38 ms·

So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?

161 points by skreuzer 5y ago

jimjag 5y ago
I truly believe that A/UX doesn't get the credit it deserves. Was it ambitious? Sure. Did it it fully succeed in the goals it set for itself? Not really. But it was really a very nice integration of the Finder and UNIX. After all these years, I still look back on it with fondness. It certainly was a cornerstone platform for me.
- kerblang 5y ago
  I also thought it was pretty nifty little OS, courtesy of an A/UX office file server that I was tasked to set up in 1993 or so I think. And yes it was a very expensive file server at that. My recollection was that internals of A/UX emulation were reused to enable the PowerPC transition from Motorola, but I might be wrong about that.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Unix licenses at the time were ridiculously expensive, even for PC-grade hardware. Adding compilers and development tools was frequently an extra eye-watering expense.
    - scruffyherder 5y ago
      which to me was surprising about A/UX, you got both C89 and F77!
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        I think GCC was available back then. Not sure about F77. What C compiler did BSD use?
        housel 5y ago
        BSD 4.3 still used the Portable C Compiler. By 4.4 Berkeley was starting to use GCC, but that wasn't available in time to incorporate into A/UX. Plus, IIRC the GNU project was actively boycotting Apple at the time, and so Apple was probably adverse to incorporating any GNU software.
        scruffyherder 5y ago
        Out of the box running strings on stuff shows the 1984-1985 AT&T-IS 1985-1987 UniSoft Corporation strings. So it's got to be PCC. The F77 credits Apple, Adobe, AT&T-IS, Motorola, SUN, CSRG, and Unisoft. In the A/UX 0.7 build there is a 'greenhills' marker in crt0.o and libc so it looks like they used greenhills before switching (self hosting?) to pcc?
        cjsplat 5y ago
        +1 on pcc. Greenhills was available as a third party compiler. Not sure why there would be markers in crt0 and libc, but perhaps someone at Apple rebuilt. Greenhills was better for most code that mattered. Can't see crt0 mattering for performance, but maybe there was some interoperability glue to make both runtimes happy.
        scruffyherder 5y ago
        without the full source it's impossible to say. That said there was a 'tar ball' of 0.7 floating around for well over a decade, but it's able to run under emulation now. https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/aux-apple-unix-68k-version-07 https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/aux-apple-unix-68k-version-... there is a /usr/lib/greenhillls with a ccom68 fcom68 and pcom68 along with some libs and crt files. It's all binaries but I did a compare on crt0 and they match the system one. Maybe it's just a case of the crt0 being assembly and it being.. well the same assembler. Maybe they were just investigating PCC vs Greenhills or it was a cross thing, or they built PCC with Greenhills. who knows?!
    - hondo77 5y ago
      We had 286's running Microport Unix at the company I was at back in the 1980s. I seem to recall that we were using Microport because it was pretty cheap. Compilers and all. I could be mis-remembering.
  - classichasclass 5y ago
    > My recollection was that internals of A/UX emulation were reused to enable the PowerPC transition from Motorola No, pretty sure this wasn't the case. The RISC LC group used a custom emulator and nanokernel which is not at all similar to A/UX. The RLC couldn't even run A/UX, which was why Apple talked about porting it to OSF/1 for the new Power Macs (which, of course, never happened).
    - lukeh 5y ago
      Right, from memory that was going to be A/UX 4.0. But as you say, that never happened.
  - rvense 5y ago
    > My recollection was that internals of A/UX emulation were reused to enable the PowerPC transition from Motorola, but I might be wrong about that. I don't think so. I don't remember a connection, at least, but it'll be in here straight from the horse's mouth: https://computerhistory.org/blog/transplanting-the-macs-central-processor-gary-davidian-and-his-68000-emulator/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/transplanting-the-macs-cent... I watched all of that a while ago and thought it was very interesting. Recommended.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Interesting that the article calls out the price point as one of the reasons it didn't succeed. Although a lot of that was the OS only having drivers for expensive hardware and being unusable on the lower end Macs. That said, high price killed off most of the legacy Unix vendors/products. The world was changing around them and they weren't ready or able to give up the profit margins they had enjoyed for so long. Personal computers were becoming commodity equipment and free versions of Unix were hard to compete against.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    It was, in retrospect, a mistake not to embrace good enough and, instead, keep pushing towards the high end of the market when good enough was what most users needed. Of course a Unix workstation was twice as fast as a PC and cost twice as much, but it becomes pointless when most of the time it’s bored to death waiting for me to move the mouse.
    - gumby 5y ago
      The irony for me is that Unix was the (unhappy) inspiration for the famous “worse is better” memo. The Unix workstation vendors made high end hardware with (semi-) commodity software, and had their lunch eaten by generic hardware coupled with software that gave more people a better experience. (Though personally not at all a fan of most of the Unix paradigm, for me it’s a vastly superior experience to Windows. But I can’t deny that that is not the case for most people)
      - aoki 5y ago
        “Worse” was Bell Labs: portable C/Unix. As opposed to MIT: codesigned Lisp/LispMs. The Unix workstation was the triumph of COTS micros over LSI or custom VLSI hardware.
        gumby 5y ago
        > The Unix workstation was the triumph of COTS micros over LSI or custom VLSI hardware. Well the Sun-1 definitely started there, no question (I don’t remember the Daisy or Apollo hardware). HP definitely never did and Sun (and SGI et al) all went down the custom hardware rabbit hole. By the time they tried to hop onto the PC hardware train it was too late. None of those companies survive in any meaningful way. BTW if you catch this in time to edit: you might want to put a hyphen between “co” and “design” because you didn’t mean signing code.
- latchkey 5y ago
  For those who don't know, Jim is/was the person who maintained the A/UX FAQ and often bailed people, like myself, out of corners when we got into them. Thanks Jim!
- ac50hz 5y ago
  Ah yes, Jagubox :-) A/UX was easy to integrate into a mixed SunOS, Solaris, Irix network with liberal use of arch-dependent automounting.
  - ForOldHack 5y ago
    Yes, when I went looking for all the bits and pieces, jagubox had them. Thanks Jim. I used this on a SE/30, a Turbo IIci, more than one Mac IIfxs.
- jiveturkey 5y ago
  Same! Thanks Jim for all your work on A/UX back in the day. You made a huge difference.
grymoire1 5y ago
I successfully used it as a writing/typesetting (NROFF) system. It was the cheapest Unix system I could buy, that the family could also use (it was dual boot). It was expensive, but I used Sun's at work, and I wanted to get as cross as I could.
walrus01 5y ago
Inflation calculator says that a workstation computer package of hardware (PC, monitor, keyboard, mouse) selling for $5500 USD in 1988 would be the equivalent of $12,718.67 today. That sort of money (except for ridiculous non-linear GPU prices today) would build one hell of a threadripper workstation.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  It'd be hard to use that sort of money for a consumer-purpose PC; maybe a higher end server, but then you likely end up with a blade form factor.
