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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

by 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.

by jimjag 5y ago

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.