[HN Gopher] So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
___________________________________________________________________
So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
Author : skreuzer
Score : 130 points
Date : 2021-09-20 13:28 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (virtuallyfun.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (virtuallyfun.com)
| jimjag wrote:
| I 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.
| latchkey wrote:
| For those who don't know, Jim is/was the person who maintained
| the A/UX FAQ and often bailed people, like myself, out of
| corners when we got into them.
|
| Thanks Jim!
| kerblang wrote:
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Unix licenses at the time were ridiculously expensive, even
| for PC-grade hardware. Adding compilers and development tools
| was frequently an extra eye-watering expense.
| hondo77 wrote:
| We had 286's running Microport Unix at the company I was at
| back in the 1980s. I seem to recall that we were using
| Microport because it was pretty cheap. Compilers and all. I
| could be mis-remembering.
| scruffyherder wrote:
| which to me was surprising about A/UX, you got both C89 and
| F77!
| rbanffy wrote:
| I think GCC was available back then. Not sure about F77.
| What C compiler did BSD use?
| classichasclass wrote:
| > 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).
| rvense wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I don't think so. I don't remember a connection, at least,
| but it'll be in here straight from the horse's mouth:
|
| https://computerhistory.org/blog/transplanting-the-macs-
| cent...
|
| I watched all of that a while ago and thought it was very
| interesting. Recommended.
| ac50hz wrote:
| Ah yes, Jagubox :-)
|
| A/UX was easy to integrate into a mixed SunOS, Solaris, Irix
| network with liberal use of arch-dependent automounting.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Yes, when I went looking for all the bits and pieces, jagubox
| had them. Thanks Jim. I used this on a SE/30, a Turbo IIci,
| more than one Mac IIfxs.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| 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.
| silvestrov wrote:
| The Macintosh was the "good enough" version of the "Apple
| Lisa".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa
| rbanffy wrote:
| It saddens me the beautiful stationery metaphor of the
| Lisa got ditched in favour of files and applications...
|
| The Lisa deserved better.
| pjmlp wrote:
| That and Object Pascal being replaced by C++.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| C++ was not yet released when the Mac was released.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Motorola's floating point was 5x as fast as Intel's.
|
| That wasn't enough to overcome market positioning.
| gumby wrote:
| 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 can't deny that that is not the case for
| most people)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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
| reaperducer wrote:
| _fun fact - there were no undergraduate courses in
| computer science at that time_
|
| Perhaps this was regional. I was enrolled in
| undergraduate Computer Science courses at this time, and
| it was at a pretty low-end state university.
| msh wrote:
| 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.
| Taniwha wrote:
| 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
| mistrial9 wrote:
| not at Berkeley ! but proper respect to you Taniwha, many
| paths
| Taniwha wrote:
| Well I did the A/UX port IN Berkeley (the city, not the
| university).
|
| The thing is that as a discipline Comp Sci is a late
| comer, university Comp Sci departments came from lots of
| places, some grew out of Engineering depts, others from
| Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Commerce, others from the
| computing infrastructure groups withing universities -
| they ended up being called all sorts of things - early on
| places offered Comp Sci by a whole lot of names
| [deleted]
| cjsplat wrote:
| Yes, Berkeley had undergrad CS degrees in the 80's (and
| late 70's). One in the College of Engineering and one in
| the College of Letters and Science. Also, an undergrad
| EECS in Engineering.
|
| The Bay Area school that didn't have an undergrad CS
| program was Stanfurd.
| gumby wrote:
| Back then MIT had one but Harvard did not. I felt sorry
| for my friends who opted to go there.
|
| H recently started an engineering school. Years ago they
| tried to buy MIT but were rebuffed.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| evidence welcome - I do not recall that as the case
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Unix was the (unhappy) inspiration for the famous
| "worse is better" memo.
|
| It could be rephrased as "done is better than perfect". I
| would love to have a high-end workstation based on exotic
| hardware with ridiculously fast storage, but an average
| home PC is probably enough for my development work and,
| when it's not, I can acknowledge it is so because the
| software is much more bloated than it should be.
