6 ms·

When Apple Built a Mac OS Running on Top of Solaris and HP-UX

ngcc_hk 5y ago
That is very interesting. But long term, given it is apple and ignore the sever part (which it should go now but not then), these are bad mix. Still Steve did try to get linux as base (including talking with Linus) but even that is not right. It turned out the strange bsd-cum-message based os work fine.
- MBCook 5y ago
  Do you have a source for the Linux part? I’ve never heard that before and would like to know more.
  - ngcc_hk 5y ago
    The discussion with Linus is in the autograph coming out when he passed away.
  - ksherlock 5y ago
    In 1996 (prior to the NeXT reverse merger) Apple and OSF started working on MkLinux which was Linux+Mach for PowerPC. Apple dropped it a couple years later. The Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs biography doesn't have any mentions of Linux or Linus Torvalds FWIW.
tluyben2 5y ago
That's quite interesting. I had a mac at home and at the university we worked on Solaris machines (laughing at the 3 guys sitting in the Windows room); I always thought 'with a bit of polish on Solaris or a LOT of improved stability on Mac OS, computing is damn near perfect'.
- bgm1975 5y ago
  It almost happened. If I’m not mistaken, Sun was on Apple’s list of possible acquisitions in the late 90s before they decided on Next (Be being the other). Considering Jobs came with Next, Apple would have turned into a very different company. If fact, I suspect the whole tech landscape would probably look a lot different today had Apple bought Sun Microsystems.
  - Maursault 5y ago
    This is not accurate. Sun was never in danger of being acquiring by Apple, instead they nearly merged before NeXT was acquired, then Sun and Apple nearly merged again in the naughts (but I honestly don't believe Jobs was serious about it). But in 1996, Sun nearly bought Apple.
    - flembat 5y ago
      Nightmare, they might have ended up owned by ORACLE..
    - bgm1975 5y ago
      Ah, thanks for the clarification, clearly my memory of the events is fuzzy.
    - KerrAvon 5y ago
      Sun was never serious about it — they offered a lower price than Apple’s stock was worth at the time (itself not much). It was an insult and the stockholders would have sued them out of existence if the board had taken it.
  - perardi 5y ago
    Nah, Sun was heavily rumored to be buying Apple. And perhaps not so much as “rumored” as “they couldn’t make a final deal”. https://www.cultofmac.com/463947/today-in-apple-history-sun-microsystems-almost-buys-apple/ https://www.cultofmac.com/463947/today-in-apple-history-sun-... I’ve been a Mac owner since 1994†, and I followed all this soap opera back then. I remember the infamous PRAY cover. https://www.wired.com/1997/06/apple-3/ https://www.wired.com/1997/06/apple-3/ †I am 38, and I feel like an old man these days, you kids with your “multitasking” and your “APIs that make sense”
azalemeth 5y ago
That sumo wrestler is quite something. I miss Easter Eggs in Apple's software -- there are a few in modern versions (e.g. "cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.lotr") but I think that picture highlights their sense of humour back in "the day".
- perardi 5y ago
  I think a lot of the old Easter eggs are soon to be lost in time, like tears in rain. But one I remember: Breakout. http://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/Breakout.html http://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/Breakout.html
- logbiscuitswave 5y ago
  To me it seems like it’s pretty much peak mid-1990s tech advertising. Pick up any issue of WIRED from this time period and it’s filled with advertisements with similar kinds of aggressively strange imagery. Things like this were definitely memorable - I certainly can never forget the infamous Logitech ad with the peeing baby. I wouldn’t be surprised if much of this style of imagery all came from the same ad firm.
  - fouc 5y ago
    I think it's more about the fact it was such a new market, people could have a lot more fun with it and "mass appeal" didn't matter nearly as much. It was still fringe, not everyone had a computer at home or in their pocket yet.
awiesenhofer 5y ago
Oh wow, I need to check if my old HP-UX pizzabox (HP 712) still boots. I'd love to try this if I can track down the files somewhere.
- trasz 5y ago
  Those are fantastic machines to run NextSTEP, btw.
- ece 5y ago
  I have a SPARCstation this might run on as well.
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    I have a slew of sparcstations so that would indeed be cool if it works. They run Linux though; need to find an old Solaris copy then too I guess.
    - ece 5y ago
      archive.org seems to have it: https://archive.org/details/Solaris2.5.1SPARC11972586714 https://archive.org/details/Solaris2.5.1SPARC11972586714 I got one in college, and it was dated even when I got it. I'll need to go back to my parents basement to try and fire it up again, the VGA adapter and and old install of Solaris is about all I can remember.
- dev_tty01 5y ago
  I used MAE on HP/UX for many years. Worked great. We were workstation based designers and couldn't stand Windows so this allowed us to stay on the workstation and still have access to corporate tools like Office. Had mh wired to pop up the appropriate Office app from MAE when those email attachments arrived.
compsciphd 5y ago