  - kryptiskt 5y ago
    If you go and spec up a HP Z workstation or Dell's comparable offering you can blow through it in no time. Just starting with putting in a TB of RAM will cost a fair bit.
  - da_chicken 5y ago
    > It'd be hard to use that sort of money for a consumer-purpose PC; maybe a higher end server, but then you likely end up with a blade form factor. No, not at all. This isn't a workstation. It's a Workstation. It's not even a struggle to beat $12k. A Mac Pro starts at $6k. You can add a 28 core Xeon for +$7k. 1.5 TB of memory is +$25k. Twin Radeons with 64 GB of video ram is another +$10k. 8TB of storage is another +$2.5k. You've picked CPU, RAM, graphics, and storage and you're already over $50k. That's no software. No display. Just the tower, a power cable, a mouse, a keyboard, and MacOS. If you go to Dell and check out their Data Science Workstations, it's not difficult to configure one for over a quarter of a million dollars. Triple graphics cards, 6 TB of memory, dual 28-core processors. In a tower computer.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  in 1988, I got the "opportunity" to buy the most expensive computer a local whitebox shop built; which was a 286-20 with 1MB of RAM and room for a 2nd MB on the motherboard. There were 386-16 machines (just) out, but this was the "Xenix workstation". With the fancy EGA monitor and card, and iirc 40MB of disk, that came out to be just about $5,000.
jonpurdy 5y ago
For those interested, Shoebill※ is an emulator designed specifically to run A/UX and it’s works very well! ※ https://github.com/pruten/Shoebill https://github.com/pruten/Shoebill
- scruffyherder 5y ago
  also Qemu is mainlining Quadra 800 support for 3.0.1 https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=11326 https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=11326 On a test of compiling about 4MB of source code, Qemu is 7x faster than Shoebill!
dev_tty01 5y ago
As the author mentions, Apple's internal work with A/UX and the associated Mac toolbox led to a product known as the Macintosh Application Environment, MAE. I used it on a PA-RISC HPUX workstation in the 90s. Actually worked really well. We were using CAD tools on HPUX workstations but it didn't have much in the way of productivity apps. Running the MAE layer allowed one to fill that gap. It was a surprisingly lightweight layer and performed better than the Mac I had at home.
- teakettle42 5y ago
  Has anyone here ever run into a copy of MAE 3.0? I’ve been searching for over a decade now.
  - selectodude 5y ago
    https://www.macintoshrepository.org/32453-apple-macintosh-application-environment-3-0-4-for-solaris-and-hp-ux https://www.macintoshrepository.org/32453-apple-macintosh-ap...
    - teakettle42 5y ago
      Oh, wow — thanks!
  - vt240 5y ago
    If you are interested in setting it up on Solaris, you can send me a message on Telegram or Email.
  - racingmars 5y ago
    Yep -- looks like you got the pointer you needed, but I have it running on a SPARCstation 20 under Solaris 2.6 and it works well! The SPARCstation also has a SunPC card in it, so I have Windows 3.11, Mac System 7.5, and Solaris 2.6 all running on the same desktop: https://i.imgur.com/ctvlzCX.gif https://i.imgur.com/ctvlzCX.gif
    - 5y ago
webwielder2 5y ago
I don't know the technical details of why it wasn't viable, and wouldn't understand them if I did, but every time I see something about A/UX, I say "Apple, you spent a decade trying to come up with a modern successor to System 6/7, and nearly died doing so, and all along you had this in the labs—and shipping?!"
- retrac 5y ago
  I think it was the price more than anything. Both of the software license (not cheap!) and also the hardware requirements. It's something that doesn't come up much anymore but RAM used to be one of the main limits of a personal computer. A/UX required a high-end Mac at the time. And Macs were already high-end PCs. And UNIX wanted a lot of RAM. 16 MB was barely comfortable in the early 90s. This was a time when when typical entry-level Macs were still selling with 2 - 4 MB sometimes and a full 32 MB upgrade would cost twice as much as the base model. In short, basically the same reasons we didn't all run SCO UNIX or whatever on our IBM PCs. Much the same dynamic for why the Windows NT kernel took so long to come down to home computers (in Windows XP finally). Even OS X's RAM requirements would inhibit its uptake for a few years. "Real" operating systems were too big for the small computers of the 1980s and even early 1990s.
  - spijdar 5y ago
    Tangential to AU/X and licensing costs, I think this is why OS X was something like a "from scratch" recreation of NeXTSTEP instead of being a straight port. They replaced the AT&T licensed UNIX core with a new open source one derived from the 386BSD forks (and DEC's OSF/1 mach fork), and replaced the display postscript WindowServer with Quartz, both for licensing cost and performance reasons. At least, that's my impression from comparing NeXTSTEP and early OS X. A lot of the "base layer" was totally replaced, including those troublesome licensed bits.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      You forgot there was still OpenSTEP and the collaboration with Sun, which ended up having an influence on a language being designed at the time called Oak. Early versions of OS X were still based on OpenSTEP, thus able to run on top of Windows as well.
G3rn0ti 5y ago
I remember watching a demonstration on a real Macintosh Quadra on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Phk3qVUPqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Phk3qVUPqw
leoc 5y ago
This YouTube video on A/UX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI is one of the best things I've found about the subject. (It has a usable transcript.) On the subject of what happened with Big Mac, the Macintosh II and NeXT, https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-precursor-mac-ii-next-cube/ https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-prec... and some of the articles linked from it https://lowendmac.com/2013/next-years-steve-jobs-before-triumphant-return-apple/ https://lowendmac.com/2013/next-years-steve-jobs-before-triu... https://www.aventure-apple.com/le-big-mac-apple/ https://www.aventure-apple.com/le-big-mac-apple/ (Google Translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https://www.aventure-apple.com/le-big-mac-apple/ https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https:/... ) is the best intro that I'm aware of, though there are some additional, important bits of information in Steven Levy's Insanely Great ch. 9 ( https://books.google.ie/books?id=Y6ZQAAAAMAAJ&dq=insanely+great&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=dhuey https://books.google.ie/books?id=Y6ZQAAAAMAAJ&dq=insanely+gr... ) and the Isaacson bio's ch. 13 ( https://books.google.ie/books?id=JT6FCgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=steve+jobs+isaacson&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=snippet&q=distressed%20call%20from%20Rich%20Page&f=false https://books.google.ie/books?id=JT6FCgAAQBAJ&printsec=front... ). TFA links to some of these, but it missed some of the information in them. (Unfortunately the Adventure-Apple piece needs one big caveat, that it mostly doesn't cite any sources.) There's also yet another whole strand of Macintosh-adjacent Unix in the Network Server products: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsVAdrdkyoA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsVAdrdkyoA . Some key points from these: * I have little idea how well-founded Apple's detailed legal complaints were, but the overall claim that "Jobs had done research for a next generation product and taken the key staff, namely Page from Apple to make it reality" is almost surely absolutely right, and NeXT was conceived an attempt to do Big Mac outside Apple using the Big Mac team from Apple. One thing that TFA and the LowEndMac miss is that Jobs, apparently, wasn't the instigator: according to Isaacson, Rich Page and other Big Mac people contacted him and begged him to launch a new company when Big Mac was cancelled. (ISTR seeing this confirmed elsewhere, too, but I don't recall where atm.) * TFA says that "[a]ll that I can find of the Big Mac project is this insanely low resolution image" showing some hardware and a screenshot of the GUI, but it links to an article which features this glamour shot of what was apparently an industrial design for Big Mac: https://i0.wp.com/www.aventure-apple.