Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?

virtuallyfun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 166 posts

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

#61

Post by hedgehog »

pasc1878 wrote: post #59
hedgehog wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nt is not a evolution of dos. A similar issue you need a new kernel for protected memory etc. Apple did make attempts see Taligent

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.

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

#62

Post by Taniwha »

mistrial9 wrote: post #43
gumby wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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

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

#63

Post by fzzzy »

lsllc wrote: post #44
dylan604 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the equivalent of $12,718.67 so a moderately equipped modern MacPro.

Did you include the $699 wheels in that? https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-w...

Where we're going, we don't need wheels.

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

#64

Post by mistrial9 »

Taniwha wrote: post #62
mistrial9 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

not at Berkeley ! but proper respect to you Taniwha, many paths

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

#65

Post by jandrese »

jbellis wrote: post #53
rjsw wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

16MB in 1987, good lord. I didn't even know that was possible on x86 at the time.

16MB systems were still mainstream in 1997! Lots of 166Mhz and 200Mhz Pentium systems sold with 16MB of RAM that year.

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

#66

Post by hondo77 »

rbanffy wrote: post #15
kerblang wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#67

Post by jdblair »

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.

https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/16/business/low-priced-work-...

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

#68

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#69

Post by alkz »

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

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

#70

Post by monocasa »

A/UX only supported m68k macs, right?

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.

It looks like a decent amount of work reversing the Powermac nanokernel has been done: https://github.com/elliotnunn/NanoKernel

Post reply on HN