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.
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.
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.
It was expensive. In 1987 I built a 386-25 with 16MB RAM and SCSI HD that ran Interactive Systems UNIX for a lot less than it would have cost to get a Mac II with A/UX.
Interactive still did beat SCO/Xenix on price in 1992 for running Oracle (on 386 hardware that costed as little as a single 857 MB hard disk on RS/6000 with AIX). And Novell 2 or 3 sure did beat A/UX as AppleTalk file server.
That was using socketed DIL chips, 8MB on the motherboard and another 8MB on an expansion card. I had to insert the chips individually into the sockets. I had mis-remembered the disks, it used ESDI not SCSI.
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.
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)
I was there at that time, there are manuals in white binders down the hall from me now. The Mac was made to never, ever, use the command line. That is what I chose to develop for at that time, including exposure to "high end" machines at University.
fun fact - there were no undergraduate courses in computer science at that time; master's level and up .. you have to be trained to use those workstations, even for five minutes, AND the oversight of an admin with security.
Mac? get one, fire it up, make Mac Paint pictures. The network IS NOT the computer, thankyouverymuch
I actually wrote a large chunk of the A/UX unix port (late 80s) - a decade before (mid 70s) I'd obtained an undergraduate degree in Comp Sci (in New Zealand) - undergraduate Comp Sci was very much a thing at the time
I found it interesting that it mentions both ‘Milwaukee‘, and Cayman "brac" ... Here on the Jasmine 80.
Seems like lots of weird codenames.
It looks like UniSoft had done a lot of work on the code (you?) to make it super portable. Although everything not directly related to the Milwaukee was cut. It'd be interesting to see if the kernel could be built without MMU support.. I tried to remove PAGING but that didn't work. Oh yeah the kernel source is on that image and other than one damaged file, it not only builds, but works on a special Shoebill.
yup I wrote a lot of that, I did all the console stuff (font renderer, vt100, mouse, keyboard, fdb/adb, ui event queue etc).
Missing is all the auto config support (ability to add 3rd party drivers to the kernel in the field, something that at the time you usually couldn't do without source), fixes for large screen support, all my appletalk code is missing too. However I can see the latish floppy bug fix (there was a hardware bug found in the FDB/ADB chip where if we accessed the floppy on only some systems the keyboard froze, turned out we were spinning reading the timer while reading the disk, doing it so fast the clock to the FDB chip sped up) and the older pre-fix code in "sony.c.~8A" - that sort of places the release in time.
Given all that I'd guess that this is one of the early releases we gave to Apple that has somehow escaped - we used to fly to Oregon and copy disks to do releases to avoid California's sales taxes - UniSoft actually had an online modem based system where customers could log in and download the latest software - at the time CA tax law didn't explicitly cover electronic delivery of software, we were sued by the state and they lost setting a precedent
It's been a long time but "psn" probably stands for "Pigs in Space" - our internal code name for the project (Apple's code name "Eagle" leaked, but ours never did).
The "Cayman/brac" looks like what someone named their box, "Jasmine" was a type of hard drive, I've no idea about Milwaukee - I think Cayman used to be a company that made mac ethernet hardware, my guess would be that someone at Apple slipped them this pre-release, and then an update with some bug fixes, along with source (very naughty! AT&T would likely have sued us, ie UniSoft if they found out)
The assembly font renderer uses the 68020 only bfins bit field insert instructions, it can under certain circumstances generate a 24-bit bus write, nubus doesn't support such a thing, we got half of the first big run of mac 2 boards, they came with a schematic and PAL equations, I got to send fixed PAL equations back to Ron at Apple to make it work.
As far as "making it portable" a large part of that is just system 5 (SVR2 in this case) not so much us, though porting this code was our bread and butter - we supported a number of MMUs - 2 paging MMUs for 68020s, and a whole lot of swapping MMUs for 68010/68000s (plus 29k 88k etc) - it was never really designed to work without some form of MMU
I'd seen this zip file floating around for well over a decade, maybe quite a bit longer. It was amazing to see someone write enough glue for an emulator to actually boot it. It's even more crazy to get 3.0.1 to mount it under Qemu and do a full build in 17 seconds... I can't even imagine how long it took to build this back in the day!