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/BigMacFrogDesign.jpg?resize=1024%2C950&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/www.aventure-apple.com/wp-content/uploads/... . (And this is cited: it's apparently from the Appledesign book https://www.worldcat.org/title/appledesign-the-work-of-the-apple-industrial-design-group/oclc/37719003/editions?start_edition=11&sd=desc&referer=br&se=yr&editionsView=true&fq= https://www.worldcat.org/title/appledesign-the-work-of-the-a... .) The resemblance to the original G3 iMac from over a decade later is obvious. Beyond appearances, some other hardware similarities include a lack of internal expansion slots (according to Levy's book, Jobs maintained his opposition to "slots" through his departure from Apple) and a focus on external expandability instead: the G3 iMac was an early adopter of USB, while Big Mac apparently had Apple Desktop Bus. In fact, according to the Adventure-Apple piece ADB was originally developed for Big Mac under the name of Front Desk Bus (though as usual I see no reference to substantiate this). The single most obvious divergence is that Big Mac couldn't display colour, though no doubt this is because of an underlying similarity: the Big Mac project was trying to hit a roughly G3-iMac-like price point in the mid-'80s. <pinwheel />
pjmlp 5y ago
The only time I saw it live was in 1994 at the old Lisbon Computer Expo. It seemed an interesting experiment for the about 15 minutes I was allowed to play with it. Never saw it again other than in computer magazines articles.
solarmist 5y ago
What is A/UX? I’m not seeing a definition.
- scruffyherder 5y ago
  Apple bough a port of UniSoft SYSVr2 to the Apple platoform and dubbed it A/UX. Version 2 onward were technically significant as ToolBox and Finder had been ported to Unix and allowed MacOS apps to run on top of Unix. They didn't offer process virtualization so they could all crash eachother out.
  - Lammy 5y ago
    The A/UX Toolbox PDFs cover a lot of interesting technical details for the curious: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/mac/a_ux/aux_2.0/030-0787-A_AUX_Toolbox_Macintosh_ROM_Interface_1990.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/mac/a_ux/aux_2.0/030-0787-A_A... "/mac/sys — This directory contains the system folders for startup and login. The System file provided with Release 2.0 of A/UX is almost identical in functionality to the System file provided with Release 6.0.5 of the Macintosh system software." Additionally I always thought the Gestalt Manager was a System 7 thing and was surprised to learn it was introduced along with system 6.0.4 and A/UX so applications could tell if they were running on it: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/mac/pdf/Operating_System_Utilities/Gestalt_Manager.pdf https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma...
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Still, since you didn't need to run MacOS apps much, it wasn't really a problem. MacOS couldn't crash the Unix or X subsystems, or anything (else) on them, and nothing else could crash MacOS.
- packetslave 5y ago
  Right-click, "Search Google for A/UX". Wikipedia article is the first link. Try harder.
  - solarmist 5y ago
Cockbrand 5y ago
So, has anyone gotten this to run in a Mac emulator on the Amiga?
- kstrauser 5y ago
  Beat me to it. Shapeshifter was a nearly perfect Mac emulator that ran full-speed on Amigas. Given that you could buy an Amiga with a 68060 CPU, which never made it to Mac, you could make the argument that the fastest 68K Mac ever built was an Amiga.
- amyjess 5y ago
  Because A/UX requires an MMU, that means the only emulator that can run it is Shoebill.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Or Qemu 3.0.1, apparently.
icedchai 5y ago
I remember A/UX... In the early 90's, a local university had a whole lab of Mac II's with A/UX. Unfortunately, they didn't disable the guest account. They also had a public dialup and were connected to the Internet. A local "elite" BBSer figured this out, and that was how most of the local kids got onto IRC for that summer.
jdblair 5y ago
From the article: The damned thing was just too expensive! From Wikipedia “When introduced, a basic system with monitor and 20 MB hard drive cost US$5,498” I respectfully disagree that price was the issue. The competition was a Sun workstation. In 1990, a sparcstation was $5k without the hard drive, a configuration that only made sense if you mounted the root filesystem using NFS, which meant you had a more expensive machine with a hard drive on your LAN. Apple could have succeeded in the workstation space, but they were a consumer focused company. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/16/business/low-priced-work-station-from-sun.html https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/16/business/low-priced-work-...
- philwelch 5y ago
  I don't even think the Macintosh II was all that unpopular with Mac users. The Mac II family was sold for six years and was discontinued only a year before the switch to PowerPC. I think Apple just didn't seriously commit to selling them as Unix workstations with A/UX.
  - Chazprime 5y ago
    > I don't even think the Macintosh II was all that unpopular with Mac users I think the Mac II & IIx were a little slow on the sales front, but from what I remember the smaller IIcx and IIci were much more popular.
    - classichasclass 5y ago
      We had a lab full of IIcis when I was an undergrad. They're still my favourite 68K Mac because they stack, they're easy to work on and disassemble, and they can do a fair bit. Just make sure you get it recapped. My "Lisp machine" is a IIci with a 50MHz Daystar accelerator and a MacIvory.
      - sneak 5y ago
        The IIcx was my first computer. It wasn't completely 32-bit-clean for some reason, and needed special software ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MODE32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MODE32 ) to run apps that expected a 32 bit memory space. I'd have preferred an IIci. :) I also had a Mac II around the same time. I still have both of the machines, although I haven't tried booting either in 15+ years.
alkz 5y ago
Around 15 years ago I got my hands on a quadra 700 and managed to install A/UX on it. I don't remember the details but i really struggled to find an external SCSI CDROM drive compatible with the OS, if memory serves me well there were just like 2/3 specific drives supported by the installer. In the end I probably used a SUN one which looked like a mini pizza box sparcstation. Taking also in account that that version of A/UX ran only on the quadra 700/800/950, it's probably one of the OS with less hardware support around The OS itself was so simple, it didn't even use init scripts to start its services, but everything was (re)spawned by /etc/inittab like /bin/getty; this was so clever I started doing it with all the services I wanted to automatically restart on my other linux servers
- scruffyherder 5y ago
  It's SYSVr2 so it's /etc/inittab to control what runs at what runlevel. then inetd reads /etc/servers to decided what to listen for at the network level.
monocasa 5y ago