So a related story (or why I'm not sure Mac OS running on HP-UX) is that strange. I was interning at the Naval Research Lab in the mid 90s while in high school and was part of a team building what the called the "Secure Tactical Access Terminal". That ran both HP CMW (comparmentalized workstation) an MLS (multi level security) version of HPUX. A big problem on ships is that they have a severe lack of space, so having multiple systems running at multiple classification levels (i.e. command and control machines running JMCIS and normal "office" machines running windows), didn't work so well. so we leveraged the work on CMW machines and provided them with a soft windows (remember them) installation in each compartment that were isolated from one another. So what might have previously been 4 machines on a ship, could be consolidated into one. We had a test deployment on the USS Theodore Roosevelt (not many HS kids back then could claim that they had stuff they wrote running on an aircraft carrier, so that was cool) and the project was well received by command of the carrier, but soon after the Navy made their decision to transition to NT, and there are famous stories about that.
- karmakaze 5y ago
  Great story. I recall SoftPC but not SoftWindows. The Wikipedia page has something interesting to say: > Unlike most emulators, the SoftWindows product used recompiled Windows components to improve performance in most business applications, providing almost native performance (but this meant that, unlike SoftPC, SoftWindows was not upgradable).
  - compsciphd 5y ago
    hmm, it might have been SoftPC. It's been a while :) I think we might have used both in different stages of the project (or on different machines, we were prototyping it on a CMW version of SCO (x86 major COTS advantage) and also had it on either SunOS CMW or trusted Solaris, but HP had the big TAC4 contract for workstations so main usage was on it, that I remember for sure.
    - karmakaze 5y ago
      My understanding is that it started out that SoftPC bundled with Windows licenses were sold as SoftWindows, and later there were optimizations.
jasoneckert 5y ago
The 1990s had a lot of weird stuff like this - platforms, operating systems and software were exploding, and nobody really knew what the end result would be so they focused on ensuring they had a hand in everything. Running Mac OS and Mac OS apps using MAE on Unix workstations was one example. But there were others too - some I remember are NeXT on Solaris with OpenStep, Mac LC systems that had a DOS compatibility card (486 CPU) to run DOS/Windows apps, and Unix SysV running in Mac OS using A/UX.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > and Unix SysV running in Mac OS using A/UX. Likewise, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MachTen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MachTen
  - masswerk 5y ago
    MachTen was actually amazing, especially the fast boot time. (There was also WebTen, which was essentially Apache, Perl and probably MaySQL running on a basic kernel, without a window manager, but with MacOS ineropability and files system sharing.)
- dekhn 5y ago
  Interix: an entire replacement posix subsystem for Windows NT, which included gcc, opengl, and motif. I ported a million line UNIX molecular modelling app to NT in 2000.
- AntiRush 5y ago
  The System 7 that runs on A/UX is actually a unix process running on top of the A/UX kernel (which exposes the necessary Macintosh Toolbox features to run the specific version of System 7).
  - lproven 5y ago
    Which is, AIUI, why A/UX could not usefully be ported to PowerPC. Which led to Copland, which didn't work out, and so led to the NeXT acquisition.
outside1234 5y ago
Windows used to run on top of DEC Alpha too
- mbreese 5y ago
  But that wasn’t in an emulator, right? I never used it, but I thought that was a separate build that ran on a DEC Alpha, not emulated on the primary Unix OS.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Correct; NT had builds for at least MIPS, Alpha, and x86. Edit: Here we go: > Windows NT 3.1 was released for Intel x86 PC compatible, PC-98, DEC Alpha, and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms. Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995, specifically PReP-compliant systems such as the IBM Power Series desktops/laptops and Motorola PowerStack series; but despite meetings between Michael Spindler and Bill Gates, not on the Power Macintosh as the PReP compliant Power Macintosh project failed to ship. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platfor...
    - foobiekr 5y ago
      And PowerPC.
    - monocasa 5y ago
      And i860, though that one was unreleased and just a development forcing function for portability.
      - lproven 5y ago
        NT was originally developed on i860, which was codenamed "N-Ten". That's what the initials "N.T." originally stood for. https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/winserver2k3_gold1.asp https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/winserver2k3_gold1... At different times, NT supported or has supported: i860, MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC, Alpha, ARM 32, ARM 64, Itanium, x86-32 and x86-64.
paxswill 5y ago
> There was a time when Apple has email mailing lists. Here is the MAE User list. And Apple published the archives for people to search. I tell ya. Was a different time at Apple. Apple still has a handful of mailing lists (they’re mostly dead though): https://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo https://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo Unfortunately many of the archives are restricted to members.
rcarmo 5y ago
I've been seriously considering running BasiliskII on a Raspberry Pi again, if only for that wonderful sense of unfettered simplicity. Too bad most document formats have evolved beyond the versions of stuff I can run on it.
