used MiNT and
| it gave me everything I needed (preemtive multitasking OS
| bootable from hard drive with a POSIXish userspace). I think MiNT
| was possibly the most impressive single-developer project I have
| even encountered.
| nynyny7 wrote:
| Apart from Atari's proprietary Unix, the TT also runs Linux
| (https://imgur.com/a/gpvi3du) and NetBSD
| (https://twitter.com/nbtt030).
| rbanffy wrote:
| That's not as much fun. It's like installing Linux on a
| SPARCstation, an SGI, or an IBM RS/6000. It's possible, but
| just not as much as exploring the uniqueness of those machines.
| johnklos wrote:
| There's a certain kind of magic to m68k. They were the first real
| 32 bit processor for the masses, at least by the criteria of
| being able to program without worrying about addressing limits,
| segments or banks.
|
| The m68020 in 1984 arguably became the first widely available
| modern CPU, even if one had to add the MMU separately. '020
| systems with enough memory can run modern software in 2022, and
| there are many thousands of binary packages available.
|
| It's an elegant architecture with an orthogonal instruction set,
| easy to understand instructions, wonderfully documented hardware,
| very little errata and no artificial limitations.
|
| It's not only interesting to preserve the history of Unix on
| m68k, but it's interesting to run with NetBSD as a modern machine
| now.
| chasil wrote:
| Actually, ARM1 was a much more efficient design for the masses.
|
| The Motorola 68000 oddly had 68,000 transistors, while ARM1 had
| 25,000. Both had a 24-bit address bus.
|
| It was introduced much later (1985, versus 1979 for 68000)
| despite using fewer transistors.
| mikepavone wrote:
| FWIW, the 68000 transistors number is just marketing. I don't
| remember the exact number, but a full netlist has been
| produced from tracing the 68000 die and IIRC the actual
| transistor count is at least 20K less than that. Still a lot
| more than the ARM1 of course. I would guess that 68000
| machine code is a fair bit denser than 32-bit ARM though
| which was important in the 80s when memory was still very
| expensive.
| chasil wrote:
| Interesting, google had the 68,000 count on several sites.
| Were they trying to ramp up the transistor count?
|
| ARM Thumb and Super-H were supposed to address the code
| density problem. I see the smallest ARM binary at
| busybox.net is for Thumb.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| To me, the extraordinary thing about m68k is that it's such an
| ancient processor family and in some case such ancient actual
| hardware but modern operating systems still work on it; not
| just NetBSD but Linux still maintains support (although distro
| support seems to be extremely spotty).
| LukeShu wrote:
| That's fun, it makes m68k the longest-supported CPU for
| Linux. The m68k was the second CPU Linux ever supported,
| after the i386, and i386 support is long gone.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > It's an elegant architecture with an orthogonal instruction
| set, easy to understand instructions, wonderfully documented
| hardware, very little errata and no artificial limitations.
|
| The 68K instruction set was so, so much nicer than anything
| from Intel. It's a shame that Intel won that round. Imagine if
| IBM had chosen the 68K for the PC.
| jagrsw wrote:
| For historical record, first m68k which could use mmu was
| m68010
|
| I've never seen m68008 m68010 and m68012 in action though.
| Seems Sun used them.
| kabdib wrote:
| The vanilla 68000 can definitely use an MMU.
|
| I think you're conflating "can handle a general fault" and
| "does address translation". Some PDP-11s ran Unix just fine
| with MMUs that didn't generate page faults (they just did
| address translation and bounds checking). You can even do
| fault handling on the 68000 if you're willing to limit it to
| instructions that are known to work or that you can throw
| away (e.g., XOR, which is what Sun used for its stack
| probes).
|
| I designed an MMU for the 68000-based Atari ST (it did
| translation and bounds checking in an interesting way), and
| we implemented it in the silicon. A Unix for it never
| happened, unfortunately. https://dadhacker-125488.ingress-
| alpha.easywp.com/how-the-at...
| jagrsw wrote:
| Thanks for the correction. Your project is very
| interesting.
|
| I think that my mistake was caused by this, that some
| manual I read in old days was claiming that m68010 was the
| first one which was able to run proper unix OSes, because
| it had correctly implemented privilege levels. And I
| somehow conflated it with MMU.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| That's a really interesting bit of history -- thanks for
| writing it all down and sharing!
| [deleted]
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| The Sinclair QL used the 68008.
| tombert wrote:
| Tangential, but there's also a port/recreation of Linux/Unix on
| the C64 that's fun to play with in an emulator called LUnix (it's
| not just a hacker tool :) ).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LUnix
| hestefisk wrote:
| This is very cool. Is it possible to find a remake of an m68k
| architecture machine to run at home?
| nynyny7 wrote:
| If your question was for a machine to run Atari System V Unix
| on, though, I'm afraid the answer is: an Atari TT. None of the
| m68k machines (or FPGA emulations thereof) mentioned in the
| other comments will run it.
|
| Perhaps (but I didn't test) Atari System V Unix would run under
| the Hatari emulator.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The Firebee (http://firebee.org/) is ColdFire based, and
| ColdFire is pretty much m68k cleaned up for the new millennium
| and pretty much backwards compatible (some opcodes are
| different but can be translated in software, or things can be
| re-assembled without huge modifications.)
|
| I'm not sure of the state of the Linux port for it, but it runs
| Atari TOS and EmuTOS (a GPL rewrite) and the FreeMiNT
| extensions which turn TOS into a multitasking POSIX compliant
| system that runs most GNU-type utilities.
| lproven wrote:
| If you mean to build yourself, yes, there are several.
|
| A few examples...
|
| https://rosco-m68k.com/
|
| https://github.com/74hc595/68k-nano
|
| https://shop.mcjohn.it/en/diy-kit/46-68k-mbc.html
|
| https://www.kswichit.com/68k/68k.html
|
| This one is a one-off but for me it is one of the most
| impressive:
|
| https://www.ist-schlau.de/
|
| It runs EmuTOS _and_ 68K Enhanced BASIC.
| windenntw wrote:
| This one is ready made: http://www.apollo-core.com/v4.html
| johnklos wrote:
| But not suitable for anything Unix or Unix related, because
| it has no MMU (and likely won't ever have an MMU).
| randombits0 wrote:
| MiSTer Project does 68000 on an NE10 FPGA.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Can it do a 68030? Probably yes, but I don't have one.
| miohtama wrote:
| In 80s and 90s engineers knew how to write developer
| documentation - a lost skill
| http://www.atariunix.com/docs/developers_guide.pdf
| dboreham wrote:
| They still know. They're just not told/incentivized to do so.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| It was the golden age of computing. Today's best in class
| documentation (Stripe!?) doesn't come close to average
| documentation in those days.
| p_l wrote:
| Documentation like that is written by specialist _technical
| writers_ in cooperation with engineering.
|
| Corporations found out that they can skimp on that and still
| get paid.
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