7 ms·

The Apple Network Server's all-too-secret weapon (featuring PPC Toolbox)

nxobject 3y ago
The history section is depressing: a whole conga line of promised collaborations and technologies that Apple seems to have promised, and then completely dropped the ball on. (Even apart from the famous crash-and-burns of Copland and OpenDoc, don't forget A/UX 4.0! A/UX and AIX on PowerOpen! Mac OS 7 on DR-DOS! Netware on PPC Macs! Mac OS on the ANS! Okay, wait, MAE on AIX on the ANS! Whoops, no SMP on the ANS! Okay, now we're shipping Mac OS, A/UX, and NT on ANS!) It puts contemporary Apple's NIH complex in context.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 3y ago
  > Mac OS 7 on DR-DOS! Seriously?
  - II2II 3y ago
    I believe it is a reference to the infamous Star Trek project. I did not know of the Digital Research connection, but it sounds like it was another one of those collaborations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project The funny thing is, the industry knew that collaboration would be necessary back then, but it took open source models for it to become effective. (I guess direct business to business agreements made competitors to dependent upon each other.)
    - classichasclass 3y ago
      (author) Yes, exactly. Star Trek got a lot of heat at the time for being a bad idea and at the time it probably would have been a real strategic blunder (Spindler was right to kill it IMHO), but it really worked, and Marklar ended up being analogously the same thing.
      - KerrAvon 3y ago
        The biggest problem with Star Trek was that it didn't run existing Mac software, and you couldn't emulate the 68k ISA reasonably on x86 at the time. The key piece of Mac OS X on Intel a decade later was translation software for PowerPC binaries, so that your existing software still worked.
    - nxobject 3y ago
      I've always hoped that, since it was actually demoed, a copy still exists somewhere in the wild – even if it'll only boot the Finder...
- minimaul 3y ago
  The huge list of projects from that era of Apple really shows how aimless they were. I remember at the time how more and more irrelevant they seemed compared to the Wintel behemoth, and that really didn’t start to turn around until the G3 iMac, and later the iPod.
  - krger 3y ago
    >The huge list of projects from that era of Apple really shows how aimless they were. Most of those projects involved active collaboration with other companies who were similarly aimless, so Apple was by no means alone in their aimlessness. It's truly wild just how much time, effort, and money the various companies spent smelling each others' farts back in the 90s.
    - fourfour3 3y ago
      I guess you can also draw similarities to the MS/IBM joint venture that was OS/2, but that actually released products - even if MS dumped it for NT.
      - lstodd 3y ago
        Oh, OS/2 Warp was fine. I even had it as my default OS for a while back then.
        EricE 3y ago
        Team OS/2 Baby! I still wish I had the salmon polo from the Warp comdex push.
      - p_l 3y ago
        MS/IBM joint venture failed through Windows 3.0, which in turn apparently was kickstarted by one person in the company.
        pjmlp 3y ago
        Yes, if I am not mistaken, this is one of the books that tells which person was it. "Undocumented Windows: A Programmers Guide to Reserved Microsoft Windows Api Functions (The Andrew Schulman Programming Series/Book and Disk" https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/0201608340 https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/0201608340 Pity as SOM was much better alternative than COM, and OS/2 in general. However that wasn't the only issue that nailed OS/2's destiny, higher hardware resources and lack of proper management direction from IBM side also played a big role.
- rodgerd 3y ago
  And clearly a leadership/partnering-driven madness. They had the answer all along: A/UX, a MacOS UX on a Unix base, gave them what they wanted to get to (modern memory management, stability, multi-user security with a MacOS AI), and what they'd end up buying with NeXT. Instead at the time I was working at an Apple reseller and we were treated to hugely over-optimisic promises for MacOS 8 that included a Microkernel that could run Windows apps alongside MacOS applications.
avidphantasm 3y ago
Interesting to think about a world where Apple was able to embed AIX with PPCToolbox running on the same machine with classic MacOS essentially as the window server. Assuming they could get around licensing cost issues, this might have been a viable path forward for a modern OS in an alternate future.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  There was also Latitude porting toolkit, which was a sort of reverse engineered MacOS toolbox that mapped Macos calls to native Unix calls, including Rhapsody, at the source level. Adobe used it to port Illustrator and Photoshop to Solaris & Irix [0] http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Jun97FactoryFloor/index.html http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Ju...
thanatos519 3y ago
I had one of these and ran Yellow Dog Linux on it. Linux supported all of the hardware very well including hotswap SCSI and the 20x4 LCD with a nice multi page mini 'top'. Physically, it was amazing. No tools required, and the processor board rolled out on rails. Had no idea about all this craziness!
knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
This is a great and accurate historical history of the Network Server and its software. I worked at Apple, in the same building with the Apple’s Shiner team and AIX teams, and had a Network Server in my office because I was on the team at Apple porting NetWare to the machine—I still have a bootable CD. The project was cancelled just as it was entering Beta when disks were to get into customers hands.
- mietek 3y ago
  Please image your CD and preserve it in the Internet Archive, for the sake of computing history. Do you happen to have any other unpreserved items from this era? In particular, APDA publications are almost all lost to time.
- classichasclass 3y ago
  (author) Was this PIN or Portable NetWare? How did it look on the ANS? Same interface as regular NetWare? That CD would also be very interesting to run on real hardware. ckaiser at floodgap dawt com if you're willing!
  - knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
    I sent you an email. Yes it was PIN.
  - knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
    It looked just like Netware except setup was actually more simple as it auto detected stuff on the network simplifying the process. At the time it was being developed for MIPS, PPC, SPARC, and PA-RISC (I’m thinking there was a fifth platform, or maybe that was X86?) Netware dropped the other RISC processors and until it was cancelled focused mainly on PPC and X86. Apple did all the PPC drivers, and all the device dependent code as well as a modified version of setup. It was dropped as both companies were going into a death spiral about the time Micheal Spindler left and Gil A started. We were told it was a “mutual” decision by both companies but I don’t have any insight into the reason for cancellation beyond that.
- 3y ago
bediger4000 3y ago
> A/UX, Apple's own Unix with a bolted-on Mac compatibility layer I used a Mac running A/UX circa 1990-91. It worked rather well for the period. I was really surprised when Apple dropped it because it solved a lot of what I saw as problems in MacOS. The article also mentions Apple talk. There was some free software called UAB, Unix-to-AppleTalk Bridge around that same timeframe.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  There was also Netatalk (like Samba but for AFP) released in 1990.

