The author seems to be unsure as to how widely the 2500UX was sold; I can confirm first hand that it was a real thing; I obtained parts of one from a dumpster dive at a Canadian university in the early 2000s. Sadly the case was mangled by a friend who really wanted its floppy drive for an SGI Indy we'd found in an earlier haul...
(I still have the 2500's accelerator card. The Indy is intact, boots, and sitting dormant in a cozy heated garage on a farm somewhere. There's also this hilarious story about how I tracked down the machine's original owner and naïvely asked him for help with removing the root password. He was amused and actually did so, though not without throwing a fair amount of shade at the university for poor hardware disposal practices...)
evaneykelen · 3h ago
I remember getting one on loan from Commodore Netherlands around 1992-1993. We were an ISV back then, and CBM provided these machines to allow us to talk to their engineers back in Pennsylvania via email and Usenet. While the emails are not preserved, I did find a post I highly likely made using an A3000UX [1]. We had the machine dial in once per day to sync email and Usenet posts. Phone costs were high, so we had to keep the phone line open as short as possible. It was actually quite handy because picking up the phone in the Netherlands to talk to an engineer in the States was prohibitively expensive (around $9 per minute in todays money, iirc). It was my first use of The Internet.
I've always associated Amigas with AmigaOS, and this is the first I heard about Unix. Why would you replace AmigaOS with Unix? Is it because it would be substantially cheaper than other 68030 Unix workstations?
pavlov · 48m ago
As mentioned in the story, everybody with a 68k or RISC computer in the 1980s tried their hand at making a Unix workstation because the market was so lucrative.
In addition to Commodore there were Apple, Acorn, and Atari also making these upscale plays with Unix. Sun and NeXT were native to this market. And non-Unix workstation vendors like Apollo were adding compatibility.
It was a crowded market and Commodore didn't bring anything unique to it. The Amiga's multimedia strengths were practically wasted running X Windows.
toast0 · 6h ago
That the suggested deals don't make a lot of sense doesn't mean there weren't discussions. Maybe the discussions ended because the deals wouldn't have made sense.
Maybe discussions happened during development when it wasn't so obvious that they didn't make sense.
pram · 3h ago
A brand new 68030 system in 1990 seems DOA to me.
ido · 1h ago
It was not - 68000 and 68020 (and 68030 of course) based systems were still sold later than that. The highest end mac in 1990 was 68030 based (https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_ii/specs/mac_iifx.htm...) and was prohibitively expensive. New 68030 models were still being introduced as late as 1994.
fredoralive · 30m ago
It’s a bit mixed, by 1990 most UNIX vendors were moving to various RISC architectures so a 68k based workstation would appear rather old fashioned for that market. People paid Serious money for a UNIX system to do Serious work, so why cheap out on yesterdays technology?
A/UX didn’t seem to do that well in the market either.
(I still have the 2500's accelerator card. The Indy is intact, boots, and sitting dormant in a cozy heated garage on a farm somewhere. There's also this hilarious story about how I tracked down the machine's original owner and naïvely asked him for help with removing the root password. He was amused and actually did so, though not without throwing a fair amount of shade at the university for poor hardware disposal practices...)
[1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.amiga.multimedia/c/Vyt0...
In addition to Commodore there were Apple, Acorn, and Atari also making these upscale plays with Unix. Sun and NeXT were native to this market. And non-Unix workstation vendors like Apollo were adding compatibility.
It was a crowded market and Commodore didn't bring anything unique to it. The Amiga's multimedia strengths were practically wasted running X Windows.
Maybe discussions happened during development when it wasn't so obvious that they didn't make sense.
A/UX didn’t seem to do that well in the market either.