I Found the Lost Amiga UNIX 2.02

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:01]Hello everyone.

[00:00:03]I want to share with you something interesting and I'm hoping that uh vintage computer enthusiasts like myself uh comment under this video and either prove me right or wrong because I think I discovered something that hasn't been discovered yet.

[00:00:28]The Amigga 3000 UX that you see here next to me. Uh I acquired it um last year at an auction uh organized by Free Software Foundation um for their 40th anniversary.

[00:00:45]Uh they put up many interesting items for the auction. Uh actually including the GNU um head their their logo original drawing which went for like many many many thousands of dollars. But um never mind that I was interested in this Amigga UX plus one more item which maybe I'll spend a different video on.

[00:01:11]this Amigga UX uh you know I was eyeing it and was thinking okay it's first of all very interesting for me because this is I think the only model 3000 UX that uh I still don't have in my collection.

[00:01:26]So I was I I really wanted to to see it and to purchase it. Second, the origins of the computer itself uh were interesting because it was used within the free software foundation offices. So I was hoping that it has some interesting software on their hard drive. We know that free software foundation was u preoccupied with building GNU operating system utilities.

[00:01:56]Um we we know all that history. I'm not going to go into that. So I was thinking like hey maybe early versions of of uh of the GNU software will be there maybe some source code that I can look into this kind of stuff. So so that was my that was my hope and uh and also you know I I wanted to uh to support free software found foundation because they I you know I relied a lot on their software throughout my almost entire professional life and and you know Given the sheer interest in in Linux and no utilities that this FSF name and GPL their their legal product have always been somewhere uh around so why not support them. So I I bought it. The auction was actually itself was interesting because initially I thought I lost it. the winner, the initial the the original winner bid 1 second after the uh auction theoretically finished it. It finished let's say I don't know 3 p.m. my time and that person placed their bid 1 second after 3 p.m. plus 1 second and you know I thought okay and and they were considered the winner by the system. I said like either the rules are wrong because the rules were saying you can bid until 3 p.m. or um or the system is wrong. Doesn't matter like I you know I I was I was a bit upset but I gave up.

[00:03:30]I just wrote a letter however to FSF and saying hey guys you probably your system is wrong because the the uh the highest bidder before 3 p.m. was myself. Uh, I wasn't complaining and I wasn't hoping on anyone, you know, uh, sending this amigga to me and I was actually congratulating the winner. But, but, you know, I I just wanted to point that out to them. Turns out uh you know they looked at my email and said okay hey like we can't give you the one that you originally were were was eyeing but we have an exactly the same model another Amigga 3000 UX in our warehouse and we're going to sell it to you for the same price that you bit if you want it. And of course I wanted it so so they sent it to me. I was super kind of them and you know I I I was really happy that I actually wrote that email because I was hesitant. I should have even you know bothered them with this but it turned out to uh to be a good decision.

[00:04:31]I have this 3000 UX originating from resource foundation. The amigga itself uh is not uh fully working yet. So it starts, it boots, but when it when it's starting to to read the disc, it uh returns some memory errors. I think there is some corros corrosion around the um where the battery was. I removed the battery, but I I think I need to fix a few traces, maybe replace a few components. In this video, I'm going to use the image of this hard drive which I did using Zulus Kazzy. I have devoted an entire separate video which is already on my channel. You can take a look how to dump the content of an old scazzy hard drive using Zulus SCSI. So today what we're going to do is basically jump right into the contents of the hard drive which is the uh the actual interesting part. So uh let's do that maybe as a as a kind of context for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about.

[00:05:35]Commodore Amigga have their own I look at these eyes they keep watching me. uh Commodore Amigga uh have their own operating system Amigga OS uh that's their that that was their main product but they had a short stint a couple of years when they were manufacturing uh computers with and and distributing computers with their own version of the Unix um system uh specifically uh system 5 revision 4.0 O uh and they were distributing them on two Amigga models. One was Amigga 2500 UX and the other one was this one, Amigga uh 3000 UX. Uh there was I think also a tower version of the 3000 UX if uh if my memory doesn't fail me. So uh uh so the interesting part was that Unix at that time was still a very commercial product. But Free Software Foundation their mission was to build utilities that would replace the commercial products or be competitive to the commercial ones and they would be distributed uh and under a free license free as in beer and free as in you know uh freedom of speech. So, so that was their goal and their beautiful mission for which I still admire admire them and for which I'm I'm very thank thankful because these days like new utilities like there are are the the utilities on the Linuxes and and uh any system that you that you're an admin of okay there are plenty of them everywhere. So that the time when this was manufactured like be uh at the end of the uh 1980s, beginning of the 1990s was the time also when the GNU software was under uh very intense development.