The history section is depressing: a whole conga line of promised collaborations and technologies that Apple seems to have promised, and then completely dropped the ball on. (Even apart from the famous crash-and-burns of Copland and OpenDoc, don't forget A/UX 4.0! A/UX and AIX on PowerOpen! Mac OS 7 on DR-DOS! Netware on PPC Macs! Mac OS on the ANS! Okay, wait, MAE on AIX on the ANS! Whoops, no SMP on the ANS! Okay, now we're shipping Mac OS, A/UX, and NT on ANS!) It puts contemporary Apple's NIH complex in context.

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 3y ago
> Mac OS 7 on DR-DOS! Seriously?
- II2II 3y ago
  I believe it is a reference to the infamous Star Trek project. I did not know of the Digital Research connection, but it sounds like it was another one of those collaborations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project The funny thing is, the industry knew that collaboration would be necessary back then, but it took open source models for it to become effective. (I guess direct business to business agreements made competitors to dependent upon each other.)
  - classichasclass 3y ago
    (author) Yes, exactly. Star Trek got a lot of heat at the time for being a bad idea and at the time it probably would have been a real strategic blunder (Spindler was right to kill it IMHO), but it really worked, and Marklar ended up being analogously the same thing.
    - KerrAvon 3y ago
      The biggest problem with Star Trek was that it didn't run existing Mac software, and you couldn't emulate the 68k ISA reasonably on x86 at the time. The key piece of Mac OS X on Intel a decade later was translation software for PowerPC binaries, so that your existing software still worked.
  - nxobject 3y ago
    I've always hoped that, since it was actually demoed, a copy still exists somewhere in the wild – even if it'll only boot the Finder...
minimaul 3y ago
The huge list of projects from that era of Apple really shows how aimless they were. I remember at the time how more and more irrelevant they seemed compared to the Wintel behemoth, and that really didn’t start to turn around until the G3 iMac, and later the iPod.
- krger 3y ago
  >The huge list of projects from that era of Apple really shows how aimless they were. Most of those projects involved active collaboration with other companies who were similarly aimless, so Apple was by no means alone in their aimlessness. It's truly wild just how much time, effort, and money the various companies spent smelling each others' farts back in the 90s.
  - fourfour3 3y ago
    I guess you can also draw similarities to the MS/IBM joint venture that was OS/2, but that actually released products - even if MS dumped it for NT.
    - lstodd 3y ago
      Oh, OS/2 Warp was fine. I even had it as my default OS for a while back then.
      - EricE 3y ago
        Team OS/2 Baby! I still wish I had the salmon polo from the Warp comdex push.
    - p_l 3y ago
      MS/IBM joint venture failed through Windows 3.0, which in turn apparently was kickstarted by one person in the company.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Yes, if I am not mistaken, this is one of the books that tells which person was it. "Undocumented Windows: A Programmers Guide to Reserved Microsoft Windows Api Functions (The Andrew Schulman Programming Series/Book and Disk" https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/0201608340 https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/0201608340 Pity as SOM was much better alternative than COM, and OS/2 in general. However that wasn't the only issue that nailed OS/2's destiny, higher hardware resources and lack of proper management direction from IBM side also played a big role.
rodgerd 3y ago
And clearly a leadership/partnering-driven madness. They had the answer all along: A/UX, a MacOS UX on a Unix base, gave them what they wanted to get to (modern memory management, stability, multi-user security with a MacOS AI), and what they'd end up buying with NeXT. Instead at the time I was working at an Apple reseller and we were treated to hugely over-optimisic promises for MacOS 8 that included a Microkernel that could run Windows apps alongside MacOS applications.

