7 ms·

A/UX

106 points by lioeters 3y ago

lioeters 3y ago
Also on this topic: - A/UX: The Unix for the rest of us? http://toastytech.com/guis/aux.html http://toastytech.com/guis/aux.html - Apple A/UX: The First UNIX Mac OS - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI
- gattilorenz 3y ago
  And the Shoebill emulator, if you want to run A/UX yourself: https://github.com/pruten/shoebill https://github.com/pruten/shoebill Or, apparently, a recent-ish QEMU, but I haven’t tried that myself
bregma 3y ago
Ah, yes, good old A/UX. I remember taking half a day to reinstall it on a Mac II from a box of floppies, staring at the counting fingers on the screen while waiting for the instructions to swap disks.
- _jal 3y ago
  Yep, me too. I worked at Sybase at the time, and installed it to use a beta PowerBuilder to (try to) build some internal tools. Granted, I in my early 20s and far less experienced with this stuff, but found PB utterly incomprehensible. Unix started making sense fairly quickly, although I still had years of learning ahead to get to competent. Only later did I realize how odd it was that they had me doing that on a Mac. Those where the days where they had farms of various Unix workstations because they ported SQL Server to a ton of different platforms. I remember ending up in a storage room one day and there were piles of unopened Suns, Apollos, DECs, SGIs... Slightly less of a commitment, there was also MPW, which was kind of unix-ish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Workshop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...
  - mleo 3y ago
    PowerBuilder is a word I haven’t heard in a long time. My first job out of college at a tech consultancy was developing a PowerBuilder/Oracle application for a client. Tooling was terrible compared to today, but it was a great LOB development tool.
    - tizio13 3y ago
      Oh man, it took me a second to realize why I even recognized Sybase and Powerbuilder. My last job had me convert a bunch of PB reports into Crystal. My god I’m so glad the design of PB never caught on. Awful program
jimjag 3y ago
This was one of the most important OSs in my life, for a number of reasons.
- latchkey 3y ago
  Please don't be so humble Jim! Anyone who is reading this should realize that Jim was the backbone of A/UX. He created and maintained the infamous A/UX FAQ. If it wasn't for him, this system would have been completely useless. He really brought light to this operating system. It was also super important in my life as well. I had a Quadra 950 beast of a machine in college (I named it: dolphin) and taught myself quite a bit of C by porting existing open source software to it (which Jim listed in his FAQ). I ran all sorts of social services on it... BBS', gopher, finger, cu-seeme and most importantly... early ncsa and apache httpd. I really got to connect with a lot of people on the early 90's internet this way and it shaped my life to this day.
- richharms 3y ago
  Thank you for everything you did to support A/UX! jagubox.gsfc.nasa.gov will be forever burned into my memory.
  - ForOldHack 3y ago
    Absolutely for ever. All the security updates, software updates, third party everything. Jimjag is the real deal. I had a pair of Quadra 950s, one running Apple share, and the other with the SCSI Card running A/UX. ( 2x4x240M ). Without his through amount of patches, and supplements, A/UX would have been much harder, despite all the documentation. I could xTerm from any machine in my house into my A/UX server. Thanks Jim. Thanks for your archive.
    - jimjag 3y ago
      blush Thank you everyone for the kind words
- classichasclass 3y ago
  Thanks for being there for A/UX! Proud to still maintain a mirror of jagubox on the Gopher server, and my clock-chipped Q800 runs it splendidly. gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/1/archive/jagubox-gsfc-nasa-gov-aux
donatj 3y ago
This reminds me of the old Computer Chronicles episode about A/UX - worthy of a watch. Wish we still had computer reporting of that caliber https://youtu.be/nId-Nsj5OX4?si=sk2A28Xo5ivL8Rqf https://youtu.be/nId-Nsj5OX4?si=sk2A28Xo5ivL8Rqf
- _0xdd 3y ago
  One of my favorite TV shows to watch on archive.org. Things were so much simpler back then.
- snakeyjake 3y ago
  >Wish we still had computer reporting of that caliber Today, when a new CPU is released instead of having a sales rep on the show to demonstrate how much faster it spins a wireframe in a 3-minute segment, there are publications that will spend two weeks benchmarking it who will then release an hour-long video and thousands of words of writing on every aspect of it. Youtube videos on A/UX go into much more detail than Computer Chronicles ever could and I'm saying that as the founding member, president, and CEO of the Stewart Cheifet Appreciation Society. Action Retro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Phk3qVUPqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Phk3qVUPqw Paul's Crap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veOLuYgWkls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veOLuYgWkls We are living in the golden age of technology reporting, if you know where to look.
  - kaladin-jasnah 3y ago
    I have to say, Action Retro is probably one of my most favourite YouTube channels. His enthusiasm for old computers is just contagious. Also, 68K.news, which appeared on the HN frontpage (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26623362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26623362), was made by him.
  - donatj 3y ago
    Neither of these guys are in a business suit nor treat the topics for with anywhere near the importance.
drooopy 3y ago