[00:07:33]New utilities were starting to pop up.

[00:07:35]The first one that I think new uh the first new initiative was the GCC the compiler. I think that was the first I I would have to check in in Wikipedia or some that but that's not the point. The point is that this hard drive comes from these those times. So so you know the content of it would be super interesting. I was hoping for some interesting source code or some some interesting utilities etc. So now maybe it's a good time to just basically start recording my screen and say a few words on how I access the disc and uh and what I discovered there because that's the uh that's the most interesting uh part. So let me start recording.

[00:08:21]And the first thing that that you see here is that I've made multiple copies of uh of the image of this hard drive. Uh the reason being very simple, I don't want to lose them. Uh I put them in multiple uh computers and save them. I don't want to accidentally overwrite or uh or delete or whatever and any changes that I'll be making uh will be made on on the copies of it. I want to preserve the original one for posteriority and maybe I'll share it actually with the free software foundation themselves. Maybe even with some computer museum. I was I know that they are interesting in interested in in such old disk images.

[00:09:08]Uh however a few uh words first of like a kind of disclaimer. I will be redacting large parts of the screen when when showing to you redacting for a very simple reason. This uh hard drive was used by multiple people and it still contains a lot of PII personal per personally identifiable information right so so because of that uh you know I need to be very very cautious what I'm sharing on the screen and I I prefer to redact more than less to to to air on the side of caution so uh don't uh don't be mad at me that you'll be uh you'll see large parts of of the screen blurred or reducted and that's that's the reason um people who used it are still alive and they may not want uh whatever they put in their computer to be displayed in public. So that's one uh that's one disclaimer. The second very interesting thing is that uh the actual people who use this um hard drive um they are uh like very well known in the free software uh community uh including you know the best known names associated with free software foundation. So I don't have to even tell you who who that is. But yes, these uh people like who have almost the status of celebrities these days, they were using this computer. So that's you know one exciting part about it. But that's not why I'm recording this video.

[00:10:47]I'm recording it uh because the operating system itself is is very interesting. So let's get to it. So the first thing that I did and what I usually do with images of hard drives is basically run it through the strings utility that shows me if there's actual textual content uh there uh and which proves that probably the hard drive wasn't wiped completely. So this is what I did. Let's do that now.

[00:11:28]So the strings show us that there is indeed some content here. Uh you see like pieces bits and pieces here. But one thing that we already see is that there are things like Unix boot, Unix swap, uh workbench 1.3, workbench 2x work, etc., etc. So it looks it looks like they are uh partitions um defined there.

[00:12:01]And there is also the header RDSK which is basically like master boot record in uh in uh PC hard hard drives but this is the equivalent in the amigga. Let's do one more thing. Let's do the same but now send it to hex dump again. Show what's what's in there. It's basically a different way of viewing the same. So again these look definitely like partitions. So I knew that there is something even if it was you know formatted it wasn't formatted on low level and probably there would be something that we could recover. I could just scan the whole disk with strings and find, hey, is there any textual information? But it would be much easier would have been much easier for me if I was able to log in to that hard drive as a regular user. So I connected the hard drive to my FSU Amigga emulator.

[00:13:09]You see this is how I pointed it to uh to the hard drive. I set up the Amigga as an A3000. It's here. I didn't make many changes. The these Amiggas didn't come with any accelerators or anything like that. The UX ones.

[00:13:27]I added a graphics card. I don't know if that's even needed.

[00:13:31]So, not many changes. The uh FSU configuration needs to point to uh the right hard drive and the hard drive needs to be um R DB uh type. Um and that's that. So we can start it now and let's see how this boots. Sometimes it boots, sometimes it doesn't. It's it's a bit finicky how it works.

[00:13:57]I think it didn't now.