Apparently above Milwaukee has something to do with Gasse and the BigMac Jr.
I wonder what ever happened to Unisoft's unix business. I've always wanted a SYSV but they seem impossible to buy. Best I have is a non commercial SYSIII from SCO before they 'gave 32v' and lower away but it's all so murkey if they could give anything away but I think they could sublicense for a fee (best $100 ever!)
After I left the Unix biz changed, we'd made money doing lots of ports for small companies, as Sun/SGI/etc got successful there were fewer of them, then we did the 88k and 29k ports but those guys didn't really take off. Doing A/UX also kind of screwed the company, I think it made us ignore our smaller customers, we expanded a bit too much, moved into a nicer building. We also didn't do an x86 port, which was a mistake - we actually helped SCO with the MMU portion of the SysV 286 port, there was some deal where we were supposed to get a copy but somehow that didn't happen (no love lost there).
UniSoft still exists, these days they sell digital video stuff (which was very weird when I became a cable/sat protocol engineer for a while a decade or so ago).
Reading what other people have been saying "Milwaukee" might have been a Mac2 code name.
Well I did the A/UX port IN Berkeley (the city, not the university).
The thing is that as a discipline Comp Sci is a late comer, university Comp Sci departments came from lots of places, some grew out of Engineering depts, others from Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Commerce, others from the computing infrastructure groups withing universities - they ended up being called all sorts of things - early on places offered Comp Sci by a whole lot of names
Yes, Berkeley had undergrad CS degrees in the 80's (and late 70's). One in the College of Engineering and one in the College of Letters and Science. Also, an undergrad EECS in Engineering.
The Bay Area school that didn't have an undergrad CS program was Stanfurd.
Surprisingly tricky to prove. It looks like Berkeley overhauled its student body statistics about 15 years ago, and data from before seems to have vanished.
> Unix was the (unhappy) inspiration for the famous “worse is better” memo.
It could be rephrased as “done is better than perfect”. I would love to have a high-end workstation based on exotic hardware with ridiculously fast storage, but an average home PC is probably enough for my development work and, when it’s not, I can acknowledge it is so because the software is much more bloated than it should be.
“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.
> 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.
The customness of the hardware is partly relative. One had to guess the trajectory of the PC to bet on clones and their components. Of course at one point there was no question the non-x86 workstation used "custom" hardware vs. the kind of more open ecosystem of x86 PC components, however even in this situation doing custom is not even an absolute criteria for success or failure or even eventual economy of scale: case in point Apple. Now of course there is in-house design vs. OTS but while it was true that the first PCs used pre-existing chips, quickly some chips started to be developed specifically for PCs or at least with PC as the main target, by far. So it is also kind of "custom", just developed by multiple companies.
Now in retrospect some workstation vendors could maybe have survived a little more by switching to x86 PC like hardware except the window for doing the switch was astonishingly small and they would have transformed to either a random OS vendor, or a random PC hardware vendor, or even both (even if requiring their own hardware, their competition would have quickly been way more directly e.g. Linux or BSD on generic PCs, and eventually with e.g. CAD vendors switching to Windows it would not have helped either)
Or as a random hardware PC vendor, what is even the point compared to their initial positioning and what was a "workstation". This market is now taken mostly by chip vendors with more or less artificial market segmentation -- and then computer vendors using such chips but they do not define the platforms anymore and add far less value. It's kind or logical; well at least in retrospect, here too. A very few number of platforms had to remain because of both the network effect and the practicality of using and developing for them. And consumer hardware was bound to eventually get state of the art designs (mostly scaled with parallelism for pro hw + a few artificial market seg)
You can take the internal dev route (again: Apple) but you had to target the general public first to do that (so not appropriate for a WS vendor)
Ironically, we could argue that to survive "in a meaningful way", if I read that in yielding a legacy today that could influence the ws workload by providing them at least a part of the platform, the old-school Workstation vendors would have needed to pivot to more pure component makers (for PCs).
