Does anyone have a .zip or something of an emulator with this all up and running?
So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
111–120 of 166 posts
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
The IIcx was my first computer. It wasn't completely 32-bit-clean for some reason, and needed special software ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MODE32 ) to run apps that expected a 32 bit memory space. I'd have preferred an IIci. :)
I also had a Mac II around the same time. I still have both of the machines, although I haven't tried booting either in 15+ years.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#113Earlier 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 assume it can't have been that common not to have undergrad courses in cs?
I know my (non US) University have had undergrad courses since 1970.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#114Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#115Earlier 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…
The customness of the hardware is partly relative. One had to guess the trajectory of the PC to bet on clones and their components. Of course at one point there was no question the non-x86 workstation used "custom" hardware vs. the kind of more open ecosystem of x86 PC components, however even in this situation doing custom is not even an absolute criteria for success or failure or even eventual economy of scale: case in point Apple. Now of course there is in-house design vs. OTS but while it was true that the first PCs used pre-existing chips, quickly some chips started to be developed specifically for PCs or at least with PC as the main target, by far. So it is also kind of "custom", just developed by multiple companies.
Now in retrospect some workstation vendors could maybe have survived a little more by switching to x86 PC like hardware except the window for doing the switch was astonishingly small and they would have transformed to either a random OS vendor, or a random PC hardware vendor, or even both (even if requiring their own hardware, their competition would have quickly been way more directly e.g. Linux or BSD on generic PCs, and eventually with e.g. CAD vendors switching to Windows it would not have helped either)
Or as a random hardware PC vendor, what is even the point compared to their initial positioning and what was a "workstation". This market is now taken mostly by chip vendors with more or less artificial market segmentation -- and then computer vendors using such chips but they do not define the platforms anymore and add far less value. It's kind or logical; well at least in retrospect, here too. A very few number of platforms had to remain because of both the network effect and the practicality of using and developing for them. And consumer hardware was bound to eventually get state of the art designs (mostly scaled with parallelism for pro hw + a few artificial market seg)
You can take the internal dev route (again: Apple) but you had to target the general public first to do that (so not appropriate for a WS vendor)
Ironically, we could argue that to survive "in a meaningful way", if I read that in yielding a legacy today that could influence the ws workload by providing them at least a part of the platform, the old-school Workstation vendors would have needed to pivot to more pure component makers (for PCs).
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes the GUI was mostly ported from consumer Windows to NT. First the 3.1 GUI, then 95.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
When Windows NT first came out in 1993 its 12-16MB memory requirement was considered to be a major obstacle to adoption, IIRC.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The customness of the hardware is partly relative. One had to guess the trajectory of the PC to bet on clones and their components. Of course at one point there was no question the non-x86 workstation used "custom" hardware vs. the kind of more open ecosystem of x86 PC components, however even in this situation doing custom is not even an absolute criteria for success or failure or even eventual economy of scale: cas…
Now in retrospect some workstation vendors could maybe have survived a little more by switching to x86 PC like hardware except the window for doing the switch was astonishingly small and they would have transformed to either a random OS vendor, or a random PC hardware vendor, or even both
I think this window was non-existent: Moore’s Law at the time was turning white boxes into workstations faster than any time-and-money consuming custom engineering could pay back the investment.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#119Earlier 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.
If the workstations were twice as fast and cost twice as much they would still have a good market niche. Instead they were more like 30% faster and cost 10 times as much. Intel eroded that speed delta pretty quickly too. The other chip makers were crushed by Intel's billions of R&D spending.
Motorola's floating point was 5x as fast as Intel's.
That wasn't enough to overcome market positioning.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#120I 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…
> That said, high price killed off most of the legacy Unix vendors/products.
High price and the differentiation. In the 90s I was working in publishing and publishing-adjacent companies that were throwing out their Unix environments as quick as they could after NT 4 was released. They were all sick of dealing with the crap of having multiple, subtly incompatible *ix environments to deal with: one company I worked for had Irix, AIX, SunOS, Solaris, and both flavours of Digital's Unix products, because various vendors had done deals with the different vendors to ship their products on those variants. Each came with different shells, different userlands, and all required slightly different tweaking and tuning to maintain operationally.
Contrast that with the NT 4 world, where that same business was quite happy to buy extremely expensive Alpha/NT systems so that the same skills, tool, and so on that worked everywhere.