>> this had real processing capabilities vaguely moddelled after Unix
> 
> AmigaOS was farther from being UNIX-like than DOS 2.0 was. The two had 
> absolutely nothing in common.
> 
> Let me rephrase: What did you think was common about the two of those? 
> About the only thing I can think of is they both had pre-emptive 
> interrupts.

I always wondered why the hell AmigaDOS provided this lame little "more" 
command. Or why it had "type". I was even more perplexed by "ed" - a 
program that lets you edit a text file one line at a time by typing in 
utterly cryptic instructions. And I often wondered why the "dir" command 
has a "SHOW=" option.

...and then I read about Unix for the first time, and I realised that 
that's where all this stuff comes from. That "ed" thing is for scripted 
editing of text files. The "SHOW=" option allows you to write 
scripts-that-write-scripts. "type" is basically the Unix "cat" program. 
And "more" is there because it's there in Unix.

[On top of that AmigaDOS allows scripts to have multiple parameters 
(with default values), local environment variables, uses variable 
expansion, and generally does a number of things similar to what various 
Unix shells give you. It also has pipes, launching background processes, 
etc.]

Obviously there's also a truckload of ways AmigaOS is *different* from 
Unix. [There are no device files, pathnames have a syntax more like 
MS-DOS, configuration is always stored in binary files not text files...]

>> [Again, I suppose theoretically you could do the same thing to a Linux 
>> distro with enough symlinks. But since I have absolutely NO CLUE how 
>> Linux actually works and this does not appear to be documented 
>> anywhere........]
> 
> I saw a distro that used symlinks to completely "fix" the legacy layout 
> of files. So their Linux had a /Programs and a /Library and a /Users and 
> so on, not unlike OSX apparently has.

Now I would suspect that would tend to break horribly as soon as some 
new application is added that expects everything to be in the normal 
locations...

[Basically I have absolutely no clue how the traditional Unix file 
layout is supposed to work. I don't know why, for example, we have /bin, 
/root/bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/share/bin...]

>> Ooo, ooo, and... TOKEN RING! Remember that?? Trying to get MS-DOS 
>> powered PCs to talk to each other over a token ring network... Never 
>> tried it personally, but I watched first-hand, and it wasn't pretty.
> 
> I didn't have any trouble with that, except for the amount of RAM it 
> took.  Left little for the actual applications.

They had trouble. Somebody walked past and the T-adaptor on their PC 
fell apart, breaking the ring. That and the constant AUTOEXEC.BAT 
editing required to set up new programs or devices on PCs...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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