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So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?

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

#31

Post by aoki »

gumby wrote: post #19
rbanffy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

“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.

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

#34

Post by retrac »

webwielder2 wrote: post #20

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.

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

#35

Post by scruffyherder »

solarmist wrote: post #32

What is A/UX? I’m not seeing a definition.

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.

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

#37

Post by dylan604 »

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.

>the equivalent of $12,718.67

so a moderately equipped modern MacPro.

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

#38

Post by itomato »

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.

...without a UNIX license.

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

#39

Post by spijdar »

retrac wrote: post #34
webwielder2 wrote: post #20

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 t…

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.

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

#40

Post by icedchai »

I remember A/UX...

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.

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