Now in retrospect some workstation vendors could maybe have survived a little more by switching to x86 PC like hardware except the window for doing the switch was astonishingly small and they would have transformed to either a random OS vendor, or a random PC hardware vendor, or even both
I think this window was non-existent: Moore’s Law at the time was turning white boxes into workstations faster than any time-and-money consuming custom engineering could pay back the investment.
I'm not sure about that, even today. The typical white box PC motherboard then (and now) doesn't support 128gb of memory for example, you have to buy a HP Z400 or a Mac Pro (or an old server). Plus they aren't really designed to be maintained, or have space for dual processors. The Sun/HP/DEC/IBM workstations were not purely bought because they were fast, there was often specific software in mind that the end user wanted.
I have two primary machines I do development on, an Acer gaming laptop (a few years old, intel i7 8750h, 32gb of memory) and a truly ancient HP Proliant server with dual Xeons (x5650 and 96Gb of memory). The Proliant is still consistently faster at compiling an Android app than the laptop, despite the laptop having SSDs and the Proliant being 7 years older. There is a lot more to making a workstation than just raw CPU speed which is as true now as it was in the early 1990s when a Sparcstation was the go-to performance machine to have on your desk.
Same here. The 5yo Lenovo trounces the 2yo top of the line x86 MacBook Pro on pretty much everything. When it was young it easily humiliated every computer in the house.
My impression is that they all built desktop minicomputers possible thanks to CPUs like the 68K but moved on to RISC designs when the 68K started showing its age. I would not say the PA-RISC was open, but SPARC had multiple sources and MIPS showed up everywhere. At that period, the x86 was not an option - Sun tried.
Apollo was building bit-slice 68000 emulations (to have an MMU) into the mid '80s, and ran Aegis, their homegrown fully-networked GUI OS, coded in their home-grown Pascal, with their home-grown touchpad pointer and home-grown token-ring network, on those and on actual 68K into the late '80s.
Aegis was inspired by MULTICS, not Unix, and was definitely a better system. They were demand-paging across the network in the early '80s.
One feature I recall stood out: they expanded environment variables in symbolic link text, like /usr/bin -> /usr/$SYSTEM/bin to get a SYSV or BSD Unix flavor, later on. The only Unix that does something similar I know of is Dragonfly.
Another was a read() system call that would copy into a caller-supplied buffer if it had to, but would normally just return a pointer into its buffer cache.
the SUN-1 was based on the SUN (Stanford University Network) board, but I can't find anything concrete on the SUN board (Also by Andy) other than it existing, and apparently 'cheap/free' to license?
Apparently it formed the foundations of cisco/SGi & SUN.
Indeed, and what I am talking about happened after the Mac being released.
> By this point, in the late 1980s, the market was moving towards C++, and the beta version of Apple C++ compiler appeared in 1989, around the MacApp 2.0 release.[5] At the same time, Apple was deep in the effort to release System 7, which had a number of major new features. The decision was made to transition to an entirely new version of MacApp, 3.0, which would use C++ in place of Object Pascal. This move was subject to a long and heated debate between proponents of Object Pascal and C++ in the Usenet and other forums. Nevertheless, 3.0 managed to garner a reasonable following after its release in 1991, even though the developer suite, MPW, was growing outdated. Apple then downsized the entire developer tools group, leaving both MacApp and MPW understaffed.
If the workstations were twice as fast and cost twice as much they would still have a good market niche. Instead they were more like 30% faster and cost 10 times as much.
Intel eroded that speed delta pretty quickly too. The other chip makers were crushed by Intel's billions of R&D spending.
> That said, high price killed off most of the legacy Unix vendors/products.
High price and the differentiation. In the 90s I was working in publishing and publishing-adjacent companies that were throwing out their Unix environments as quick as they could after NT 4 was released. They were all sick of dealing with the crap of having multiple, subtly incompatible *ix environments to deal with: one company I worked for had Irix, AIX, SunOS, Solaris, and both flavours of Digital's Unix products, because various vendors had done deals with the different vendors to ship their products on those variants. Each came with different shells, different userlands, and all required slightly different tweaking and tuning to maintain operationally.
