5 ms·

It should be noted that certain 680x0 Macintoshes could run a real UNIX, created by Apple no less. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX https://en.wikipedia.org/

by afreak 11y ago

It should be noted that certain 680x0 Macintoshes could run a real UNIX, created by Apple no less. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX What was unique about it was that it could run System 7 applications alongside your common System V/BSD tools. I've still got a Quadra 800 at home running it.

mixmastamyk 11y ago
That was a real missed opportunity, the equivalent of OS X decades earlier
- rbanffy 11y ago
  It did require a ridiculously expensive computer for its time, well into the workstation range, but with a relatively puny hardware compared to what Sun could offer at the time.
  - nrr 11y ago
    More aptly, FPU and MMU hardware were incredibly expensive in the late 1980's and early 1990's, and the amount of RAM to sustain running A/UX would've crept you closer into workstation territory anyway. Keep in mind that this was a time when one was not guaranteed to have memory segmentation hardware, let alone floating point hardware. We take this for granted in 2015, but in the period between 1985 and 1995, it was a serious luxury for lots of computer buyers. That said, with 4MB of 60ns RAM and a 68030 costing you $10k to start on a Mac IIfx and an upgrade to take you up to 8MB potentially costing you another couple grand, why not just go SGI and be done with it?
    - yuhong 11y ago
      1MB SIMMs was much cheaper than this by then, though the IIfx was famous for requiring special 64 pin SIMMs.
- ams6110 11y ago
  Equivalent? No. Unix is not the secret sauce of OSX. I never used A/UX. Did it have a GUI at all?
  - vt240 11y ago
    Yes, a variation of the System 7 finder. Personally I used MachTen which was a 4.3BSD variation which ran on top of the usual system.
drudru11 11y ago
au/x was an interesting UNIX, but it did have its flaws. If the system beep occurred, the kernel would lose interrupts. Needless to say, this was not a good thing.
- mikeash 11y ago
  What manner of madness caused this?
  - CodeWriter23 11y ago
    I imagine, the oscillator was software driven, and play_sound (or whatever they called it in the library) disabled interrupts so the sound wouldn't be modified by an interrupt.
- mrpippy 11y ago
  I'm surprised that would be the case, at least by A/UX 3 the Sound Manager routines were re-routed to call into special A/UX implementations (which I assume wouldn't be disabling interrupts).
mietek 11y ago
It might be worth pointing out that there is a Macintosh II emulator built solely for the purpose of running A/UX. https://github.com/pruten/Shoebill https://github.com/pruten/Shoebill A mirror of the well-known A/UX software repository, Jagubox, has been published at the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/25_12_2009_jagubox https://archive.org/details/25_12_2009_jagubox
- glesica 11y ago
  > This will probably be the last release. I won't be able to work on Shoebill going forward (by contractual obligation), so I wanted to race out one last release. Really sad that companies put these kinds of restrictions on their employees...
  - afreak 11y ago
    Well considering that the author went on to work at Apple, it sort of makes sense. I don't think he was explicitly told not to continue development, but it is likely that some sort of boilerplate part of his contract restricts him.
    - mikeash 11y ago
      I don't think it makes any sense, and the fact that it's a boilerplate clause everyone gets makes it worse, not better. Employers really need to stop trying to control what their employees do while off the clock.
      - mrpippy 11y ago
        The project depends on reverse-engineering proprietary (if archaic) Apple hardware/software. Do you think Microsoft would/should allow their employees to contribute to Wine? Or Nintendo employees working on open-source emulators?
        mikeash 11y ago
ja27 11y ago
We had a lab of I think Mac IIx's running A/UX at Georgia Tech. My understanding was that Apple only did A/UX so they could satisfy a government procurement requirement of having an available *nix for their hardware. We weren't supposed to let people reboot them into Mac OS so the lab was mostly empty all the time.
- yuhong 11y ago
  A/UX 2.0 was much better than 1.x I think though, including the Finder and MultiFinder (previously Mac apps had to be launched from the command line). Trivia: A/UX 1.x used separate programs to be used at the command line to read/write MFS/HFS volumes, and 1.0 only included the MFS one.
kabdib 11y ago
Those were the Mac IIs, which had 68020 CPUs and could resume instructions after faulting.
icedchai 11y ago
They needed a real MMU though (68851). The Amiga also supposed real Unix on 68030 machines.
yuhong 11y ago
Trivia: A/UX 1.0 was released just before the famous DRAM shortage and at one point it was common to buy A/UX Mac IIs just to have the 4MB of RAM in them.