I've always wondered why Apple didn't kept on developing A/UX as their replacement for classic Mac OS but instead chose to focus on either Frankenstein-like experiments, such as Copland or purchasing technology stack from 3rd party companies.
- bluepizza 3y ago
  They licensed Sys V to build A/UX. That must have been quite expensive.
- cstross 3y ago
  I am guessing here, but I worked at SCO (when it was a UNIX VAR, not three vexatious lawsuits in a trenchcoat) and the killer was always licensing fees, especially to AT&T. Sun bought a royalty-free license to SVR4 from AT&T which became Solaris, but it cost them on the order of $200M (if the figure I was told was accurate). SCO had a royalty-free license to SVR3.2 but had to pay out $250 to licensees for each copy of SCO Open Desktop 3 they sold (the precursor to SCO Open Server in 1995) for stuff like Motif, IXI Desktop, the Microsoft C compiler they still used ... I suspect Apple went to AT&T for royalty-free terms and were quoted a price that, in the troubled Spindler/Amelio era, they simply couldn't afford for a niche product (the servers).
  - drooopy 3y ago
    Yeah, after some quick looking into this, cost seems to be the reason why. And ultimately their decision to purchase an external solution seemed to have paid off handsomely.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    They could have ported their user space to Linux or BSD though? I never used A/UX, so I can't comment on its relative quality. But it took half a decade for Apple to ship OS/X after the palace coup that brought Jobs back and killed off all their indigenous OS development. And what they ended up shipping with the first revision of OS X didn't really feel very "Mac" like, and ended up being this weird fusion of NeXT tech with a sort of pseudo-Mac UX. I guess I wonder what was wrong with the A/UX tech that stopped them from utilizing that as a foundation for something new. EDIT, answering my own question: from WP "cooperatively multitasks all Macintosh apps in a single address space by using a token-passing system for their access to the Toolbox." Not sure if this would apply to "hybrid" apps that used the Toolbox but with Unix syscalls as well, but I'm guessing yes, and that sounds like a serious limitation. Pure (non-GUI) unix applications would be fully multitasking, but GUI apps would have the same kinds of limitations as on System 7 -- poor/no memory protection, cooperative multitasking, bad memory management.
dmd 3y ago
And if that’s not weird enough for you, the same era of Macs also had IBM AIX!
- sillywalk 3y ago
  Here's a brochure [PDF] https://www.1000bit.it/js/web/viewer.html?file=%2Fad%2Fbro%2Fapple%2Fappleaixservers%2Epdf#zoom=page-fit https://www.1000bit.it/js/web/viewer.html?file=%2Fad%2Fbro%2...
aquova 3y ago
This Does Not Compute on Youtube made an interesting video showcasing A/UX and some of its features and limitations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI
- ramijames 3y ago
  I love this YouTube channel. Just feels like hanging out with some dude while he geeks out over stuff I like.
jasoneckert 3y ago
For a short period of time, Apple did a marketing push around A/UX. I remember A/UX ads and commentary appearing in several computing magazines, including the famous sumo in a tutu ad: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/b1j7b1/old_apple_advert_for_apples_unix_aux_in_the_early/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/b1j7b1/old_apple_adver...
remoquete 3y ago
Apple's A/UX had Commando, a graphical assistant for assembling Unix command-line incantations. I'm baffled that this hasn't been redone.
- linux2647 3y ago
  For those who’d never heard of that before, ToastyTech has a screenshot: http://toastytech.com/guis/auxcmdo-ls.png http://toastytech.com/guis/auxcmdo-ls.png (via http://toastytech.com/guis/aux3.html http://toastytech.com/guis/aux3.html)
  - Affric 3y ago
    That is genius. Does anyone know how it worked? Each command would have to have been done individually yeah?
- atommclain 3y ago
  I think Commando was also part of Macintosh Programmers Workshop, which another commenter here noted was kinda unixish (which I agree.) I’ve never used a tool like MPW, it’s text based, and you can install additional tools and write scripts, but it also has some graphical components to it. Hard to succinctly describe, but very odd.
  - ksherlock 3y ago
    The thing about MPW is that instead of running a shell in a 80x24 character cell terminal emulator, you're running a shell in a text editor. Kind of like emacs with eshell, but more of a text-editor feel.
- dr_kiszonka 3y ago
  I think it has been redone. I saw a few HN posts about packages that turn Linux commands into TUI apps.
dang 3y ago
Related: Porting Doom to a/UX - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31670484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31670484 - June 2022 (34 comments) So what is the deal with A/UX anyways? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28593552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28593552 - Sept 2021 (162 comments) Apple a/UX: The First Unix Mac OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002427 - Jan 2020 (6 comments) Installing A/UX on the Quadra 610 (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21881271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21881271 - Dec 2019 (58 comments) Running A/UX on a Macintosh SE/30 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20198692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20198692 - June 2019 (8 comments) Shoebill – A Macintosh II emulator that runs A/UX - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7740533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7740533 - May 2014 (3 comments)