lundukethrow 5y ago
so i used to read lunduke's twitter. his current twitter is literally the antithesis of his previous twitter. i have no idea what to think about this.
tiffanyh 5y ago
Macintosh Application Environment was a Virtual Machine (VM) before VMs became popular.
- mechanical_bear 5y ago
  VMs were quite popular before this project, dating back to the 1960s.
  - mnd999 5y ago
    Indeed, the previous poster might be interested in z/VM for example.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      Or Smalltalk 80.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  VM's have been popular since IBM more or less invented the term in the 60's. It's not even possible anymore to install an OS on a modern mainframe bare metal. IIRC, the z12 was the last one where this was possible.
adrianmonk 5y ago
> Is it a virtual machine? Yes. Yes it is. Mostly. > It is, essentially, a 68040 emulator with a Mac ROM and System 7.5.3 sitting on top of it. It sounds like they basically reused the same design that they used to build PowerPC Macs that could run (legacy) Motorola 68k applications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_68k_emulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_68k_emulator When you ran a legacy 68k app, the code of the app itself ran under CPU emulation. But they ported some of the system to PowerPC, and when the legacy app called into those particular parts of the system, that part of the code ran natively. Some lucky apps (with the right workload) ran surprisingly fast. Looking at the MAE architecture diagram, it looks very similar, with some of the Mac system sitting atop the 68k emulator but some of it sitting atop a layer that doesn't go through emulation.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  > When you ran a legacy 68k app, the code of the app itself ran under CPU emulation. But they ported some of the system to PowerPC, and when the legacy app called into those particular parts of the system, that part of the code ran natively. Sounds like qemu-user.
  - jchw 5y ago
    I think qemu-user is a cleaner split due to the syscall interface being the barrier. IIRC, what Apple was doing was a bit more interesting because there wasn’t a clean boundary between what was emulated and what was native.
    - marcodiego 5y ago
      So it is like box86, which translates some API calls?
      - jchw 5y ago
        If I’m not mistaken, System 7 itself was not entirely ported to PowerPC. So the OS itself still needed m68k emulation for some components. But yes, box86 sounds a bit closer based on my understanding.
racingmars 5y ago
Not too long ago, I got a SunPC Accelerator card (basically a 486 PC on an SBus card) for my SPARCstation 20, and installed the Macintosh Application Environment, so I have Solaris, Mac System 7, and Windows 3.11 running on the SPARCstation 20! Screenshot of everything happily co-existing: https://i.imgur.com/ctvlzCX.gif https://i.imgur.com/ctvlzCX.gif
ylee 5y ago
My first year at Columbia, the university set up a single computer lab in the engineering building (<https://cuit.columbia.edu/computer-lab-technologies/locations-hours https://cuit.columbia.edu/computer-lab-technologies/location...>) with HP 9000 workstations. Although they booted into HP-UX and its Motif window manager, MAE provided Mac emulation and, in practice, was usually used because most students were unfamiliar with X Window, of course. MAE was slow and unstable, and by the time I graduated Macs, I believe, replaced them, which made the lab consistent with what most of the other computer labs had.
kbob 5y ago
I was part of the MAE engineering team from 1992-94. The original plan was to machine-translate the Mac ROM from 68K machine code to SPARC/PA-RISC/POWER machine code. It would have brought MAE much closer to RISC-like speeds. Unfortunately, there's a lot of dirty assembler in the Mac ROMs, and the decoding project faltered. So about 3/4 of the way through the project, we scrapped the binary translation and ran the whole ROM in the 68K emulator. It started working quickly, but it was slower by a factor of several. We had a binary translation app, basically a compiler that took 68K machine code as the source language, written by a 3rd party company whose name I forgot. They were east coast, possibly Research Triangle, and might have had defense contracting ties. I personally identified about 20 Duff's Devices in QuickDraw inner loops and recoded them as not-Duff's-Devices so the binary translator could grok them. (Sorry, can't remember exactly how I de-optimized them. My/our assumption was that the RISC processors were so much faster than the 68030 of the Mac IIci we were porting that optimization wasn't a big deal.) We (largely me) developed a huge list of hints for the translator, hundreds of instances of "The code at address X looks like it does this, but it really does that." or "Address Y is an entry point. Start translating here." or the converse, "Address Z is data. Don't mess with it." It was an insane engineering effort, and I'm still disappointed it never shipped. It was happening at the same time other parts of Apple were developing the first generation PowerPC Macs. They were going through equally insane gymnastics getting 68K and PowerPC to coexist in the same address space, with calls in both directions. Unfortunately, it's been nearly 30 years, and I just can't remember very many details any more.
- kbob 5y ago
  N.B., I didn't learn the term, "Duff's Device" until several years later.
mc4ndr3 5y ago
I wish Apple would bring macOS to x86. Or Valve would bring Source Engine to 64-bit.