A/UX only supported m68k macs, right? I wonder if you could patch the m68k emulator in the later nanokernel for PowerPC Macs to support it. Would it be legal? Gods no. Would it be a throwback to the kind of really dirty hacks I associate with the 90s? Absolutely. It looks like a decent amount of work reversing the Powermac nanokernel has been done: https://github.com/elliotnunn/NanoKernel https://github.com/elliotnunn/NanoKernel
- scruffyherder 5y ago
  newer Qemu can emulate the 68040, and even a Quadra 800. that would be the much easier route...
  - monocasa 5y ago
    For sure that's what more practical. My idea was just a fun pontification about an alt history where A/UX was supported the same way as MacOS itself into the PowerPC era sort of like tge fantasy retro game consoles you see from time to time.
jacobsenscott 5y ago
University of Wisconsin Eau Claire CS class of '98 raise your hands! We had a lab full of A/UX workstations. It is where I learned C++, shell, etc. They were fantastic machines.
dhosek 5y ago
While I was in college, I was the device drivers editor for TUGboat and trying to track all the combinations of OS and output device for TeX DVI drivers brought a lot of borderline operating systems into my awareness. As I recall, there was a TeX port for A/UX. There were also, so many Unix variants, that I ended up having to combine them into a single Unix column in the table and then in the detailed listings, indicate which Unix flavor(s) were supported. Nowadays, when, for all practical purposes, any desktop system will either be Windows, MacOS or Linux, things are considerably simpler.
cjsplat 5y ago
I did some of the initial mmu support for A/UX while at UniSoft, so lived a fair amount of the history, at least for version 0 of A/UX. For those not familiar with the times, this was still at the outset of the Unix wars - Berkeley vs AT&T vs everyone else. UniSoft was a porting house based in Berkeley that specialized in putting Unix on almost anything. For example, the first Unix implementations for Sun and SGI were Version 7 ports done by UniSoft. The business model problem was that support costs, Time-to-market, and vendor customization rapidly pushed high volume customers into doing all their Unix work in-house. Apple followed the same path with A/UX, pulling the entire project in-house after UniSoft delivered the first version. UniPlus was a blend of software from AT&T (System V release 2 and later SVR3) and BSD (TCP/IP, sendmail, bind and other utilities) and eventually Sun (NFS). This was viable because AT&T had a semi-official position that UUCP was networking. That was the business wing of AT&T, not Bell Labs. The internal fights at AT&T are items of legend, but basically Bell Labs stepped back and kept to its research charter (with OS work turning into Plan9). AT&T corporate kept adding legal and technical stupid to Unix until eventually the only option was SysVR4 and the unified field theory with Sun. The Mac-II target for UniPlus used the Motorola 68851 MMU, a table walking highly configurable system. It was a stock item that UniPlus supported, but Apple wanted quite a bit of customization. 4K pages, Nubus memory, and MacOS address space support. 4k pages was a mostly trivial tweak from the 8k baseline, which had been selected at UniSoft for TLB efficiency. Apple wanted 4k because they had a smaller memory footprint and wanted to get better memory utilization. This was a good decision - I tested a 2k page size and it was even snappier for the small memory size, but lost on the TLB issues for larger memory and Apple didn't want the pagesize to be determined at boot time. The NuBus memory was a discontiguous physical address space that wasn't initialized by the system. It was also an extra 2 clocks away compared to main memory. I dealt with the memory map, and added initialization hooks so that the memory could be found and used early, and built up a test system with two expansion cards and 20 MBytes of memory. Slower memory was pretty bad normally, but the 68020 I-cache and large register file made it benchmark OK. Unfortunately, sometimes the system stack was placed on NuBus memory and the impact on interrupt and system call latency was horrible. I set it up so that by default any external memory was dedicated to the IO buffer cache. Apple wasn't happy with this, but they accepted it since there was a driver boot-time flag to force a big pool of slow memory. The MacOS address space was the most interesting. The old Mac systems were so memory starved that they took advantage of the 32 bit memory and 24 address lines on the 68000/68010 to store stuff in the high order byte. I can't remember if it was general storage or metadata - I seem to have blocked out the usage details. I put together a design that would alias the high order bytes by creating 256 overlapping top level segments that could share the rest of the page tables so that physical memory wouldn't be exhausted with page tables to cover the 32-bit address space. Apple decided not to do this - they wanted a 100% user mode implementation. I was irritated at the time since they were choosing to sacrifice memory protection and security, but in retrospect I was only a couple of years out of school and I am not sure I fully appreciated the side effects of aliasing addresses that way. Still, it would have been fun to implement.
hadlock 5y ago
I can't remember if Apple themselves hosted AUX or not on their website, alongside System 6 and 7.5, or if you could get them, ahem, from other locations. Anyways, remarkably, A/UX could run on a Macintosh LC II and III. The LC III was remarkable in that if you found the right DIMM, it wouldn't reject a 32MB SIMM RAM chip. Long story short, you could buy an Mac LC II for $10 in 2000, and install A/UX on there. The tricky thing was that Macs all used SCSI drives back then, and most macs required the SCSI drive to have a special bit flipped (in, I guess, firmware? or bootloader?) that marked it as a Mac hardware scsi drive. A/UX was unique in that 1. it did not require a Mac specific SCSI drive and 2. utilities existed to convert any scsi drive to be marked as a "Mac hardware" scsi drive. TL;DR ran A/UX for a couple of weeks on a $10 Macintosh LC II that I bought at a computer consignment shop in the early 2000s
sneak 5y ago
Does anyone have a .zip or something of an emulator with this all up and running?
- scruffyherder 5y ago
  this is the 'emaculation' windows build: https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42/files/4BSD%20under%20Windows/v0.4/Qemu_AUX_301-noX11.7z/download https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42/files/4BSD%20under%20... decompress and run the batch file. I didn't bother installing X11 as anything else is a better X11 than the one mouse button Mac.. I enabled TCP/IP and you can telnet in on 127.0.0.1 42323 Enjoy!
cjsplat 5y ago
After doing A/UX work I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I interviewed at Apple. They offered me a 5% pay cut for the chance to commute from Berkeley to Cupertino, which wasn't great but at least the stock was likely to be worthwhile. (UniSoft had a great team, but no business model). After I got the Apple offer, I met with people up the management chain to the VP a step above the entire A/UX org (3 people up from my potential hiring manager). The VP had no problem admitting that he didn't really see a reason for Apple to be in the Unix business and that he had no criteria for measuring the success of the effort or justifying substantial additional investment. Bonus points for honesty, but I decided at that point that the project was doomed. I think in the long run it became a checkbox for Federal sales and it made inroads at some universities where Unix (for IT dept) + Mac S/W was a selling point.
- mrpippy 5y ago
  That, and as a server for Mac-only shops. AppleShare Pro was apparently very fast, and ISTR there were other things like Oracle available for it. What year was the Apple interview?

