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I had completely forgotten about A/UX, what a blast from the past. Has A/UX gotten any recent open-source attention?

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
What attention would it get? I mean, it's a neat OS, but it's an ancient enough unix that porting packages to it would be somewhere between difficult and impractical (even if you could compile ex. modern gcc for A/UX, it would need more disk+RAM than is likely to be on a machine of that age), and I'm not aware of any features (or even applications) that would justify trying to clone it (beyond the cool factor).
spijdar 6y ago
It's not recent, but there are some pages with "older" open-source attention like http://www.nleymann.de/appleAUX/AppleAUXMain.htm http://www.nleymann.de/appleAUX/AppleAUXMain.htm I suspect that, like other pre-SysVR4/Solaris-y unixes, compiling anything newer than GCC 2.95-ish will be pretty much impossible. But, depending on your interest/curiosity, it looks like there's some fun stuff to play with.
tzs 6y ago
One feature of A/UX that I'd like to see in current Unix and Unix-like systems is Commando. It was a graphical help system for command-line tools. You would invoke Commando from the shell for a command and it would bring up a dialog to help you construct the command line, which would be written back to the shell. There's a screen shot of it for ls here [1], and mount here [2]. [1] http://toastytech.com/guis/aux3.html http://toastytech.com/guis/aux3.html [2] https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/running-a-ux-apples-at-t-unix-system-7-blend/885 https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/running-a-ux-apples-at-t-u...
- hyperrail 6y ago
  I wonder if Apple got the idea from IBM's OS for the late-80s AS/400 minicomputer line (today's System i servers). The OS/400 command language shell used its own rich knowledge of each command's syntax to present a full-screen form you could fill out to interactively compose a command: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_74/rzal2/rzal2commands.htm https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_74/rza... (Also, OS/400 commands all follow a very strict naming convention, such as the example WrkActJob in the link. The consistency of the words used and the abbreviations for those words were intended to make learning easier.) You see a bit of this today in PowerShell's command auto-completion for built-in commands, PowerShell script files, and cmdlets (user-defined commands written as PowerShell script functions or .NET CLI methods). The graphical PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) even pops up windows that let you interactively fill out forms to enter command options, just like Commando: https://blog.netwrix.com/2018/02/21/windows-powershell-scripting-tutorial-for-beginners/ https://blog.netwrix.com/2018/02/21/windows-powershell-scrip... Regrettably, PowerShell ISE is deprecated, and the recommended replacement of Visual Studio Code with the PowerShell extension isn't an exact one.
flomo 6y ago
Random trivia. Back in the day, Apple was being boycotted by GNU, so the open source situation on A/UX wasn't great even compared to other weird unixes.

What attention would it get? I mean, it's a neat OS, but it's an ancient enough unix that porting packages to it would be somewhere between difficult and impractical (even if you could compile ex. modern gcc for A/UX, it would need more disk+RAM than is likely to be on a machine of that age), and I'm not aware of any features (or even applications) that would justify trying to clone it (beyond the cool factor).

spijdar 6y ago

It's not recent, but there are some pages with "older" open-source attention like http://www.nleymann.de/appleAUX/AppleAUXMain.htm http://www.nleymann.de/appleAUX/AppleAUXMain.htm I suspect that, like other pre-SysVR4/Solaris-y unixes, compiling anything newer than GCC 2.95-ish will be pretty much impossible. But, depending on your interest/curiosity, it looks like there's some fun stuff to play with.

tzs 6y ago

One feature of A/UX that I'd like to see in current Unix and Unix-like systems is Commando. It was a graphical help system for command-line tools. You would invoke Commando from the shell for a command and it would bring up a dialog to help you construct the command line, which would be written back to the shell. There's a screen shot of it for ls here [1], and mount here [2]. [1] http://toastytech.com/guis/aux3.html http://toastytech.com/guis/aux3.html [2] https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/running-a-ux-apples-at-t-unix-system-7-blend/885 https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/running-a-ux-apples-at-t-u...

hyperrail 6y ago
I wonder if Apple got the idea from IBM's OS for the late-80s AS/400 minicomputer line (today's System i servers). The OS/400 command language shell used its own rich knowledge of each command's syntax to present a full-screen form you could fill out to interactively compose a command: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_74/rzal2/rzal2commands.htm https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_74/rza... (Also, OS/400 commands all follow a very strict naming convention, such as the example WrkActJob in the link. The consistency of the words used and the abbreviations for those words were intended to make learning easier.) You see a bit of this today in PowerShell's command auto-completion for built-in commands, PowerShell script files, and cmdlets (user-defined commands written as PowerShell script functions or .NET CLI methods). The graphical PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) even pops up windows that let you interactively fill out forms to enter command options, just like Commando: https://blog.netwrix.com/2018/02/21/windows-powershell-scripting-tutorial-for-beginners/ https://blog.netwrix.com/2018/02/21/windows-powershell-scrip... Regrettably, PowerShell ISE is deprecated, and the recommended replacement of Visual Studio Code with the PowerShell extension isn't an exact one.

flomo 6y ago

Random trivia. Back in the day, Apple was being boycotted by GNU, so the open source situation on A/UX wasn't great even compared to other weird unixes.