Contrast that with the NT 4 world, where that same business was quite happy to buy extremely expensive Alpha/NT systems so that the same skills, tool, and so on that worked everywhere.
Imagine in today’s money sinking 12,000 USD on a computer.
Do you take the Macintosh II with A/UX aka Unix from a company that doesn’t seem all too interested in the product themselves and selling what seems like a toy or do you go with SUN? They hired Bill Joy, and they are 100% committed to Unix?
They simply cost too much for a non commital company like Apple. If anything it’s amazing they saw it through to the end of the Quadra
more so the platform + the OS... I guess being in for 4k for a base machine (probably 2k more to make it usable) 500/1000 more isn't going to break it, but 386BSD machines while far less usable would be a heck of a lot cheaper.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?!
> 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).
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.
> 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
My first year at Columbia in 1994, the university set up a single computer lab in the engineering building (<https://cuit.columbia.edu/computer-lab-technologies/location...>) with them. 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 in my experience unlike yours, 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 ) 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.
In '87 name brand 386's were going for $4500. The Mac premium wasn't quite so outrageous considering it came with a superior color display when most PCs were still doddering about with EGA and Hercules mono.
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?!"
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.
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.
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.
OpenStep was still based on Mach 2 and (encumbered) 4.3BSD.
OS X Server 1.0 was very OpenStep like yes, it used the old Display Postscript server and was more compatible with next/openstep (I think the display servers were similar enough you could forward OpenSTEP software to a OS X Server 1.0 windowserver), but I believe it was based on the un-encumbered XNU, and couldn't directly run OpenSTEP programs due to this impedance. I'm fairly certain Rhapsody is the same, using the OSFMK kernel and 4.4BSD "lite".
At least, I don't think OS X Server 1.0 software would have worked on the OpenSTEP for Enterprise stuff?
Rhapsody was still pre-Mk but had 4.4BSD userland. It could run OPENSTEP binaries if you copied the shared libraries over, from memory one of the ex-NeXT engineers did this for fun.
Still might have paid the unix license; this was pre AT&T vs USL, but, thought nextstep was basically CMU mach (which itself was BSD+Mach) + the NextStep frameworks/ui
NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP were based on 4.3BSD/4.4BSD(not-lite) and required a license from AT&T to distribute. I assume that, to be legally safe, they would have scrapped that code entirely and replaced it with 4.4BSD lite, pulling in code from 4.4BSD lite forks like FreeBSD and NetBSD.
The video of the audience heat he is taking for those decisions and how he goes justifying his decisions is worth watching for anyone that needs to go through something similar.
Though he did notably compromise on Carbon. The early plan was Cocoa/App Kit all the way, which meant a fundamental rewrite of all the important applications, namely Adobe and Microsoft stuff.
My understanding is the "Mac" side of A/UX still had no memory protection. It still had all the stability problems plaguing System 7, unlike modern macOS / OS/X
This is true and was not easily fixable with existing applications. They added a kernel supporting memory protection in the move to PowerPC but it wasn't until Carbon that apps really benefited from that. Carbon was a transitional API between classic MacOS and OS X that made it feasible to port apps to run on both, but conceivably they could have done something similar without the switch to Darwin.
This is correct, but as a practical matter, since the Finder was just another process on A/UX everything else (including X clients, if any) could keep running. Unfortunately this would kill all your Mac apps, including your X server if you were running it through MacX.
After studying the history a bit it seems to me the reasons were organizational more than technical. Jobs brought his team back with him and they built on what they were familiar with. With better management the existing nanokernel-based MacOS could probably have been evolved similar to what MS did with NT.
Exactly. MS rehosted win16 apps on top of a new kernel, ported the UI, and encouraged developers to migrate code to win32. Apple had pieces of a similar transition with the transition to PPC but failed to execute, maybe because they were betting on different attempts to rewrite everything from scratch.