161 points by skreuzer 5y ago

I truly believe that A/UX doesn't get the credit it deserves. Was it ambitious? Sure. Did it it fully succeed in the goals it set for itself? Not really. But it was really a very nice integration of the Finder and UNIX. After all these years, I still look back on it with fondness. It certainly was a cornerstone platform for me.

kerblang 5y ago
I also thought it was pretty nifty little OS, courtesy of an A/UX office file server that I was tasked to set up in 1993 or so I think. And yes it was a very expensive file server at that. My recollection was that internals of A/UX emulation were reused to enable the PowerPC transition from Motorola, but I might be wrong about that.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  Unix licenses at the time were ridiculously expensive, even for PC-grade hardware. Adding compilers and development tools was frequently an extra eye-watering expense.
  - scruffyherder 5y ago
    which to me was surprising about A/UX, you got both C89 and F77!
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      I think GCC was available back then. Not sure about F77. What C compiler did BSD use?
      - housel 5y ago
        BSD 4.3 still used the Portable C Compiler. By 4.4 Berkeley was starting to use GCC, but that wasn't available in time to incorporate into A/UX. Plus, IIRC the GNU project was actively boycotting Apple at the time, and so Apple was probably adverse to incorporating any GNU software.
      - scruffyherder 5y ago
        Out of the box running strings on stuff shows the 1984-1985 AT&T-IS 1985-1987 UniSoft Corporation strings. So it's got to be PCC. The F77 credits Apple, Adobe, AT&T-IS, Motorola, SUN, CSRG, and Unisoft. In the A/UX 0.7 build there is a 'greenhills' marker in crt0.o and libc so it looks like they used greenhills before switching (self hosting?) to pcc?
        cjsplat 5y ago
        +1 on pcc. Greenhills was available as a third party compiler. Not sure why there would be markers in crt0 and libc, but perhaps someone at Apple rebuilt. Greenhills was better for most code that mattered. Can't see crt0 mattering for performance, but maybe there was some interoperability glue to make both runtimes happy.
        scruffyherder 5y ago
        without the full source it's impossible to say. That said there was a 'tar ball' of 0.7 floating around for well over a decade, but it's able to run under emulation now. https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/aux-apple-unix-68k-version-07 https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/aux-apple-unix-68k-version-... there is a /usr/lib/greenhillls with a ccom68 fcom68 and pcom68 along with some libs and crt files. It's all binaries but I did a compare on crt0 and they match the system one. Maybe it's just a case of the crt0 being assembly and it being.. well the same assembler. Maybe they were just investigating PCC vs Greenhills or it was a cross thing, or they built PCC with Greenhills. who knows?!
  - hondo77 5y ago
    We had 286's running Microport Unix at the company I was at back in the 1980s. I seem to recall that we were using Microport because it was pretty cheap. Compilers and all. I could be mis-remembering.
- classichasclass 5y ago
  > My recollection was that internals of A/UX emulation were reused to enable the PowerPC transition from Motorola No, pretty sure this wasn't the case. The RISC LC group used a custom emulator and nanokernel which is not at all similar to A/UX. The RLC couldn't even run A/UX, which was why Apple talked about porting it to OSF/1 for the new Power Macs (which, of course, never happened).
  - lukeh 5y ago
    Right, from memory that was going to be A/UX 4.0. But as you say, that never happened.
- rvense 5y ago
  > My recollection was that internals of A/UX emulation were reused to enable the PowerPC transition from Motorola, but I might be wrong about that. I don't think so. I don't remember a connection, at least, but it'll be in here straight from the horse's mouth: https://computerhistory.org/blog/transplanting-the-macs-central-processor-gary-davidian-and-his-68000-emulator/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/transplanting-the-macs-cent... I watched all of that a while ago and thought it was very interesting. Recommended.
jandrese 5y ago
Interesting that the article calls out the price point as one of the reasons it didn't succeed. Although a lot of that was the OS only having drivers for expensive hardware and being unusable on the lower end Macs. That said, high price killed off most of the legacy Unix vendors/products. The world was changing around them and they weren't ready or able to give up the profit margins they had enjoyed for so long. Personal computers were becoming commodity equipment and free versions of Unix were hard to compete against.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  It was, in retrospect, a mistake not to embrace good enough and, instead, keep pushing towards the high end of the market when good enough was what most users needed. Of course a Unix workstation was twice as fast as a PC and cost twice as much, but it becomes pointless when most of the time it’s bored to death waiting for me to move the mouse.
  - gumby 5y ago
    The irony for me is that Unix was the (unhappy) inspiration for the famous “worse is better” memo. The Unix workstation vendors made high end hardware with (semi-) commodity software, and had their lunch eaten by generic hardware coupled with software that gave more people a better experience. (Though personally not at all a fan of most of the Unix paradigm, for me it’s a vastly superior experience to Windows. But I can’t deny that that is not the case for most people)
    - aoki 5y ago
      “Worse” was Bell Labs: portable C/Unix. As opposed to MIT: codesigned Lisp/LispMs. The Unix workstation was the triumph of COTS micros over LSI or custom VLSI hardware.
      - gumby 5y ago
        > The Unix workstation was the triumph of COTS micros over LSI or custom VLSI hardware. Well the Sun-1 definitely started there, no question (I don’t remember the Daisy or Apollo hardware). HP definitely never did and Sun (and SGI et al) all went down the custom hardware rabbit hole. By the time they tried to hop onto the PC hardware train it was too late. None of those companies survive in any meaningful way. BTW if you catch this in time to edit: you might want to put a hyphen between “co” and “design” because you didn’t mean signing code.
latchkey 5y ago
For those who don't know, Jim is/was the person who maintained the A/UX FAQ and often bailed people, like myself, out of corners when we got into them. Thanks Jim!
ac50hz 5y ago
Ah yes, Jagubox :-) A/UX was easy to integrate into a mixed SunOS, Solaris, Irix network with liberal use of arch-dependent automounting.
- ForOldHack 5y ago
  Yes, when I went looking for all the bits and pieces, jagubox had them. Thanks Jim. I used this on a SE/30, a Turbo IIci, more than one Mac IIfxs.
jiveturkey 5y ago
Same! Thanks Jim for all your work on A/UX back in the day. You made a huge difference.

grymoire1 5y ago

I successfully used it as a writing/typesetting (NROFF) system. It was the cheapest Unix system I could buy, that the family could also use (it was dual boot). It was expensive, but I used Sun's at work, and I wanted to get as cross as I could.