avidphantasm 3y ago

Interesting to think about a world where Apple was able to embed AIX with PPCToolbox running on the same machine with classic MacOS essentially as the window server. Assuming they could get around licensing cost issues, this might have been a viable path forward for a modern OS in an alternate future.

sillywalk 3y ago
There was also Latitude porting toolkit, which was a sort of reverse engineered MacOS toolbox that mapped Macos calls to native Unix calls, including Rhapsody, at the source level. Adobe used it to port Illustrator and Photoshop to Solaris & Irix [0] http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Jun97FactoryFloor/index.html http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Ju...

thanatos519 3y ago

I had one of these and ran Yellow Dog Linux on it. Linux supported all of the hardware very well including hotswap SCSI and the 20x4 LCD with a nice multi page mini 'top'. Physically, it was amazing. No tools required, and the processor board rolled out on rails. Had no idea about all this craziness!

knuckleheadsmif 3y ago

This is a great and accurate historical history of the Network Server and its software. I worked at Apple, in the same building with the Apple’s Shiner team and AIX teams, and had a Network Server in my office because I was on the team at Apple porting NetWare to the machine—I still have a bootable CD. The project was cancelled just as it was entering Beta when disks were to get into customers hands.

mietek 3y ago
Please image your CD and preserve it in the Internet Archive, for the sake of computing history. Do you happen to have any other unpreserved items from this era? In particular, APDA publications are almost all lost to time.
classichasclass 3y ago
(author) Was this PIN or Portable NetWare? How did it look on the ANS? Same interface as regular NetWare? That CD would also be very interesting to run on real hardware. ckaiser at floodgap dawt com if you're willing!
- knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
  I sent you an email. Yes it was PIN.
- knuckleheadsmif 3y ago
  It looked just like Netware except setup was actually more simple as it auto detected stuff on the network simplifying the process. At the time it was being developed for MIPS, PPC, SPARC, and PA-RISC (I’m thinking there was a fifth platform, or maybe that was X86?) Netware dropped the other RISC processors and until it was cancelled focused mainly on PPC and X86. Apple did all the PPC drivers, and all the device dependent code as well as a modified version of setup. It was dropped as both companies were going into a death spiral about the time Micheal Spindler left and Gil A started. We were told it was a “mutual” decision by both companies but I don’t have any insight into the reason for cancellation beyond that.
3y ago

bediger4000 3y ago

> A/UX, Apple's own Unix with a bolted-on Mac compatibility layer I used a Mac running A/UX circa 1990-91. It worked rather well for the period. I was really surprised when Apple dropped it because it solved a lot of what I saw as problems in MacOS. The article also mentions Apple talk. There was some free software called UAB, Unix-to-AppleTalk Bridge around that same timeframe.

sillywalk 3y ago
There was also Netatalk (like Samba but for AFP) released in 1990.