So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
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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?
#2I have a Mac SE/30 running A/UX. It was "maxed out" at 8MB of RAM, and had a huge 80MB hard drive. 512x342 screen, 1 bit per pixel. Ethernet. It came with a C compiler, which I used to compile Gcc in about 2 hours.
I only just found out I could upgrade it to 32GB of RAM.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#3I 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.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#4I successfully used it as a writing/typesetting (NROFF) system. It was the cheapest Unix system I could buy, that the family could also use (it was dual boot). It was expensive, but I used Sun's at work, and I wanted to get as cross as I could.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#5Inflation 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.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#6I 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.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#7I 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. Personal computers were becoming commodity equipment and free versions of Unix were hard to compete against.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#8For those interested, Shoebill※ is an emulator designed specifically to run A/UX and it’s works very well!
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#9Inflation 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.
It'd be hard to use that sort of money for a consumer-purpose PC; maybe a higher end server, but then you likely end up with a blade form factor.
Re: So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
#10Inflation 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.
It'd be hard to use that sort of money for a consumer-purpose PC; maybe a higher end server, but then you likely end up with a blade form factor.
If you go and spec up a HP Z workstation or Dell's comparable offering you can blow through it in no time. Just starting with putting in a TB of RAM will cost a fair bit.