walrus01 5y ago

Inflation calculator says that a workstation computer package of hardware (PC, monitor, keyboard, mouse) selling for $5500 USD in 1988 would be the equivalent of $12,718.67 today. That sort of money (except for ridiculous non-linear GPU prices today) would build one hell of a threadripper workstation.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
It'd be hard to use that sort of money for a consumer-purpose PC; maybe a higher end server, but then you likely end up with a blade form factor.
- kryptiskt 5y ago
  If you go and spec up a HP Z workstation or Dell's comparable offering you can blow through it in no time. Just starting with putting in a TB of RAM will cost a fair bit.
- da_chicken 5y ago
  > It'd be hard to use that sort of money for a consumer-purpose PC; maybe a higher end server, but then you likely end up with a blade form factor. No, not at all. This isn't a workstation. It's a Workstation. It's not even a struggle to beat $12k. A Mac Pro starts at $6k. You can add a 28 core Xeon for +$7k. 1.5 TB of memory is +$25k. Twin Radeons with 64 GB of video ram is another +$10k. 8TB of storage is another +$2.5k. You've picked CPU, RAM, graphics, and storage and you're already over $50k. That's no software. No display. Just the tower, a power cable, a mouse, a keyboard, and MacOS. If you go to Dell and check out their Data Science Workstations, it's not difficult to configure one for over a quarter of a million dollars. Triple graphics cards, 6 TB of memory, dual 28-core processors. In a tower computer.
h2odragon 5y ago
in 1988, I got the "opportunity" to buy the most expensive computer a local whitebox shop built; which was a 286-20 with 1MB of RAM and room for a 2nd MB on the motherboard. There were 386-16 machines (just) out, but this was the "Xenix workstation". With the fancy EGA monitor and card, and iirc 40MB of disk, that came out to be just about $5,000.

jonpurdy 5y ago

For those interested, Shoebill※ is an emulator designed specifically to run A/UX and it’s works very well! ※ https://github.com/pruten/Shoebill https://github.com/pruten/Shoebill

scruffyherder 5y ago
also Qemu is mainlining Quadra 800 support for 3.0.1 https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=11326 https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=11326 On a test of compiling about 4MB of source code, Qemu is 7x faster than Shoebill!

dev_tty01 5y ago

As the author mentions, Apple's internal work with A/UX and the associated Mac toolbox led to a product known as the Macintosh Application Environment, MAE. I used it on a PA-RISC HPUX workstation in the 90s. Actually worked really well. We were using CAD tools on HPUX workstations but it didn't have much in the way of productivity apps. Running the MAE layer allowed one to fill that gap. It was a surprisingly lightweight layer and performed better than the Mac I had at home.

teakettle42 5y ago
Has anyone here ever run into a copy of MAE 3.0? I’ve been searching for over a decade now.
- selectodude 5y ago
  https://www.macintoshrepository.org/32453-apple-macintosh-application-environment-3-0-4-for-solaris-and-hp-ux https://www.macintoshrepository.org/32453-apple-macintosh-ap...
  - teakettle42 5y ago
    Oh, wow — thanks!
- vt240 5y ago
  If you are interested in setting it up on Solaris, you can send me a message on Telegram or Email.
- racingmars 5y ago
  Yep -- looks like you got the pointer you needed, but I have it running on a SPARCstation 20 under Solaris 2.6 and it works well! The SPARCstation also has a SunPC card in it, so I have Windows 3.11, Mac System 7.5, and Solaris 2.6 all running on the same desktop: https://i.imgur.com/ctvlzCX.gif https://i.imgur.com/ctvlzCX.gif
  - 5y ago

webwielder2 5y ago

I don't know the technical details of why it wasn't viable, and wouldn't understand them if I did, but every time I see something about A/UX, I say "Apple, you spent a decade trying to come up with a modern successor to System 6/7, and nearly died doing so, and all along you had this in the labs—and shipping?!"

retrac 5y ago
I think it was the price more than anything. Both of the software license (not cheap!) and also the hardware requirements. It's something that doesn't come up much anymore but RAM used to be one of the main limits of a personal computer. A/UX required a high-end Mac at the time. And Macs were already high-end PCs. And UNIX wanted a lot of RAM. 16 MB was barely comfortable in the early 90s. This was a time when when typical entry-level Macs were still selling with 2 - 4 MB sometimes and a full 32 MB upgrade would cost twice as much as the base model. In short, basically the same reasons we didn't all run SCO UNIX or whatever on our IBM PCs. Much the same dynamic for why the Windows NT kernel took so long to come down to home computers (in Windows XP finally). Even OS X's RAM requirements would inhibit its uptake for a few years. "Real" operating systems were too big for the small computers of the 1980s and even early 1990s.
- spijdar 5y ago
  Tangential to AU/X and licensing costs, I think this is why OS X was something like a "from scratch" recreation of NeXTSTEP instead of being a straight port. They replaced the AT&T licensed UNIX core with a new open source one derived from the 386BSD forks (and DEC's OSF/1 mach fork), and replaced the display postscript WindowServer with Quartz, both for licensing cost and performance reasons. At least, that's my impression from comparing NeXTSTEP and early OS X. A lot of the "base layer" was totally replaced, including those troublesome licensed bits.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    You forgot there was still OpenSTEP and the collaboration with Sun, which ended up having an influence on a language being designed at the time called Oak. Early versions of OS X were still based on OpenSTEP, thus able to run on top of Windows as well.

G3rn0ti 5y ago

I remember watching a demonstration on a real Macintosh Quadra on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Phk3qVUPqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Phk3qVUPqw

