Re: lynx-dev Fwd: Lynx for Amiga

[David Woolley]

> >????  AmigaOS doesn't have the slightest relationship with BSD!  I
> >believe there are NetBSD and probably OpenBSD ports for the Amiga, but
> >those are not AmigaOS, which is based on Tripos, from some UK
> >university.  Commodore also once shipped their own Unix port, which was

Cambridge (I didn't know that AmigaOS was based on Tripos, but I do have
a copy of some Tripos documentation).

> >SVR4.0-based.
 
> While using "based on" is far too strong, from what I remember from 
> Amiga-owning
> housemates, the shell was pretty UNIX-y, so I could imagine my hypothesis 
> above
> may be true.

I don't think it is that surprising.  Unix is written in C, C is
derived from BCPL and BCPL is in turn derived from CPL.  CPL was a
large language development project that never took off; BCPL was the
boostrapping language, which was adopted, if not written, by Martin
Richards at Cambridge.

The original Tripos was a research operating system written in BCPL.

Bourne shell syntax is based on Algol 68 (that's 1968) and it's author
Steve Bourne taught Algol 68 at Cambridge before he went to Bell Labs.

Cambridge's own command interpreters were much more sophisticated than
most commercial ones (certainly than IBM's timesharing one (TSO)) at the
time and already had standard input and output concepts, but not pipes.

Some other, more technical aspects, of the Unix kernel were in the Titan
operating system at Cambridge in the late 1960s.

All in all there is rather a lot of coupling between Cambridge England and
the design of Unix, so if it is also coupled to AmigaOS, I would expect
commonality even if there was no direct cross-fertilization. 

(I believe BBC/Acorn have Cambridge connections, and several of the
Amstrad team were from Cambridge, although not really coupled to the
computer science department (they are more connected to Brentwood Grammar
School, of Douglas Adams fame)).