That is very interesting. But long term, given it is apple and ignore the sever part (which it should go now but not then), these are bad mix. Still Steve did try to get linux as base (including talking with Linus) but even that is not right. It turned out the strange bsd-cum-message based os work fine.

MBCook 5y ago
Do you have a source for the Linux part? I’ve never heard that before and would like to know more.
- ngcc_hk 5y ago
  The discussion with Linus is in the autograph coming out when he passed away.
- ksherlock 5y ago
  In 1996 (prior to the NeXT reverse merger) Apple and OSF started working on MkLinux which was Linux+Mach for PowerPC. Apple dropped it a couple years later. The Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs biography doesn't have any mentions of Linux or Linus Torvalds FWIW.

tluyben2 5y ago

That's quite interesting. I had a mac at home and at the university we worked on Solaris machines (laughing at the 3 guys sitting in the Windows room); I always thought 'with a bit of polish on Solaris or a LOT of improved stability on Mac OS, computing is damn near perfect'.

bgm1975 5y ago
It almost happened. If I’m not mistaken, Sun was on Apple’s list of possible acquisitions in the late 90s before they decided on Next (Be being the other). Considering Jobs came with Next, Apple would have turned into a very different company. If fact, I suspect the whole tech landscape would probably look a lot different today had Apple bought Sun Microsystems.
- Maursault 5y ago
  This is not accurate. Sun was never in danger of being acquiring by Apple, instead they nearly merged before NeXT was acquired, then Sun and Apple nearly merged again in the naughts (but I honestly don't believe Jobs was serious about it). But in 1996, Sun nearly bought Apple.
  - flembat 5y ago
    Nightmare, they might have ended up owned by ORACLE..
  - bgm1975 5y ago
    Ah, thanks for the clarification, clearly my memory of the events is fuzzy.
  - KerrAvon 5y ago
    Sun was never serious about it — they offered a lower price than Apple’s stock was worth at the time (itself not much). It was an insult and the stockholders would have sued them out of existence if the board had taken it.
- perardi 5y ago
  Nah, Sun was heavily rumored to be buying Apple. And perhaps not so much as “rumored” as “they couldn’t make a final deal”. https://www.cultofmac.com/463947/today-in-apple-history-sun-microsystems-almost-buys-apple/ https://www.cultofmac.com/463947/today-in-apple-history-sun-... I’ve been a Mac owner since 1994†, and I followed all this soap opera back then. I remember the infamous PRAY cover. https://www.wired.com/1997/06/apple-3/ https://www.wired.com/1997/06/apple-3/ †I am 38, and I feel like an old man these days, you kids with your “multitasking” and your “APIs that make sense”

