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.
So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
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Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#73Earlier 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.
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.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#74This YouTube video on A/UX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI is one of the best things I've found about the subject. (It has a usable transcript.) On the subject of what happened with Big Mac, the Macintosh II and NeXT, https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-prec... and some of the articles linked from it https://lowendmac.com/2013/next-years-steve-jobs-before-triu... https://www.aventure-a…
* 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.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
not at Berkeley ! but proper respect to you Taniwha, many paths
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…
[deleted]
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
which to me was surprising about A/UX, you got both C89 and F77!
I think GCC was available back then. Not sure about F77. What C compiler did BSD use?
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#77As 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 lightw…
Has anyone here ever run into a copy of MAE 3.0? I’ve been searching for over a decade now.
If you are interested in setting it up on Solaris, you can send me a message on Telegram or Email.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 imp…
It also probably has to do with personalities, and who did what. NeXT was the Jobs thing. So Jobs came back, and they based things on NeXT.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#79While 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.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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…
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.