Amiga Minix 1.5 Demo

On Fish Disk 525, there's a disk image containing a demo version of Minix 1.5 from 1991. Back in those days it wasn't free as in speech, but it had some significance in boosting GPL anyways: This was roughly the version Linus Torvalds used when he started his work on the Linux kernel. While it might at this point have been of academic interest, Minix certainly provided for a rather crude user experience, even by *nix-like text mode standards. It was hardly an improvement on the Amiga, which already provided 32-bit preemptive multitasking, a powerful command line and a beautifully coherent desktop metaphor.

A few photos

Click the images for larger versions.

The amazing welcome screen and obligatory hardware shot.

Zoom in on the welcome screen.

Process list.

Testing out a few function keys resulted in this neat memory/register dump. I guess I should read the docs.

Using the included "mined" editor.