106 points by lioeters 3y ago

Also on this topic: - A/UX: The Unix for the rest of us? http://toastytech.com/guis/aux.html http://toastytech.com/guis/aux.html - Apple A/UX: The First UNIX Mac OS - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI

gattilorenz 3y ago
And the Shoebill emulator, if you want to run A/UX yourself: https://github.com/pruten/shoebill https://github.com/pruten/shoebill Or, apparently, a recent-ish QEMU, but I haven’t tried that myself

bregma 3y ago

Ah, yes, good old A/UX. I remember taking half a day to reinstall it on a Mac II from a box of floppies, staring at the counting fingers on the screen while waiting for the instructions to swap disks.

_jal 3y ago
Yep, me too. I worked at Sybase at the time, and installed it to use a beta PowerBuilder to (try to) build some internal tools. Granted, I in my early 20s and far less experienced with this stuff, but found PB utterly incomprehensible. Unix started making sense fairly quickly, although I still had years of learning ahead to get to competent. Only later did I realize how odd it was that they had me doing that on a Mac. Those where the days where they had farms of various Unix workstations because they ported SQL Server to a ton of different platforms. I remember ending up in a storage room one day and there were piles of unopened Suns, Apollos, DECs, SGIs... Slightly less of a commitment, there was also MPW, which was kind of unix-ish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Workshop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...
- mleo 3y ago
  PowerBuilder is a word I haven’t heard in a long time. My first job out of college at a tech consultancy was developing a PowerBuilder/Oracle application for a client. Tooling was terrible compared to today, but it was a great LOB development tool.
  - tizio13 3y ago
    Oh man, it took me a second to realize why I even recognized Sybase and Powerbuilder. My last job had me convert a bunch of PB reports into Crystal. My god I’m so glad the design of PB never caught on. Awful program

jimjag 3y ago

This was one of the most important OSs in my life, for a number of reasons.

