[HN Gopher] Atari System V Unix - Unofficial Website ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-28 23:01 UTC)