My understanding is that the old MacOS Classic "Blue box" dates back to making System 7 virtualizable on A/UX. The issue at the time is the typical Unix/X11 gr

My understanding is that the old MacOS Classic "Blue box" dates back to making System 7 virtualizable on A/UX. The issue at the time is the typical Unix/X11 graphical application was not really impressive compared to what you could get with native System 7. (Which is still mostly true with modern MacOS vs Linux.) So AU/X gave you some commandline stuff... Graphical apps you wanted Mac. Also the story is that A/UX mostly existed because of government purchasing requirements that a computer had to be POSIX-capable. Often it was never removed from the shrinkwrap.