I'll admit I haven't seen the NT source but from a user perspective NT's UI (widgets, progman, etc) looked and functioned near identically to Windows 3 so I've always thought those bits were ported over. I'm aware most everything under that was replaced. To my eye that was one step in a well-executed evolution up from legacy Windows towards the eventual convergence in XP.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I also worked on it at UniSoft, did maybe half the device drivers, plus the appletalk stack, autoconfig (loadable drivers), large screen support, console subsystem, kernel event manager for the mac world etc.
The early 68k systems used in the early macs only brought out 24 address bits, Apple did indeed use that memory for metadata - memory was tight - the first Macs had 128k, we were shipping Unix systems at UniSoft that ran in 256k.
* 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/... . (And this is cited: it's apparently from the Appledesign book 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.
I'm emailing someone who did support for the ANS stuff so I'll follow up with something there, although I don't have the machine/software.. not that I'd have the space for such a monster!
I'll have to order those books... it'd be a surprising twist that Jobs was dragged into NeXT? maybe some personal obligation?
* On the software side, Big Mac's vision of Unix with Macintosh on top is familiar from NeXT and OS X. It was also roughly paralleled by many other projects, from Pink/Taligent and BeOS to OS/2 and WinNT. But it's worth asking where Jobs and the other Big Mac supporters got the idea from in turn. One obvious source of inspiration for the NeXT work was Xerox PARC, and Jobs seems to have been acknowledging (or claiming) that influence in the famous clip from the 1995 Triumph of the Nerds "lost" interview where he talked about not understanding the importance of PARC's networking or OO work originally https://www.bhooshan.com/2017/12/07/quotes-steve-jobs-lost-i...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHaTRWRj8G0 . Furthermore Alan Kay had just joined Apple in 1984 https://www.quora.com/What-was-Alan-Kays-experience-like-wor... . But there were plenty of other, very immediate possible inspirations for Big Mac in the commercial workstation market. There was high-end stuff like Apollo/Domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo/Domain or Lisp machines, but above all there was Sun. By 1983 the Sun-2 workstations had proven that you could already get a real Unix running on a desktop machine, using the same m68k architecture family as the Mac, that you could put a PARCish GUI on top of it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunView and that you could make money selling it. And on the other hand Sun's high prices and gimcrack user experience would have bred confidence that Apple could do much better, at least with a couple more years for prices to decline. I can't think of anything to confirm that Sun was an influence, but it more or less has to have been.
* What about the networking, though? (Apart from all other possible inspirations, Sun was already trumpeting that "the network is the computer" by this time.) There's no mention anywhere of any network port on any Big Mac prototype, and it seems reasonable to assume that Big Mac was intended to have no integrated networking hardware. But I don't think this indicates that networking was unimportant to the Big Mac vision. Jobs put plenty of emphasis on networking in his February 1985 Playboy interview https://allaboutstevejobs.com/verbatim/interviews/playboy_19... , and he seems to have been very much on board with (and likely involved with?) Apple's efforts to roll out a LAN offering in 1984 and 1985 https://www.macgui.com/news/article.php?t=491 . I think the most likely explanation was that, like the non-colour screen, this was a cost-driven decision. In 1985 integrated networking would have been expensive and useless to most modem users, and vice versa, while many users weren't yet ready to pay for either LAN or dial-up hardware. And of course networking hadn't yet really converged on (not-quite-)RJ45 Ethernet—Apple itself had only just started pushing AppleTalk!—so even for LAN users there was a good chance that any integrated LAN hardware would be an expensive waste.
* That just leaves the PARC-influenced "object-oriented" element which later showed up on the NeXT in the form of Objective C and the NeXT APIs. Had Big Mac's software already taken some steps in this kind of direction? Or was it an ambition for later, or simply not on the roadmap at all yet? I have no idea.
> That just leaves the PARC-influenced "object-oriented" element which later showed up on the NeXT in the form of Objective C and the NeXT APIs. Had Big Mac's software already taken some steps in this kind of direction? Or was it an ambition for later, or simply not on the roadmap at all yet? I have no idea.