leoc 5y ago

This YouTube video on A/UX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI is one of the best things I've found about the subject. (It has a usable transcript.) On the subject of what happened with Big Mac, the Macintosh II and NeXT, https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-precursor-mac-ii-next-cube/ https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-prec... and some of the articles linked from it https://lowendmac.com/2013/next-years-steve-jobs-before-triumphant-return-apple/ https://lowendmac.com/2013/next-years-steve-jobs-before-triu... https://www.aventure-apple.com/le-big-mac-apple/ https://www.aventure-apple.com/le-big-mac-apple/ (Google Translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https://www.aventure-apple.com/le-big-mac-apple/ https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https:/... ) is the best intro that I'm aware of, though there are some additional, important bits of information in Steven Levy's Insanely Great ch. 9 ( https://books.google.ie/books?id=Y6ZQAAAAMAAJ&dq=insanely+great&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=dhuey https://books.google.ie/books?id=Y6ZQAAAAMAAJ&dq=insanely+gr... ) and the Isaacson bio's ch. 13 ( https://books.google.ie/books?id=JT6FCgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=steve+jobs+isaacson&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=snippet&q=distressed%20call%20from%20Rich%20Page&f=false https://books.google.ie/books?id=JT6FCgAAQBAJ&printsec=front... ). TFA links to some of these, but it missed some of the information in them. (Unfortunately the Adventure-Apple piece needs one big caveat, that it mostly doesn't cite any sources.) There's also yet another whole strand of Macintosh-adjacent Unix in the Network Server products: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsVAdrdkyoA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsVAdrdkyoA . Some key points from these: * I have little idea how well-founded Apple's detailed legal complaints were, but the overall claim that "Jobs had done research for a next generation product and taken the key staff, namely Page from Apple to make it reality" is almost surely absolutely right, and NeXT was conceived an attempt to do Big Mac outside Apple using the Big Mac team from Apple. One thing that TFA and the LowEndMac miss is that Jobs, apparently, wasn't the instigator: according to Isaacson, Rich Page and other Big Mac people contacted him and begged him to launch a new company when Big Mac was cancelled. (ISTR seeing this confirmed elsewhere, too, but I don't recall where atm.) * TFA says that "[a]ll that I can find of the Big Mac project is this insanely low resolution image" showing some hardware and a screenshot of the GUI, but it links to an article which features this glamour shot of what was apparently an industrial design for Big Mac: https://i0.wp.com/www.aventure-apple.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/BigMacFrogDesign.jpg?resize=1024%2C950&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/www.aventure-apple.com/wp-content/uploads/... . (And this is cited: it's apparently from the Appledesign book https://www.worldcat.org/title/appledesign-the-work-of-the-apple-industrial-design-group/oclc/37719003/editions?start_edition=11&sd=desc&referer=br&se=yr&editionsView=true&fq= https://www.worldcat.org/title/appledesign-the-work-of-the-a... .) The resemblance to the original G3 iMac from over a decade later is obvious. Beyond appearances, some other hardware similarities include a lack of internal expansion slots (according to Levy's book, Jobs maintained his opposition to "slots" through his departure from Apple) and a focus on external expandability instead: the G3 iMac was an early adopter of USB, while Big Mac apparently had Apple Desktop Bus. In fact, according to the Adventure-Apple piece ADB was originally developed for Big Mac under the name of Front Desk Bus (though as usual I see no reference to substantiate this). The single most obvious divergence is that Big Mac couldn't display colour, though no doubt this is because of an underlying similarity: the Big Mac project was trying to hit a roughly G3-iMac-like price point in the mid-'80s. <pinwheel />

pjmlp 5y ago

The only time I saw it live was in 1994 at the old Lisbon Computer Expo. It seemed an interesting experiment for the about 15 minutes I was allowed to play with it. Never saw it again other than in computer magazines articles.

solarmist 5y ago

What is A/UX? I’m not seeing a definition.

scruffyherder 5y ago
Apple bough a port of UniSoft SYSVr2 to the Apple platoform and dubbed it A/UX. Version 2 onward were technically significant as ToolBox and Finder had been ported to Unix and allowed MacOS apps to run on top of Unix. They didn't offer process virtualization so they could all crash eachother out.
- Lammy 5y ago
  The A/UX Toolbox PDFs cover a lot of interesting technical details for the curious: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/mac/a_ux/aux_2.0/030-0787-A_AUX_Toolbox_Macintosh_ROM_Interface_1990.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/mac/a_ux/aux_2.0/030-0787-A_A... "/mac/sys — This directory contains the system folders for startup and login. The System file provided with Release 2.0 of A/UX is almost identical in functionality to the System file provided with Release 6.0.5 of the Macintosh system software." Additionally I always thought the Gestalt Manager was a System 7 thing and was surprised to learn it was introduced along with system 6.0.4 and A/UX so applications could tell if they were running on it: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/mac/pdf/Operating_System_Utilities/Gestalt_Manager.pdf https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma...
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Still, since you didn't need to run MacOS apps much, it wasn't really a problem. MacOS couldn't crash the Unix or X subsystems, or anything (else) on them, and nothing else could crash MacOS.
packetslave 5y ago
Right-click, "Search Google for A/UX". Wikipedia article is the first link. Try harder.
- solarmist 5y ago

Cockbrand 5y ago

So, has anyone gotten this to run in a Mac emulator on the Amiga?

kstrauser 5y ago
Beat me to it. Shapeshifter was a nearly perfect Mac emulator that ran full-speed on Amigas. Given that you could buy an Amiga with a 68060 CPU, which never made it to Mac, you could make the argument that the fastest 68K Mac ever built was an Amiga.
amyjess 5y ago
Because A/UX requires an MMU, that means the only emulator that can run it is Shoebill.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Or Qemu 3.0.1, apparently.

icedchai 5y ago

I remember A/UX... In the early 90's, a local university had a whole lab of Mac II's with A/UX. Unfortunately, they didn't disable the guest account. They also had a public dialup and were connected to the Internet. A local "elite" BBSer figured this out, and that was how most of the local kids got onto IRC for that summer.

jdblair 5y ago

From the article: The damned thing was just too expensive! From Wikipedia “When introduced, a basic system with monitor and 20 MB hard drive cost US$5,498” I respectfully disagree that price was the issue. The competition was a Sun workstation. In 1990, a sparcstation was $5k without the hard drive, a configuration that only made sense if you mounted the root filesystem using NFS, which meant you had a more expensive machine with a hard drive on your LAN. Apple could have succeeded in the workstation space, but they were a consumer focused company. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/16/business/low-priced-work-station-from-sun.html https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/16/business/low-priced-work-...

philwelch 5y ago
I don't even think the Macintosh II was all that unpopular with Mac users. The Mac II family was sold for six years and was discontinued only a year before the switch to PowerPC. I think Apple just didn't seriously commit to selling them as Unix workstations with A/UX.
- Chazprime 5y ago
  > I don't even think the Macintosh II was all that unpopular with Mac users I think the Mac II & IIx were a little slow on the sales front, but from what I remember the smaller IIcx and IIci were much more popular.
  - classichasclass 5y ago
    We had a lab full of IIcis when I was an undergrad. They're still my favourite 68K Mac because they stack, they're easy to work on and disassemble, and they can do a fair bit. Just make sure you get it recapped. My "Lisp machine" is a IIci with a 50MHz Daystar accelerator and a MacIvory.
    - sneak 5y ago
      The IIcx was my first computer. It wasn't completely 32-bit-clean for some reason, and needed special software ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MODE32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MODE32 ) to run apps that expected a 32 bit memory space. I'd have preferred an IIci. :) I also had a Mac II around the same time. I still have both of the machines, although I haven't tried booting either in 15+ years.

alkz 5y ago

Around 15 years ago I got my hands on a quadra 700 and managed to install A/UX on it. I don't remember the details but i really struggled to find an external SCSI CDROM drive compatible with the OS, if memory serves me well there were just like 2/3 specific drives supported by the installer. In the end I probably used a SUN one which looked like a mini pizza box sparcstation. Taking also in account that that version of A/UX ran only on the quadra 700/800/950, it's probably one of the OS with less hardware support around The OS itself was so simple, it didn't even use init scripts to start its services, but everything was (re)spawned by /etc/inittab like /bin/getty; this was so clever I started doing it with all the services I wanted to automatically restart on my other linux servers

scruffyherder 5y ago
It's SYSVr2 so it's /etc/inittab to control what runs at what runlevel. then inetd reads /etc/servers to decided what to listen for at the network level.