azalemeth 5y ago

That sumo wrestler is quite something. I miss Easter Eggs in Apple's software -- there are a few in modern versions (e.g. "cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.lotr") but I think that picture highlights their sense of humour back in "the day".

perardi 5y ago
I think a lot of the old Easter eggs are soon to be lost in time, like tears in rain. But one I remember: Breakout. http://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/Breakout.html http://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/Breakout.html
logbiscuitswave 5y ago
To me it seems like it’s pretty much peak mid-1990s tech advertising. Pick up any issue of WIRED from this time period and it’s filled with advertisements with similar kinds of aggressively strange imagery. Things like this were definitely memorable - I certainly can never forget the infamous Logitech ad with the peeing baby. I wouldn’t be surprised if much of this style of imagery all came from the same ad firm.
- fouc 5y ago
  I think it's more about the fact it was such a new market, people could have a lot more fun with it and "mass appeal" didn't matter nearly as much. It was still fringe, not everyone had a computer at home or in their pocket yet.

awiesenhofer 5y ago

Oh wow, I need to check if my old HP-UX pizzabox (HP 712) still boots. I'd love to try this if I can track down the files somewhere.

trasz 5y ago
Those are fantastic machines to run NextSTEP, btw.
ece 5y ago
I have a SPARCstation this might run on as well.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  I have a slew of sparcstations so that would indeed be cool if it works. They run Linux though; need to find an old Solaris copy then too I guess.
  - ece 5y ago
    archive.org seems to have it: https://archive.org/details/Solaris2.5.1SPARC11972586714 https://archive.org/details/Solaris2.5.1SPARC11972586714 I got one in college, and it was dated even when I got it. I'll need to go back to my parents basement to try and fire it up again, the VGA adapter and and old install of Solaris is about all I can remember.
dev_tty01 5y ago
I used MAE on HP/UX for many years. Worked great. We were workstation based designers and couldn't stand Windows so this allowed us to stay on the workstation and still have access to corporate tools like Office. Had mh wired to pop up the appropriate Office app from MAE when those email attachments arrived.

compsciphd 5y ago

So a related story (or why I'm not sure Mac OS running on HP-UX) is that strange. I was interning at the Naval Research Lab in the mid 90s while in high school and was part of a team building what the called the "Secure Tactical Access Terminal". That ran both HP CMW (comparmentalized workstation) an MLS (multi level security) version of HPUX. A big problem on ships is that they have a severe lack of space, so having multiple systems running at multiple classification levels (i.e. command and control machines running JMCIS and normal "office" machines running windows), didn't work so well. so we leveraged the work on CMW machines and provided them with a soft windows (remember them) installation in each compartment that were isolated from one another. So what might have previously been 4 machines on a ship, could be consolidated into one. We had a test deployment on the USS Theodore Roosevelt (not many HS kids back then could claim that they had stuff they wrote running on an aircraft carrier, so that was cool) and the project was well received by command of the carrier, but soon after the Navy made their decision to transition to NT, and there are famous stories about that.

karmakaze 5y ago
Great story. I recall SoftPC but not SoftWindows. The Wikipedia page has something interesting to say: > Unlike most emulators, the SoftWindows product used recompiled Windows components to improve performance in most business applications, providing almost native performance (but this meant that, unlike SoftPC, SoftWindows was not upgradable).
- compsciphd 5y ago
  hmm, it might have been SoftPC. It's been a while :) I think we might have used both in different stages of the project (or on different machines, we were prototyping it on a CMW version of SCO (x86 major COTS advantage) and also had it on either SunOS CMW or trusted Solaris, but HP had the big TAC4 contract for workstations so main usage was on it, that I remember for sure.
  - karmakaze 5y ago
    My understanding is that it started out that SoftPC bundled with Windows licenses were sold as SoftWindows, and later there were optimizations.

