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

121–130 of 166 posts

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

#121

Post by Taniwha »

Taniwha wrote: post #103
cjsplat wrote: post #85

I did some of the initial mmu support for A/UX while at UniSoft, so lived a fair amount of the history, at least for version 0 of A/UX. For those not familiar with the times, this was still at the outset of the Unix wars - Berkeley vs AT&T vs everyone else. UniSoft was a porting house based in Berkeley that specialized in putting Unix on almost anything. For example, the first Unix implementations for Sun and SGI wer…

I also worked on it at UniSoft, did maybe half the device drivers, plus the appletalk stack, autoconfig (loadable drivers), large screen support, console subsystem, kernel event manager for the mac world etc. The early 68k systems used in the early macs only brought out 24 address bits, Apple did indeed use that memory for metadata - memory was tight - the first Macs had 128k, we were shipping Unix systems at UniSoft…

PS: hi Carl :-)

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

#122

Post by 0xabe »

classichasclass wrote: post #97
Chazprime wrote: post #95

Earlier 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.

Any current Lisp projects you’d like to share?

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

#123

Post by lukeh »

classichasclass wrote: post #99
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.

> 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).

Right, from memory that was going to be A/UX 4.0. But as you say, that never happened.

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

#124

Post by lukeh »

spijdar wrote: post #56
pjmlp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot there was still OpenSTEP and the collaboration with Sun, which ended up having an influence on a language being designed at the time called Oak. Early versions of OS X were still based on OpenSTEP, thus able to run on top of Windows as well.

OpenStep was still based on Mach 2 and (encumbered) 4.3BSD. OS X Server 1.0 was very OpenStep like yes, it used the old Display Postscript server and was more compatible with next/openstep (I think the display servers were similar enough you could forward OpenSTEP software to a OS X Server 1.0 windowserver), but I believe it was based on the un-encumbered XNU, and couldn't directly run OpenSTEP programs due to this i…

Rhapsody was still pre-Mk but had 4.4BSD userland. It could run OPENSTEP binaries if you copied the shared libraries over, from memory one of the ex-NeXT engineers did this for fun.

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

#125

Post by scruffyherder »

leoc wrote: post #24

This 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…

glad you got the 65scribe video!

I'm emailing someone who did support for the ANS stuff so I'll follow up with something there, although I don't have the machine/software.. not that I'd have the space for such a monster!

I'll have to order those books... it'd be a surprising twist that Jobs was dragged into NeXT? maybe some personal obligation?

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

#126

Post by housel »

rbanffy wrote: post #76
scruffyherder wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

BSD 4.3 still used the Portable C Compiler. By 4.4 Berkeley was starting to use GCC, but that wasn't available in time to incorporate into A/UX. Plus, IIRC the GNU project was actively boycotting Apple at the time, and so Apple was probably adverse to incorporating any GNU software.

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

#127

Post by scruffyherder »

leoc wrote: post #106
leoc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 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…

* "Milwaukee" wasn't Big Mac, even though (if Levy is correct) it was also sometimes referred to as "Little Big Mac". As Aventure-Apple states (and Levy confirms), it was a rival (or at least completely indepdendent) effort. Insanely Great says that it was a grassroots initiative by engineer Mike Dhuey focussed on creating a version-2 Macintosh with internal expansion slots. (And it wasn't even the only other project…

Milwaukee is mentioned in the A/UX 0.7 build, so I was wondering if it was more 'BigMac' or something else entirely.

It's a shame more of this is buried in legend.

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

#128

Post by scruffyherder »

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

Have you ever played with this:

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/aux-apple-unix-68k-version-...

I found it interesting that it mentions both ‘Milwaukee‘, and Cayman "brac" ... Here on the Jasmine 80.

Seems like lots of weird codenames.

It looks like UniSoft had done a lot of work on the code (you?) to make it super portable. Although everything not directly related to the Milwaukee was cut. It'd be interesting to see if the kernel could be built without MMU support.. I tried to remove PAGING but that didn't work. Oh yeah the kernel source is on that image and other than one damaged file, it not only builds, but works on a special Shoebill.

cd /sys/psn

rm *.o

cd io

mv screen-data.c screen_data.c

cd ..

make unix

Pretty neat, none the less!

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

#129

Post by wmf »

icedchai wrote: post #46
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?!"

My understanding is the "Mac" side of A/UX still had no memory protection. It still had all the stability problems plaguing System 7, unlike modern macOS / OS/X

That's no worse than Classic aka the Blue Box. In retrospect it seems like Carbon on A/UX should have been possible.

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

#130

Post by scruffyherder »

gumby wrote: post #47
aoki wrote: post #31

Earlier 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 SUN-1 was based on the SUN (Stanford University Network) board, but I can't find anything concrete on the SUN board (Also by Andy) other than it existing, and apparently 'cheap/free' to license?

Apparently it formed the foundations of cisco/SGi & SUN.

Post reply on HN