So what is the deal with A/UX anyways? • Hacker News Board

Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?

#11

Post by rbanffy » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 2:11 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #7

jimjag wrote: post #3

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.

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. Pers…

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.

Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?

#12

Post by latchkey » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 2:12 PM UTC

jimjag wrote: post #3

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.

Thanks Jim!

Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?

#13

Post by h2odragon » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 2:12 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #5

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.

Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?

#14

Post by dev_tty01 » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

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.

Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?

#15

Post by rbanffy » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

kerblang wrote: post #6

jimjag wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?

#16

Post by ac50hz » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

jimjag wrote: post #3

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.

Ah yes, Jagubox :-)

A/UX was easy to integrate into a mixed SunOS, Solaris, Irix network with liberal use of arch-dependent automounting.

Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?

#17

Post by da_chicken » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 2:26 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #9

walrus01 wrote: post #5

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.

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.

> 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.

Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?

#18

Post by ForOldHack » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 2:41 PM UTC

ac50hz wrote: post #16

jimjag wrote: post #3

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.

Ah yes, Jagubox :-) A/UX was easy to integrate into a mixed SunOS, Solaris, Irix network with liberal use of arch-dependent automounting.

Yes, when I went looking for all the bits and pieces, jagubox had them. Thanks Jim. I used this on a SE/30, a Turbo IIci, more than one Mac IIfxs.

Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?

#19

Post by gumby » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 2:45 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #11

jandrese wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Pers…

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)

Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?

#20

Post by webwielder2 » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

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?!"