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

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

#91

Post by ylee » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

dev_tty01 wrote: post #14

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 lightw…

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.

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

#92

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #82

silvestrov wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Macintosh was the "good enough" version of the "Apple Lisa". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa

It saddens me the beautiful stationery metaphor of the Lisa got ditched in favour of files and applications… The Lisa deserved better.

That and Object Pascal being replaced by C++.

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

#93

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

asveikau wrote: post #78

spijdar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While killing almost everything else.

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.

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

#94

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

hedgehog wrote: post #61

pasc1878 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Win16 and NT branch don't share almost anything.

Probably the only port was Win32s, which was a subset of Win32 backported to Win16.

Win16 stuff runned on a VM like environment, WOW.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_on_Windows

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

#95

Post by Chazprime » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #87

jdblair wrote: post #67

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…

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.

> I don't even think the Macintosh II was all that unpopular with Mac users

I think the Mac II & IIx were a little slow on the sales front, but from what I remember the smaller IIcx and IIci were much more popular.

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

#96

Post by mistrial9 » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 7:59 PM UTC

cjsplat wrote: post #86

mistrial9 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

evidence welcome - I do not recall that as the case

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

#97

Post by classichasclass » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 8:08 PM UTC

Chazprime wrote: post #95

philwelch wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I don't even think the Macintosh II was all that unpopular with Mac users I think the Mac II & IIx were a little slow on the sales front, but from what I remember the smaller IIcx and IIci were much more popular.

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.

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

#98

Post by hedgehog » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 8:12 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #94

hedgehog wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Win16 and NT branch don't share almost anything. Probably the only port was Win32s, which was a subset of Win32 backported to Win16. Win16 stuff runned on a VM like environment, WOW. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_on_Windows

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.

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

#99

Post by classichasclass » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 8:16 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.

> 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).

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

#100

Post by perardi » Mon, Sep 20, 2021, 8:17 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #93

asveikau wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While killing almost everything else. 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.

Which would not have flown.