by afreak 11y ago

mixmastamyk 11y ago

That was a real missed opportunity, the equivalent of OS X decades earlier

rbanffy 11y ago
It did require a ridiculously expensive computer for its time, well into the workstation range, but with a relatively puny hardware compared to what Sun could offer at the time.
- nrr 11y ago
  More aptly, FPU and MMU hardware were incredibly expensive in the late 1980's and early 1990's, and the amount of RAM to sustain running A/UX would've crept you closer into workstation territory anyway. Keep in mind that this was a time when one was not guaranteed to have memory segmentation hardware, let alone floating point hardware. We take this for granted in 2015, but in the period between 1985 and 1995, it was a serious luxury for lots of computer buyers. That said, with 4MB of 60ns RAM and a 68030 costing you $10k to start on a Mac IIfx and an upgrade to take you up to 8MB potentially costing you another couple grand, why not just go SGI and be done with it?
  - yuhong 11y ago
    1MB SIMMs was much cheaper than this by then, though the IIfx was famous for requiring special 64 pin SIMMs.
ams6110 11y ago
Equivalent? No. Unix is not the secret sauce of OSX. I never used A/UX. Did it have a GUI at all?
- vt240 11y ago
  Yes, a variation of the System 7 finder. Personally I used MachTen which was a 4.3BSD variation which ran on top of the usual system.

drudru11 11y ago

au/x was an interesting UNIX, but it did have its flaws. If the system beep occurred, the kernel would lose interrupts. Needless to say, this was not a good thing.

mikeash 11y ago
What manner of madness caused this?
- CodeWriter23 11y ago
  I imagine, the oscillator was software driven, and play_sound (or whatever they called it in the library) disabled interrupts so the sound wouldn't be modified by an interrupt.
mrpippy 11y ago
I'm surprised that would be the case, at least by A/UX 3 the Sound Manager routines were re-routed to call into special A/UX implementations (which I assume wouldn't be disabling interrupts).

mietek 11y ago

It might be worth pointing out that there is a Macintosh II emulator built solely for the purpose of running A/UX. https://github.com/pruten/Shoebill https://github.com/pruten/Shoebill A mirror of the well-known A/UX software repository, Jagubox, has been published at the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/25_12_2009_jagubox https://archive.org/details/25_12_2009_jagubox

glesica 11y ago
> This will probably be the last release. I won't be able to work on Shoebill going forward (by contractual obligation), so I wanted to race out one last release. Really sad that companies put these kinds of restrictions on their employees...
- afreak 11y ago
  Well considering that the author went on to work at Apple, it sort of makes sense. I don't think he was explicitly told not to continue development, but it is likely that some sort of boilerplate part of his contract restricts him.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    I don't think it makes any sense, and the fact that it's a boilerplate clause everyone gets makes it worse, not better. Employers really need to stop trying to control what their employees do while off the clock.
    - mrpippy 11y ago
      The project depends on reverse-engineering proprietary (if archaic) Apple hardware/software. Do you think Microsoft would/should allow their employees to contribute to Wine? Or Nintendo employees working on open-source emulators?
      - mikeash 11y ago

ja27 11y ago

We had a lab of I think Mac IIx's running A/UX at Georgia Tech. My understanding was that Apple only did A/UX so they could satisfy a government procurement requirement of having an available *nix for their hardware. We weren't supposed to let people reboot them into Mac OS so the lab was mostly empty all the time.

yuhong 11y ago
A/UX 2.0 was much better than 1.x I think though, including the Finder and MultiFinder (previously Mac apps had to be launched from the command line). Trivia: A/UX 1.x used separate programs to be used at the command line to read/write MFS/HFS volumes, and 1.0 only included the MFS one.

kabdib 11y ago

Those were the Mac IIs, which had 68020 CPUs and could resume instructions after faulting.

icedchai 11y ago

They needed a real MMU though (68851). The Amiga also supposed real Unix on 68030 machines.

yuhong 11y ago

Trivia: A/UX 1.0 was released just before the famous DRAM shortage and at one point it was common to buy A/UX Mac IIs just to have the 4MB of RAM in them.