AMIX

Technical details

Amiga Unix (aka: AMIX) was a port of Unix SysV R4 developed for the Amiga 3000 line as an alternative to the Amiga OS, and does not have compatibility layers to run Amiga OS programs. Aside from the Amiga 3000UX, the Amiga 3000 line included AmigaOS by default. AMIX was a proprietary OS, but components of it were open source. AMIX was released in 1990, and had some success as an OS sold to university students, but its last release was in 1992, and Commodore dropped support for it in 1993.

Character details

AMIX-tan is represented as a tall woman with some similarities in appearance to Amiga-tan, and is depicted wearing a stylized military uniform with a cape, and carries a magician wand. Her wand is decorated with a small globe on top, a pair of red and blue ribbons, and five stripes in the Amiga logo colors. She is a magician who was proficient in the standard sorcery all Unix-tans knew, and knew several unique spells, referencing the unique commands that Amiga Unix has. Her personality was very stern and unforgiving, as AMIX was said to be a difficult and frustrating OS to install. She often felt lonely and coped by being so strict towards others.

Appearance

AMIX-tan had brown hair, light blue eyes, red glasses, and wore a white headband with the Commodore logo on it. The color scheme of her uniform was a muted version of the color scheme of Amiga-tan's Commodore cadet uniform. Her overcoat was gray with white epaulettes, blue trim, a red belt, and had a long blue cape. She wore a light blue collared shirt with a red tie.

Family and relationships

Commodore-tans

The Commodore-tans are her stepsisters, and she served alongside them as part of the Commodore Fleet, aside from Commodore 65-tan, whom she never met. AMIX-tan did not often spend a lot of time with them because she had different missions than them, competing in the education market and against the DEC and Unix workstations instead of the contemporary home computers. Of the Commodore-tans, she got along with PET-tan the best, and PET-tan entrusted her to be Amiga-tan's mentor.

Amiga

Amiga-tan is another of her stepsisters. Although AMIX-tan is younger than Amiga-tan, AMIX-tan was entrusted to be her mentor who would teach her how to fit in with the Commodore Fleet and to follow their protocols. The relationship they had was complicated. Their personalities clashed, and AMIX-tan was frustrated over Amiga-tan not consistently following the Commodore Fleet protocol. Amiga-tan remained friendly and wanted to be her friend. AMIX-tan wanted to accept this friendship, but she also felt some resentment over Amiga-tan taking away some of her following, even if it was unintentional.

Unix Family

She was shunned by most of the Unix Family because of her support for open sourcery before it became socially acceptable for them to support. Her affiliation with Commodore exempted her from fighting in the Unix Wars, and she was very loyal to Commodore, but the shunning she felt from most of the Unix Family affected her. She almost formed an alliance with Solaris-tan, but it did not work, referencing Sun's failed deal with Commodore to produce the Amiga 3000UX under license.

History and background

AMIX-tan was born circa 1988, when a prototype of AMIX was demonstrated, and began her career with the Commodore Fleet with her debut in 1990. She was quickly entrusted to be Amiga-tan's mentor while being assigned different missions from each other, but inadvertantly became each other's competitors.

AMIX-tan's assignments were to build a following in the education market, and to compete against the other Unix-tans that were in the workstation market. Amiga-tan's capabilities were more versatile, but overlapped with AMIX-tan's in the education market, which caused her and AMIX-tan to be competitors to each other, with Amiga-tan often winning by gaining more of a following. Amiga-tan's success undercut AMIX-tan's ability to keep her following. AMIX-tan was briefly successful in the education market, and taught as a college professor, but she had to retire when her corporate support from Commodore was dropped in 1993. Her loss of corporate support caused her health to sharply decline.

She left the Commodore Fleet and briefly lived as a wanderer until her death in 1994, looking for students to teach about open sourcery. Although she couldn't fully commit to practicing it, she looked for someone who could.