[00:14:00]Yeah. Let's try again. Sometimes it takes a couple of tries.

[00:14:06]I don't know why.

[00:14:08]Looks like it's booting, but now it will I think try again because it's finding some issues on the image. Yeah, now it's going to boot. So, first of all, you see the interesting bits already there. And uh and the main thing that I want to discuss here, look at the very top of the screen. There's the version of the uh of the Amigga Unix which I just booted and the uh version is 2.02 C 2.02C specifically. Now this is the discovery that uh I'm very curious about because I've searched every possible corner of the internet including the Amigga Unix um u specific page. They only have versions like one 1.1 I think 2.0 2.01 then 2.03 but in between them there's no 2.02 anywhere that I was able to uh to search for and here I I can clearly see we have a version 2.02. So, I think I was able to find a version of AmIGGA Unix, also known as Amix, uh, which, uh, hasn't been discovered uh, so far. So, that's that's the exciting part. And now I want to look into the operating system a little bit more to see what we find there. Again, removing all the personal information.

[00:15:45]So uh and by the way what you see on these screens is also coming from the exact same amigga Unix 2.0 tool uh because I made multiple copies of it as I mentioned of the of the image and I'm running it through two different emulations. One is running the X window system and the other one is the textual console.

[00:16:07]Uh okay so how do I login? How do I know how to login? Uh well there were two approaches that I could take.

[00:16:17]Uh I scanned the uh hard drive using strings as I mentioned and I found the um etc password file which uh in Unix's contains used to contain passwords for users and the list of users themselves.

[00:16:36]Even then already in the end of 1980s the etc password file did not really contain the passwords anymore. It pointed to a it was the passwords were actually stored in a hashed version in a different file which was which is called etc shadow. So that's what I did. I examined both etc password and etc shadow.

[00:17:02]The full list of users was there again very well-known names in etc password assoc people associated with free software foundation and their their passwords in the hashed form in the etc shadow.

[00:17:17]There were two ways that I could try and uh break into this system. first was by guessing the password using appropriate tools for that or second overwriting the u the hashed password. Uh and actually I used a mix of both. So after the first scan I of of the uh of the hashes I was able to recover one password using uh John the Reaper the utility that is uh used for this purposes. So I recovered one password of one of the users.

[00:17:53]For the remaining ones uh I you used the like very brute force approach and basically created my own hashes 13 uh character hashes and replace them within the disk image. It's not that easy because it's not a matter of just you know editing the image and going there and replacing. you can you you're always risking that you're you will move some of the byes uh in the wrong way or replace them in the wrong way. So I used the DD uh utility to replace the very specific bytes at a very specific offset. So I patched basically the uh the hard drive with my own hashes of the passwords that obviously I know. Okay, let's log in to the system with an account which I just created for myself and let's explore a little bit. So starting with the obvious you name all we've already seen that. So it's again 2.0 O2 C version of the AIX or Amigga Unix based on the system file from AT&T and it's compiled for uh for the u Motorola uh microprocessor.

[00:19:13]Now uh what we can do also is the explore the kernel itself a little bit.

[00:19:19]So let's check what uh the this command returns. I made some notes for myself uh before recording this what to explore. So this is a link to stand Unix. Let's explore Unix.

[00:19:40]And you can see that the link was created in September 1991. But the kernel itself is from October 1991.

[00:19:51]So it was compiled uh after the initial link was created.

[00:19:55]So it was a recompiled kernel. And we can actually use the same forensic method to look into the kernel by just piping it through strings. So, let's do that.

[00:20:17]And there's a lot here, mostly diagnostic information for the user. But what I want to find is whether GCC was used here. and seems it was used at least parts of the kernel but probably all of it was already compiled with GCC which is a nice finding because from all the material that I found on the internet especially there was one new uh bulletin uh that that was that was published that said oh AIX uh AIX's kernel was compiled uh starting from version 2.1 but actually this is 2.02 O2 and it seems like GCC traces are already in it. So it must have been already compiled with GCC.

[00:21:12]Definitely looks like that. Now what we can do is go to uh user public bin where normally new utilities would would have been stored and you can see quite a few of them already. In addition to GCC and G++, let G++ should give us a version as well.

