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So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?

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

#41

Post by Lammy »

scruffyherder wrote: post #35
solarmist wrote: post #32

What is A/UX? I’m not seeing a definition.

Apple bough a port of UniSoft SYSVr2 to the Apple platoform and dubbed it A/UX. Version 2 onward were technically significant as ToolBox and Finder had been ported to Unix and allowed MacOS apps to run on top of Unix. They didn't offer process virtualization so they could all crash eachother out.

The A/UX Toolbox PDFs cover a lot of interesting technical details for the curious: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/mac/a_ux/aux_2.0/030-0787-A_A...

"/mac/sys — This directory contains the system folders for startup and login. The System file provided with Release 2.0 of A/UX is almost identical in functionality to the System file provided with Release 6.0.5 of the Macintosh system software."

Additionally I always thought the Gestalt Manager was a System 7 thing and was surprised to learn it was introduced along with system 6.0.4 and A/UX so applications could tell if they were running on it: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma...

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

#42

Post by kstrauser »

Cockbrand wrote: post #36

So, has anyone gotten this to run in a Mac emulator on the Amiga?

Beat me to it. Shapeshifter was a nearly perfect Mac emulator that ran full-speed on Amigas. Given that you could buy an Amiga with a 68060 CPU, which never made it to Mac, you could make the argument that the fastest 68K Mac ever built was an Amiga.

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

#43

Post by mistrial9 »

gumby wrote: post #19
rbanffy wrote: post #11

Earlier 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.

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 minutes, AND the oversight of an admin with security.

Mac? get one, fire it up, make Mac Paint pictures. The network IS NOT the computer, thankyouverymuch

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

#44

Post by lsllc »

dylan604 wrote: post #37
walrus01 wrote: post #5

Inflation calculator says that a workstation computer package of hardware (PC, monitor, keyboard, mouse) selling for $5500 USD in 1988 would be the equivalent of $12,718.67 today. That sort of money (except for ridiculous non-linear GPU prices today) would build one hell of a threadripper workstation.

>the equivalent of $12,718.67 so a moderately equipped modern MacPro.

Did you include the $699 wheels in that?

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-w...

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

#45

Post by Lammy »

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…

> 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 can't find any solid info on it but have to imagine their experience reimplementing Toolbox was tied into "Star Trek" somehow as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

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

#46

Post by icedchai »

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

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

#47

Post by gumby »

aoki wrote: post #31
gumby wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

“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 you catch this in time to edit: you might want to put a hyphen between “co” and “design” because you didn’t mean signing code.

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

#49

Post by jandrese »

rbanffy wrote: post #11
jandrese wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#50

Post by hedgehog »

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?!"

After studying the history a bit it seems to me the reasons were organizational more than technical. Jobs brought his team back with him and they built on what they were familiar with. With better management the existing nanokernel-based MacOS could probably have been evolved similar to what MS did with NT.
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