monocasa 5y ago

A/UX only supported m68k macs, right? I wonder if you could patch the m68k emulator in the later nanokernel for PowerPC Macs to support it. Would it be legal? Gods no. Would it be a throwback to the kind of really dirty hacks I associate with the 90s? Absolutely. It looks like a decent amount of work reversing the Powermac nanokernel has been done: https://github.com/elliotnunn/NanoKernel https://github.com/elliotnunn/NanoKernel

scruffyherder 5y ago
newer Qemu can emulate the 68040, and even a Quadra 800. that would be the much easier route...
- monocasa 5y ago
  For sure that's what more practical. My idea was just a fun pontification about an alt history where A/UX was supported the same way as MacOS itself into the PowerPC era sort of like tge fantasy retro game consoles you see from time to time.

jacobsenscott 5y ago

University of Wisconsin Eau Claire CS class of '98 raise your hands! We had a lab full of A/UX workstations. It is where I learned C++, shell, etc. They were fantastic machines.

dhosek 5y ago

While I was in college, I was the device drivers editor for TUGboat and trying to track all the combinations of OS and output device for TeX DVI drivers brought a lot of borderline operating systems into my awareness. As I recall, there was a TeX port for A/UX. There were also, so many Unix variants, that I ended up having to combine them into a single Unix column in the table and then in the detailed listings, indicate which Unix flavor(s) were supported. Nowadays, when, for all practical purposes, any desktop system will either be Windows, MacOS or Linux, things are considerably simpler.

cjsplat 5y ago

I did some of the initial mmu support for A/UX while at UniSoft, so lived a fair amount of the history, at least for version 0 of A/UX. For those not familiar with the times, this was still at the outset of the Unix wars - Berkeley vs AT&T vs everyone else. UniSoft was a porting house based in Berkeley that specialized in putting Unix on almost anything. For example, the first Unix implementations for Sun and SGI were Version 7 ports done by UniSoft. The business model problem was that support costs, Time-to-market, and vendor customization rapidly pushed high volume customers into doing all their Unix work in-house. Apple followed the same path with A/UX, pulling the entire project in-house after UniSoft delivered the first version. UniPlus was a blend of software from AT&T (System V release 2 and later SVR3) and BSD (TCP/IP, sendmail, bind and other utilities) and eventually Sun (NFS). This was viable because AT&T had a semi-official position that UUCP was networking. That was the business wing of AT&T, not Bell Labs. The internal fights at AT&T are items of legend, but basically Bell Labs stepped back and kept to its research charter (with OS work turning into Plan9). AT&T corporate kept adding legal and technical stupid to Unix until eventually the only option was SysVR4 and the unified field theory with Sun. The Mac-II target for UniPlus used the Motorola 68851 MMU, a table walking highly configurable system. It was a stock item that UniPlus supported, but Apple wanted quite a bit of customization. 4K pages, Nubus memory, and MacOS address space support. 4k pages was a mostly trivial tweak from the 8k baseline, which had been selected at UniSoft for TLB efficiency. Apple wanted 4k because they had a smaller memory footprint and wanted to get better memory utilization. This was a good decision - I tested a 2k page size and it was even snappier for the small memory size, but lost on the TLB issues for larger memory and Apple didn't want the pagesize to be determined at boot time. The NuBus memory was a discontiguous physical address space that wasn't initialized by the system. It was also an extra 2 clocks away compared to main memory. I dealt with the memory map, and added initialization hooks so that the memory could be found and used early, and built up a test system with two expansion cards and 20 MBytes of memory. Slower memory was pretty bad normally, but the 68020 I-cache and large register file made it benchmark OK. Unfortunately, sometimes the system stack was placed on NuBus memory and the impact on interrupt and system call latency was horrible. I set it up so that by default any external memory was dedicated to the IO buffer cache. Apple wasn't happy with this, but they accepted it since there was a driver boot-time flag to force a big pool of slow memory. The MacOS address space was the most interesting. The old Mac systems were so memory starved that they took advantage of the 32 bit memory and 24 address lines on the 68000/68010 to store stuff in the high order byte. I can't remember if it was general storage or metadata - I seem to have blocked out the usage details. I put together a design that would alias the high order bytes by creating 256 overlapping top level segments that could share the rest of the page tables so that physical memory wouldn't be exhausted with page tables to cover the 32-bit address space. Apple decided not to do this - they wanted a 100% user mode implementation. I was irritated at the time since they were choosing to sacrifice memory protection and security, but in retrospect I was only a couple of years out of school and I am not sure I fully appreciated the side effects of aliasing addresses that way. Still, it would have been fun to implement.

hadlock 5y ago

I can't remember if Apple themselves hosted AUX or not on their website, alongside System 6 and 7.5, or if you could get them, ahem, from other locations. Anyways, remarkably, A/UX could run on a Macintosh LC II and III. The LC III was remarkable in that if you found the right DIMM, it wouldn't reject a 32MB SIMM RAM chip. Long story short, you could buy an Mac LC II for $10 in 2000, and install A/UX on there. The tricky thing was that Macs all used SCSI drives back then, and most macs required the SCSI drive to have a special bit flipped (in, I guess, firmware? or bootloader?) that marked it as a Mac hardware scsi drive. A/UX was unique in that 1. it did not require a Mac specific SCSI drive and 2. utilities existed to convert any scsi drive to be marked as a "Mac hardware" scsi drive. TL;DR ran A/UX for a couple of weeks on a $10 Macintosh LC II that I bought at a computer consignment shop in the early 2000s

sneak 5y ago

Does anyone have a .zip or something of an emulator with this all up and running?

scruffyherder 5y ago
this is the 'emaculation' windows build: https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42/files/4BSD%20under%20Windows/v0.4/Qemu_AUX_301-noX11.7z/download https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42/files/4BSD%20under%20... decompress and run the batch file. I didn't bother installing X11 as anything else is a better X11 than the one mouse button Mac.. I enabled TCP/IP and you can telnet in on 127.0.0.1 42323 Enjoy!

cjsplat 5y ago

After doing A/UX work I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I interviewed at Apple. They offered me a 5% pay cut for the chance to commute from Berkeley to Cupertino, which wasn't great but at least the stock was likely to be worthwhile. (UniSoft had a great team, but no business model). After I got the Apple offer, I met with people up the management chain to the VP a step above the entire A/UX org (3 people up from my potential hiring manager). The VP had no problem admitting that he didn't really see a reason for Apple to be in the Unix business and that he had no criteria for measuring the success of the effort or justifying substantial additional investment. Bonus points for honesty, but I decided at that point that the project was doomed. I think in the long run it became a checkbox for Federal sales and it made inroads at some universities where Unix (for IT dept) + Mac S/W was a selling point.

mrpippy 5y ago
That, and as a server for Mac-only shops. AppleShare Pro was apparently very fast, and ISTR there were other things like Oracle available for it. What year was the Apple interview?