So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?

After doing A/UX work I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I interviewed at Apple. They offered me a 5% pay cut for the chance to commute from Berkeley to Cupertino, which wasn't great but at least the stock was likely to be worthwhile. (UniSoft had a great team, but no business model).

After I got the Apple offer, I met with people up the management chain to the VP a step above the entire A/UX org (3 people up from my potential hiring manager). The VP had no problem admitting that he didn't really see a reason for Apple to be in the Unix business and that he had no criteria for measuring the success of the effort or justifying substantial additional investment.

Bonus points for honesty, but I decided at that point that the project was doomed.

I think in the long run it became a checkbox for Federal sales and it made inroads at some universities where Unix (for IT dept) + Mac S/W was a selling point.

:-) Close - I was the other cocky young kid from Berkeley.

Since there was only one Kiwi on the project, the other clue I'll give you is that I inherited your cubicle when you left.

(here's probably too much information)

yup I wrote a lot of that, I did all the console stuff (font renderer, vt100, mouse, keyboard, fdb/adb, ui event queue etc).

Missing is all the auto config support (ability to add 3rd party drivers to the kernel in the field, something that at the time you usually couldn't do without source), fixes for large screen support, all my appletalk code is missing too. However I can see the latish floppy bug fix (there was a hardware bug found in the FDB/ADB chip where if we accessed the floppy on only some systems the keyboard froze, turned out we were spinning reading the timer while reading the disk, doing it so fast the clock to the FDB chip sped up) and the older pre-fix code in "sony.c.~8A" - that sort of places the release in time.

Given all that I'd guess that this is one of the early releases we gave to Apple that has somehow escaped - we used to fly to Oregon and copy disks to do releases to avoid California's sales taxes - UniSoft actually had an online modem based system where customers could log in and download the latest software - at the time CA tax law didn't explicitly cover electronic delivery of software, we were sued by the state and they lost setting a precedent

It's been a long time but "psn" probably stands for "Pigs in Space" - our internal code name for the project (Apple's code name "Eagle" leaked, but ours never did).

The "Cayman/brac" looks like what someone named their box, "Jasmine" was a type of hard drive, I've no idea about Milwaukee - I think Cayman used to be a company that made mac ethernet hardware, my guess would be that someone at Apple slipped them this pre-release, and then an update with some bug fixes, along with source (very naughty! AT&T would likely have sued us, ie UniSoft if they found out)

The assembly font renderer uses the 68020 only bfins bit field insert instructions, it can under certain circumstances generate a 24-bit bus write, nubus doesn't support such a thing, we got half of the first big run of mac 2 boards, they came with a schematic and PAL equations, I got to send fixed PAL equations back to Ron at Apple to make it work.

As far as "making it portable" a large part of that is just system 5 (SVR2 in this case) not so much us, though porting this code was our bread and butter - we supported a number of MMUs - 2 paging MMUs for 68020s, and a whole lot of swapping MMUs for 68010/68000s (plus 29k 88k etc) - it was never really designed to work without some form of MMU

Ah - my original guess was one of the Chris

(how would I know who got my cubicle when I left? :-)

have a look upthread someone has discovered an early A/UX kernel source release that Apple must have slipped to someone (my guess is Cayman Systems)

Why would I try harder for something that _might_ be interesting? That's just bad writing.

If I can’t tell what something’s about from the first couple paragraphs or a quick skim, I’ll tune it out. I have plenty of other content to read.