[00:21:40]Yeah, G++ is 1.39.1 based on GCC 1.39, but GCC is already in a higher version 1.40.5.

[00:21:50]So, G++ wasn't recompiled to that. I think later GCC and G++ became one command if if I remember correctly the GDB the debugger what version is it 3.54.15 let me quit the debugger I forgot how to do that jar is in version 1 so there are other utilities which were um already built by uh as replacements for older Unix uh utilities like less you you can see less here is was a replacement for more we have elm which was a replacement for mail but I don't think it was made by uh by FSF programmers made by Usenet community trust Dave Tyler but no mention of FSF however that was also as far as I remember a replacement for is now Mayo.

[00:22:56]We have VE visual editor.

[00:23:04]Uh I don't know if it was a replacement for VI. I use VI here anyway. An NTPD which is an news groups demon I think. Uh network news transfer protocol server. I think I used leaf uh or something similar for that uh in my Linux early Linux times to access the new usenet groups. Yeah, let's list the amigga specific utilities. So, AIX contained a separate folder uh which was user amigga bin.

[00:23:44]You see like I have to retype every command which I make a mistake in because the up and down arrows as they work in modern uh shell shell um programs don't work as expected. Same with tab tab doesn't work. These are amigga specific utilities especially amix a mix ADM which allowed you to create a user set the date etc. RDB RDB is an interesting one. Can I even run it as nonroot? I don't think so. Let me switch to the root account.

[00:24:19]Um am I root? I am.

[00:24:25]So this was used to create and manage hard disk partition table. So this can actually give us some information about the hard drive that we're operating in.

[00:24:35]So let's take a look at that first. Let me use mount and our main operating system is mounted def DSK cos1.

[00:24:50]So if I do RDB H dev dsk c 0 d0 s1 is that going to give us no z s0 maybe as the main. Yeah.

[00:25:09]Okay. So that shows us the layout of partitions on uh our hard drive. uh something that we previously only uh looked at using strings and our forensic methods. Uh so it's showing 166 mgabyte uh for the root partition, 31 mgabytes for the swap which is expected because uh Amigga Unix came with 16 megabytes of uh RAM. So usually swap was uh twice the size of the RAM and then boot 2 megabytes which is again sufficient. And we saw that the kernel uh was uh around one uh over one megabyte. So 2 megaby is sufficient for storing the kernel and booting the system. We have the blocks where the partitions start and end all that stuff. So this is interesting. So it looks like because it's the to the total is 166 + 31 + 2 close to 200 megabytes. I don't think there's any space left for the actual AmIGGA OS like workbench and that stuff. Um or maybe just 10 megabytes because this is 210. So maybe they left 10 megabytes but I haven't tried accessing the uh the proper amigga portion of it.

[00:26:28]Maybe what we saw in when doing the scanning of the was just some kind of leftovers from earlier insta installation. So that was RDB. Uh we can also look at DF mount should show us the types of file systems. How to mount V maybe yeah that shows us the first the main partition is UFS. Then there is progue of course that's the sort of virtual one and and FD for def FD I don't know what it is for some floppy uh drive I suppose. Let me go back to my proper um account. What else do we have for Amigga specifically? I don't really know what they are. Well says it's obvious what it does. uh display type.

[00:27:28]What?

[00:27:30]Okay. Some code for the uh display that we're using.

[00:27:36]No man page. There is a man page for that. Okay. It just shows us type of display the Amigga Unix is using. ECS.

[00:27:45]That's interesting.

[00:27:47]What is it? What does it do?

[00:27:51]Nothing about it. Okay. ACS is one of the Amigga graphics architectures. I'm curious what it does. What else? What else? Null clutch. Some kind of patch of some hardware issue, I suppose.

[00:28:08]What does it do?

[00:28:15]Manipulate null clutch elf section to disable null pointer. I'm not going to pretend that I know what it means. It's looks like a workar around for something. What else? System setup.

[00:28:32]System setup. Configuration script that runs automatically the first time you start your Amigga. Okay. How about we do that at the very end of this video? We can try that.

[00:28:44]Color. What does it mean? Background, foreground. It just shows us what color.

[00:28:48]So we have F8000 AAA. If you try it on a different virtual console to 600 FFA. Okay. Yeah. So it shows us the colors of the specific um terminal that we're using. What else?