jasoneckert 5y ago

The 1990s had a lot of weird stuff like this - platforms, operating systems and software were exploding, and nobody really knew what the end result would be so they focused on ensuring they had a hand in everything. Running Mac OS and Mac OS apps using MAE on Unix workstations was one example. But there were others too - some I remember are NeXT on Solaris with OpenStep, Mac LC systems that had a DOS compatibility card (486 CPU) to run DOS/Windows apps, and Unix SysV running in Mac OS using A/UX.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> and Unix SysV running in Mac OS using A/UX. Likewise, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MachTen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MachTen
- masswerk 5y ago
  MachTen was actually amazing, especially the fast boot time. (There was also WebTen, which was essentially Apache, Perl and probably MaySQL running on a basic kernel, without a window manager, but with MacOS ineropability and files system sharing.)
dekhn 5y ago
Interix: an entire replacement posix subsystem for Windows NT, which included gcc, opengl, and motif. I ported a million line UNIX molecular modelling app to NT in 2000.
AntiRush 5y ago
The System 7 that runs on A/UX is actually a unix process running on top of the A/UX kernel (which exposes the necessary Macintosh Toolbox features to run the specific version of System 7).
- lproven 5y ago
  Which is, AIUI, why A/UX could not usefully be ported to PowerPC. Which led to Copland, which didn't work out, and so led to the NeXT acquisition.

outside1234 5y ago

Windows used to run on top of DEC Alpha too

mbreese 5y ago
But that wasn’t in an emulator, right? I never used it, but I thought that was a separate build that ran on a DEC Alpha, not emulated on the primary Unix OS.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Correct; NT had builds for at least MIPS, Alpha, and x86. Edit: Here we go: > Windows NT 3.1 was released for Intel x86 PC compatible, PC-98, DEC Alpha, and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms. Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995, specifically PReP-compliant systems such as the IBM Power Series desktops/laptops and Motorola PowerStack series; but despite meetings between Michael Spindler and Bill Gates, not on the Power Macintosh as the PReP compliant Power Macintosh project failed to ship. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platfor...
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    And PowerPC.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    And i860, though that one was unreleased and just a development forcing function for portability.
    - lproven 5y ago
      NT was originally developed on i860, which was codenamed "N-Ten". That's what the initials "N.T." originally stood for. https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/winserver2k3_gold1.asp https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/ms/winserver2k3_gold1... At different times, NT supported or has supported: i860, MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC, Alpha, ARM 32, ARM 64, Itanium, x86-32 and x86-64.

paxswill 5y ago

> There was a time when Apple has email mailing lists. Here is the MAE User list. And Apple published the archives for people to search. I tell ya. Was a different time at Apple. Apple still has a handful of mailing lists (they’re mostly dead though): https://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo https://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo Unfortunately many of the archives are restricted to members.

rcarmo 5y ago

I've been seriously considering running BasiliskII on a Raspberry Pi again, if only for that wonderful sense of unfettered simplicity. Too bad most document formats have evolved beyond the versions of stuff I can run on it.

lundukethrow 5y ago

so i used to read lunduke's twitter. his current twitter is literally the antithesis of his previous twitter. i have no idea what to think about this.

tiffanyh 5y ago

Macintosh Application Environment was a Virtual Machine (VM) before VMs became popular.

mechanical_bear 5y ago
VMs were quite popular before this project, dating back to the 1960s.
- mnd999 5y ago
  Indeed, the previous poster might be interested in z/VM for example.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Or Smalltalk 80.
rbanffy 5y ago
VM's have been popular since IBM more or less invented the term in the 60's. It's not even possible anymore to install an OS on a modern mainframe bare metal. IIRC, the z12 was the last one where this was possible.