latchkey 3y ago
Please don't be so humble Jim! Anyone who is reading this should realize that Jim was the backbone of A/UX. He created and maintained the infamous A/UX FAQ. If it wasn't for him, this system would have been completely useless. He really brought light to this operating system. It was also super important in my life as well. I had a Quadra 950 beast of a machine in college (I named it: dolphin) and taught myself quite a bit of C by porting existing open source software to it (which Jim listed in his FAQ). I ran all sorts of social services on it... BBS', gopher, finger, cu-seeme and most importantly... early ncsa and apache httpd. I really got to connect with a lot of people on the early 90's internet this way and it shaped my life to this day.
richharms 3y ago
Thank you for everything you did to support A/UX! jagubox.gsfc.nasa.gov will be forever burned into my memory.
- ForOldHack 3y ago
  Absolutely for ever. All the security updates, software updates, third party everything. Jimjag is the real deal. I had a pair of Quadra 950s, one running Apple share, and the other with the SCSI Card running A/UX. ( 2x4x240M ). Without his through amount of patches, and supplements, A/UX would have been much harder, despite all the documentation. I could xTerm from any machine in my house into my A/UX server. Thanks Jim. Thanks for your archive.
  - jimjag 3y ago
    blush Thank you everyone for the kind words
classichasclass 3y ago
Thanks for being there for A/UX! Proud to still maintain a mirror of jagubox on the Gopher server, and my clock-chipped Q800 runs it splendidly. gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/1/archive/jagubox-gsfc-nasa-gov-aux

donatj 3y ago

This reminds me of the old Computer Chronicles episode about A/UX - worthy of a watch. Wish we still had computer reporting of that caliber https://youtu.be/nId-Nsj5OX4?si=sk2A28Xo5ivL8Rqf https://youtu.be/nId-Nsj5OX4?si=sk2A28Xo5ivL8Rqf

_0xdd 3y ago
One of my favorite TV shows to watch on archive.org. Things were so much simpler back then.
snakeyjake 3y ago
>Wish we still had computer reporting of that caliber Today, when a new CPU is released instead of having a sales rep on the show to demonstrate how much faster it spins a wireframe in a 3-minute segment, there are publications that will spend two weeks benchmarking it who will then release an hour-long video and thousands of words of writing on every aspect of it. Youtube videos on A/UX go into much more detail than Computer Chronicles ever could and I'm saying that as the founding member, president, and CEO of the Stewart Cheifet Appreciation Society. Action Retro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Phk3qVUPqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Phk3qVUPqw Paul's Crap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veOLuYgWkls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veOLuYgWkls We are living in the golden age of technology reporting, if you know where to look.
- kaladin-jasnah 3y ago
  I have to say, Action Retro is probably one of my most favourite YouTube channels. His enthusiasm for old computers is just contagious. Also, 68K.news, which appeared on the HN frontpage (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26623362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26623362), was made by him.
- donatj 3y ago
  Neither of these guys are in a business suit nor treat the topics for with anywhere near the importance.

drooopy 3y ago

I've always wondered why Apple didn't kept on developing A/UX as their replacement for classic Mac OS but instead chose to focus on either Frankenstein-like experiments, such as Copland or purchasing technology stack from 3rd party companies.