[00:29:09]AEN.

[00:29:10]Funny that I'm trying out these commands without knowing what they do. Amix package.

[00:29:19]Oh, you need a tape drive for that. So, uh, amigga Unix actually uh required uh tape streamer to be connected uh to uh to the machine. Uh you wouldn't be able to you wouldn't have been able to install that uh system without tape drive. uh when people install it from scratch on emulators, they need to emulate that tap uh tape drive themselves. Um but here obviously we're dealing with a system that has already been installed so no need for that pass w if we do it as a root.

[00:30:06]Okay, I don't want to change anybody's password.

[00:30:17]Mon dump.

[00:30:22]Oh, memory fault. Okay. Anything else? I think that's good.

[00:30:28]Format. I suppose it formats floppies in amigga specific format.

[00:30:35]We may also look into the keyboard maps.

[00:30:38]So we can go to So there are several languages listed, several layouts.

[00:30:51]We can go to fonts.

[00:30:57]Nothing interesting. Not that many fonts. But what I also wanted to do is uh show the default shell which is KSH. I thought it was CS KSH that's fine. Corn shell. And we can also check what's in source code directory.

[00:31:20]There's any source code that these people were working on and that could be interesting. Let's do Let's see what we find in GNU.

[00:31:33]Oh, these look like source codes for Emacs and GCC. That's interesting.

[00:31:42]They are from 1993. So that's already later, like 3 years later after the kernel was two years later after the kernel was compiled. Anything else? News tar as well. Okay, so they may actually contain source code for all these. Elm, finger, kerides, octopus. What is octopus?

[00:32:12]Oh, this display sometimes when emulated gets corrupted.

[00:32:21]Start of text. I don't know what octopus is. Doesn't tell me anything. It looks like descriptions of characters.

[00:32:38]It's good that VI works as expected. I'm a hardcore VI user. So, at least I know my work my way around textual files here.

[00:32:50]Otherwise it would be difficult.

[00:32:53]How about we try and build it?

[00:32:58]Okay. Can I open output file?

[00:33:03]What's the output file?

[00:33:10]We should be able to open it. Okay.

[00:33:12]Maybe I don't have the privilege. Let's try and go there as root. Now if we try and make it Yeah, it builds something.

[00:33:24]What if we run it? Binary oct same syntax carriage. Oh. Ah, nice. It shows us the the keys that were that were pressed. This is nice. I love it. However, how do I go out of it? No, I can't cancel. I can't exit.

[00:33:54]I wish I looked at the source code more closely so that I know at least how to leave this utility, which is a pretty nice utility, but arrows. No. Okay. Arrows don't register.

[00:34:10]The optional ones don't register. Yeah, it dropped the segmentation fault. So, I basically crashed it and it Oh, I also locked myself out of the root root account. That's not great because we're going to need it. SC, what does SC do?

[00:34:34]Let's start with read me this time.

[00:34:36]Match modifier the public domain spreadsheet. Oh, but why don't we try and build this one, too?

[00:34:49]It's building.

[00:34:51]Which one is the binary SC?

[00:34:56]Ah, it's a spreadsheet indeed. It's a spreadsheet. And wow, it it actually supports the vi shortcuts.

[00:35:08]What about sh or share?

[00:35:16]Let's build it. Shouldn't take long.

[00:35:18]It's just two files here.

[00:35:22]Man share make shell archive package.

[00:35:26]Share bundles the named files into a single distribution package suitable for mailing or moving. It's like so it's like basically compression.

[00:35:34]Uh or does it even compress? No, it just archives them. So it's like tar.

[00:35:41]Okay. I don't want to try that out, but it's good to know that it exists. And I'm thinking about the author of it.

[00:35:52]Author Jack Appan at HPFSD 1985 modified by Ryan Young 86.

[00:36:03]Let's go to the games directory or let's look into etc. There are a few here.

[00:36:21]Let's build them all. What does number do?

[00:36:29]Okay, it just reads out numbers. I like it.

[00:36:34]Not reads out. prints out in words something longer. Oh, it does that too.

[00:36:42]Okay, cool utility, but I don't need it.

[00:36:46]What does pig do?