This was already present on the classical Macs, and Lisa, via the Object Pascal frameworks, and later evolved into its C++ replacement.
* "Milwaukee" wasn't Big Mac, even though (if Levy is correct) it was also sometimes referred to as "Little Big Mac". As Aventure-Apple states (and Levy confirms), it was a rival (or at least completely indepdendent) effort. Insanely Great says that it was a grassroots initiative by engineer Mike Dhuey focussed on creating a version-2 Macintosh with internal expansion slots. (And it wasn't even the only other project working on a successor Mac in the time between the release of the original and Jobs' firing.) Jobs likely didn't even know it existed, as it was hidden from him to prevent him from killing it. At some point (according to Levy) this meshed with Jean-Louis Gassée's vision of a high-end Macintosh line which would give power users the things they liked about the PC. He went so far as to get "OPEN MAC" number plate for his car, where 'open' in this case referred to slots. Insanely Greatseems to suggest that Gassée had this ambition even before he heard about Milwaukee/Little Big Mac, but it's not competely clear on that point. In any case, after Jobs was gone and Gassée had been given the reins, he killed off Big Mac and Milwaukee was allowed to become Macintosh II.
* The Apple Extended Keyboard https://deskthority.net/wiki/Apple_Extended_Keyboard with its Model-M based layout was by far the biggest Apple keyboard up to that point and was clearly part of the Macintosh II power-user vision just as slots and colour were. (IIRC it was explicitly justified as making the Mac compatible with PC software.) And so it's no surprise that Jobs didn't like it: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/841771 .
* It isn't quite directly stated anywhere I know of, but it's clear that rival visions of Macintosh cost, margins and market share were a big factor in the internal strife. Even back at the launch of the original Macintosh, Jobs had been very unhappy that the price had been set at $2500 rather than $2000 https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor... . There's also a video clip from the '90s, almost certainly from his NeXT days, complaining bitterly about Apple's decision to choose high margins and low market share for the Macintosh, but I can't find it atm. Despite the big screen and the ambitious Unix-based OS rewrite which probably imposed a big RAM penalty, Big Mac's creators evidently hoped (realistically or not) that it would compete for something like the mainstream market. On the other hand, whether or not this was quite Gassée's vision from Day 1, the Macintosh IIs were and remained brutally high-margin, priced to soak those who not only both needed a high-end Mac and could afford one but were also trapped on the Mac platform, while the all-in-one Macs (and even the later LCs, to a lesser extent) were kept underpowered but also swingeingly expensive. It's not a coincidence that Gassée popped up to smirk and leer when the 2019 Mac Pro's prices were announced https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20163321 . To be fair, the Macintosh II pricing strategy actually did make Apple a great deal of money, for a while. Meanwhile NeXT was, ironically, in no position to compete for the mass market.
That story with Steve Jobs vs the Apple Extended Keyboard is quite funny because it's one of my favourite keyboards. The original mac keyboard M0110 has comparable build quality but with a tiny layout.
I remember (I think) John Siracusa expressing frustration that Isaacson delivered a personality-focussed and patchily-researched bio instead of taking the unique opportunity to grill Jobs with a long list of detailed and specific questions about the remaining mysteries of his stints at Apple. But of course that's probably part of the reason why Jobs chose Isaacson and not Siracusa or someone like him. And conversely, not all of this stuff actually required access to Jobs: there is, for instance, a lot of mystery about the Big Mac that Levy could probably have cleared up. However Levy was really quite specific (and hopefully correct!) about the 'Milwaukee' name: he said that Gassée coined the name after seeing a photo of Milwaukee on the wall of Dhuey's cubicle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"/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/ma...
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.
I have a Mac SE/30 running A/UX. It was "maxed out" at 8MB of RAM, and had a huge 80MB hard drive. 512x342 screen, 1 bit per pixel. Ethernet. It came with a C compiler, which I used to compile Gcc in about 2 hours.
I only just found out I could upgrade it to 32GB of RAM.