bluepizza 3y ago
They licensed Sys V to build A/UX. That must have been quite expensive.
cstross 3y ago
I am guessing here, but I worked at SCO (when it was a UNIX VAR, not three vexatious lawsuits in a trenchcoat) and the killer was always licensing fees, especially to AT&T. Sun bought a royalty-free license to SVR4 from AT&T which became Solaris, but it cost them on the order of $200M (if the figure I was told was accurate). SCO had a royalty-free license to SVR3.2 but had to pay out $250 to licensees for each copy of SCO Open Desktop 3 they sold (the precursor to SCO Open Server in 1995) for stuff like Motif, IXI Desktop, the Microsoft C compiler they still used ... I suspect Apple went to AT&T for royalty-free terms and were quoted a price that, in the troubled Spindler/Amelio era, they simply couldn't afford for a niche product (the servers).
- drooopy 3y ago
  Yeah, after some quick looking into this, cost seems to be the reason why. And ultimately their decision to purchase an external solution seemed to have paid off handsomely.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  They could have ported their user space to Linux or BSD though? I never used A/UX, so I can't comment on its relative quality. But it took half a decade for Apple to ship OS/X after the palace coup that brought Jobs back and killed off all their indigenous OS development. And what they ended up shipping with the first revision of OS X didn't really feel very "Mac" like, and ended up being this weird fusion of NeXT tech with a sort of pseudo-Mac UX. I guess I wonder what was wrong with the A/UX tech that stopped them from utilizing that as a foundation for something new. EDIT, answering my own question: from WP "cooperatively multitasks all Macintosh apps in a single address space by using a token-passing system for their access to the Toolbox." Not sure if this would apply to "hybrid" apps that used the Toolbox but with Unix syscalls as well, but I'm guessing yes, and that sounds like a serious limitation. Pure (non-GUI) unix applications would be fully multitasking, but GUI apps would have the same kinds of limitations as on System 7 -- poor/no memory protection, cooperative multitasking, bad memory management.

dmd 3y ago

And if that’s not weird enough for you, the same era of Macs also had IBM AIX!

sillywalk 3y ago
Here's a brochure [PDF] https://www.1000bit.it/js/web/viewer.html?file=%2Fad%2Fbro%2Fapple%2Fappleaixservers%2Epdf#zoom=page-fit https://www.1000bit.it/js/web/viewer.html?file=%2Fad%2Fbro%2...

aquova 3y ago

This Does Not Compute on Youtube made an interesting video showcasing A/UX and some of its features and limitations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI

ramijames 3y ago
I love this YouTube channel. Just feels like hanging out with some dude while he geeks out over stuff I like.

jasoneckert 3y ago

For a short period of time, Apple did a marketing push around A/UX. I remember A/UX ads and commentary appearing in several computing magazines, including the famous sumo in a tutu ad: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/b1j7b1/old_apple_advert_for_apples_unix_aux_in_the_early/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/b1j7b1/old_apple_adver...

remoquete 3y ago

Apple's A/UX had Commando, a graphical assistant for assembling Unix command-line incantations. I'm baffled that this hasn't been redone.

linux2647 3y ago
For those who’d never heard of that before, ToastyTech has a screenshot: http://toastytech.com/guis/auxcmdo-ls.png http://toastytech.com/guis/auxcmdo-ls.png (via http://toastytech.com/guis/aux3.html http://toastytech.com/guis/aux3.html)
- Affric 3y ago
  That is genius. Does anyone know how it worked? Each command would have to have been done individually yeah?
atommclain 3y ago
I think Commando was also part of Macintosh Programmers Workshop, which another commenter here noted was kinda unixish (which I agree.) I’ve never used a tool like MPW, it’s text based, and you can install additional tools and write scripts, but it also has some graphical components to it. Hard to succinctly describe, but very odd.
- ksherlock 3y ago
  The thing about MPW is that instead of running a shell in a 80x24 character cell terminal emulator, you're running a shell in a text editor. Kind of like emacs with eshell, but more of a text-editor feel.
dr_kiszonka 3y ago
I think it has been redone. I saw a few HN posts about packages that turn Linux commands into TUI apps.

dang 3y ago

Related: Porting Doom to a/UX - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31670484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31670484 - June 2022 (34 comments) So what is the deal with A/UX anyways? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28593552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28593552 - Sept 2021 (162 comments) Apple a/UX: The First Unix Mac OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002427 - Jan 2020 (6 comments) Installing A/UX on the Quadra 610 (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21881271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21881271 - Dec 2019 (58 comments) Running A/UX on a Macintosh SE/30 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20198692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20198692 - June 2019 (8 comments) Shoebill – A Macintosh II emulator that runs A/UX - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7740533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7740533 - May 2014 (3 comments)