[00:36:49]Reads number. No, repeats number about letters.

[00:36:54]A a s a dd a y f a y. Okay. So it just adds a to anything I type.

[00:37:09]Yeah. Seems so.

[00:37:14]Hello. Transform to hello. Hey. Okay. So it also swaps letters.

[00:37:21]Adam A. Adam.

[00:37:24]Adam. Adam. So, it swaps letters if it's longer. Doesn't matter. Let it run in the background. What does rain do?

[00:37:37]Oh, it's very cool. So, it displays rain in ASKI characters similar to what I see here, but that one is actually worms also from the same directory. Nice. I forgot about one more utility that I saw in user amigga.

[00:37:59]Oh, there's a source source here as well. I didn't notice. Oh, but it's empty. Okay. But the thing that I forgot about was uh the fractals uh display.

[00:38:12]It displays fractals within the virtual console, not within X window system. So this is pretty cool. And actually I saw that you can zoom in and obviously as fractals go it will zoom in and zoom in zoom in at infinitum.

[00:38:36]So this is pretty cool. So, it's just a fractal program with zoom in feature that works right in your in your console without the X window system. So, I think the uh really last thing that is left to explore is the uh X window system itself.

[00:39:00]uh I had some problems configuring the X system here so that it is even you know presentable in a way that that I can share something because it was like whenever I started it the windows were all over the place. It seems that the size of the display here is different from what they used in FSF but uh ultimately I was able to make some sense of it. However, I was not able to change the number of colors to anything other than just one bit depth, meaning black or white. Uh, I don't know why. I know that AIX is capable of displaying um larger color depths. I was unable to do that. Doesn't matter. But let's see what's available in the X Windows system. So, let me start it. I actually had to build my own start script because the original one was a series of dependencies. So it was started starting automatically from the uh init subsystem. It was calling one script and that script was calling other another script then calling something within one of the users directories uh like x init rc or something. Then start start x was taking all that. It was a it was a mess like a series of dependencies. So, I just basically created my own uh X Windows startup script in order to show you what's there. But I'm still not happy with it, especially with the uh fact that it's uh monochrome, but doesn't matter.

[00:40:32]Let's run this.

[00:40:35]Uh let's run X window now and see what's available there. All right. So, I showed you some of that stuff already there. Um but let's start with the obvious. So start the obligatory ice. I always love this. Then the the calculator which is very nice and it's working as expected.

[00:41:09]Uh the maze always amazed me.

[00:41:17]But we need to resize it. The resizing of the windows drives me totally crazy.

[00:41:27]And moving as well. I know there are simpler ways of doing that. They were, but I don't remember them.

[00:41:35]Okay. And we see that TWWM icon manager.

[00:41:38]I think it's Tomm or or something.

[00:41:42]window manager uh allows you to switch between the apps. Actually, you don't even switch it. Just mouse over and they come to focus. Uh which is we also takes some getting used to. Uh what else uh have we got in the X X magnifying glass probably?

[00:42:04]Is it?

[00:42:08]Yes. Oh, so it magnifies that portion.

[00:42:11]Oh, I like these pixels. Love it. Okay, what else was there? Muncher is something that I also saw and I like the effect a lot.

[00:42:29]Okay, let it run.

[00:42:34]We're going to crush the system with this many windows ultimately. Anything else interesting?

[00:42:40]Okay, I'm I'm not going to go into more details about uh each of these utilities. You see them listed here. If you're interested in any of of them, let me know. You've also seen other uh directories which I explored including the source code one. If you're interested in looking into any of these for again computer archaeology purposes, uh let me know. I'll I'll help. I'll share what I found there. We can discuss that in comments. Maybe I can even try and strip this whole system of any personal information and put it somewhere in in uh for the public to to view to explore themselves. Maybe we can we can work on that together if if there's any need for this. And also let me know if if you maybe have seen version 2.02 in the wild somewhere, but I suppose I suppose this is really the only copy in existence.

[00:43:33]Uh, and that's why, you know, this this video is uh is uh probably interesting to someone. Uh, it's a super niche thing, I know, but uh but still maybe of uh some use. Thank you for bearing with me. Uh let me know if you need any more information about this from from my side. Um and that's that. See you in uh future videos.