adrianmonk 5y ago

> Is it a virtual machine? Yes. Yes it is. Mostly. > It is, essentially, a 68040 emulator with a Mac ROM and System 7.5.3 sitting on top of it. It sounds like they basically reused the same design that they used to build PowerPC Macs that could run (legacy) Motorola 68k applications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_68k_emulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_68k_emulator When you ran a legacy 68k app, the code of the app itself ran under CPU emulation. But they ported some of the system to PowerPC, and when the legacy app called into those particular parts of the system, that part of the code ran natively. Some lucky apps (with the right workload) ran surprisingly fast. Looking at the MAE architecture diagram, it looks very similar, with some of the Mac system sitting atop the 68k emulator but some of it sitting atop a layer that doesn't go through emulation.

marcodiego 5y ago
> When you ran a legacy 68k app, the code of the app itself ran under CPU emulation. But they ported some of the system to PowerPC, and when the legacy app called into those particular parts of the system, that part of the code ran natively. Sounds like qemu-user.
- jchw 5y ago
  I think qemu-user is a cleaner split due to the syscall interface being the barrier. IIRC, what Apple was doing was a bit more interesting because there wasn’t a clean boundary between what was emulated and what was native.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    So it is like box86, which translates some API calls?
    - jchw 5y ago
      If I’m not mistaken, System 7 itself was not entirely ported to PowerPC. So the OS itself still needed m68k emulation for some components. But yes, box86 sounds a bit closer based on my understanding.

racingmars 5y ago

Not too long ago, I got a SunPC Accelerator card (basically a 486 PC on an SBus card) for my SPARCstation 20, and installed the Macintosh Application Environment, so I have Solaris, Mac System 7, and Windows 3.11 running on the SPARCstation 20! Screenshot of everything happily co-existing: https://i.imgur.com/ctvlzCX.gif https://i.imgur.com/ctvlzCX.gif

ylee 5y ago

My first year at Columbia, the university set up a single computer lab in the engineering building (<https://cuit.columbia.edu/computer-lab-technologies/locations-hours https://cuit.columbia.edu/computer-lab-technologies/location...>) with HP 9000 workstations. Although they booted into HP-UX and its Motif window manager, MAE provided Mac emulation and, in practice, was usually used because most students were unfamiliar with X Window, of course. MAE was slow and unstable, and by the time I graduated Macs, I believe, replaced them, which made the lab consistent with what most of the other computer labs had.

kbob 5y ago

I was part of the MAE engineering team from 1992-94. The original plan was to machine-translate the Mac ROM from 68K machine code to SPARC/PA-RISC/POWER machine code. It would have brought MAE much closer to RISC-like speeds. Unfortunately, there's a lot of dirty assembler in the Mac ROMs, and the decoding project faltered. So about 3/4 of the way through the project, we scrapped the binary translation and ran the whole ROM in the 68K emulator. It started working quickly, but it was slower by a factor of several. We had a binary translation app, basically a compiler that took 68K machine code as the source language, written by a 3rd party company whose name I forgot. They were east coast, possibly Research Triangle, and might have had defense contracting ties. I personally identified about 20 Duff's Devices in QuickDraw inner loops and recoded them as not-Duff's-Devices so the binary translator could grok them. (Sorry, can't remember exactly how I de-optimized them. My/our assumption was that the RISC processors were so much faster than the 68030 of the Mac IIci we were porting that optimization wasn't a big deal.) We (largely me) developed a huge list of hints for the translator, hundreds of instances of "The code at address X looks like it does this, but it really does that." or "Address Y is an entry point. Start translating here." or the converse, "Address Z is data. Don't mess with it." It was an insane engineering effort, and I'm still disappointed it never shipped. It was happening at the same time other parts of Apple were developing the first generation PowerPC Macs. They were going through equally insane gymnastics getting 68K and PowerPC to coexist in the same address space, with calls in both directions. Unfortunately, it's been nearly 30 years, and I just can't remember very many details any more.

kbob 5y ago
N.B., I didn't learn the term, "Duff's Device" until several years later.

mc4ndr3 5y ago

I wish Apple would bring macOS to x86. Or Valve would bring Source Engine to 64-bit.