| aoki wrote:
| "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.
| gumby wrote:
| > 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.
| temac wrote:
| 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).
| twoodfin wrote:
| _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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| My impression is that they all built desktop
| minicomputers possible thanks to CPUs like the 68K but
| moved on to RISC designs when the 68K started showing its
| age. I would not say the PA-RISC was open, but SPARC had
| multiple sources and MIPS showed up everywhere. At that
| period, the x86 was not an option - Sun tried.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > 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.
| rjsw wrote:
| It was expensive. In 1987 I built a 386-25 with 16MB RAM and
| SCSI HD that ran Interactive Systems UNIX for a lot less than
| it would have cost to get a Mac II with A/UX.
| jbellis wrote:
| 16MB in 1987, good lord. I didn't even know that was
| possible on x86 at the time.
| jandrese wrote:
| 16MB systems were still mainstream in _1997_! Lots of
| 166Mhz and 200Mhz Pentium systems sold with 16MB of RAM
| that year.
| leoc wrote:
| When Windows NT first came out in 1993 its 12-16MB memory
| requirement was considered to be a major obstacle to
| adoption, IIRC.
| rjsw wrote:
| That was using socketed DIL chips, 8MB on the motherboard
| and another 8MB on an expansion card. I had to insert the
| chips individually into the sockets. I had mis-remembered
| the disks, it used ESDI not SCSI.
| scruffyherder wrote:
| more so the platform + the OS... I guess being in for 4k for
| a base machine (probably 2k more to make it usable) 500/1000
| more isn't going to break it, but 386BSD machines while far
| less usable would be a heck of a lot cheaper.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| Same! Thanks Jim for all your work on A/UX back in the day. You
| made a huge difference.
| solarmist wrote:
| What is A/UX? I'm not seeing a definition.
| packetslave wrote:
| Right-click, "Search Google for A/UX". Wikipedia article is the
| first link.
|
| Try harder.
| scruffyherder wrote:
| 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.
| Lammy wrote:
| 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/libra
| ry/archive/documentation/ma...
| grymoire1 wrote:
| I 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.
| webwielder2 wrote:
| 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?!"
| retrac wrote:
| I think it was the price more than anything. Both of the
| software license (not cheap!) and also the hardware
| requirements. It's something that doesn't come up much anymore
| but RAM used to be one of the main limits of a personal
| computer. A/UX required a high-end Mac at the time. And Macs
| were already high-end PCs. And UNIX wanted a _lot_ of RAM. 16
| MB was barely comfortable in the early 90s. This was a time
| when when typical entry-level Macs were still selling with 2 -
| 4 MB sometimes and a full 32 MB upgrade would cost twice as
| much as the base model.
|
| In short, basically the same reasons we didn't all run SCO UNIX
| or whatever on our IBM PCs. Much the same dynamic for why the
| Windows NT kernel took so long to come down to home computers
| (in Windows XP finally). Even OS X's RAM requirements would
| inhibit its uptake for a few years. "Real" operating systems
| were too big for the small computers of the 1980s and even
| early 1990s.
| spijdar wrote:
| Tangential to AU/X and licensing costs, I think this is why
| OS X was something like a "from scratch" recreation of
| NeXTSTEP instead of being a straight port. They replaced the
| AT&T licensed UNIX core with a _new_ open source one derived
| from the 386BSD forks (and DEC 's OSF/1 mach fork), and
| replaced the display postscript WindowServer with Quartz,
| both for licensing cost and performance reasons.
|
| At least, that's my impression from comparing NeXTSTEP and
| early OS X. A lot of the "base layer" was totally replaced,
| including those troublesome licensed bits.
| cat199 wrote:
| I had thought NeXTStep was always BSD based?
|
| Still might have paid the unix license; this was pre AT&T
| vs USL, but, thought nextstep was basically CMU mach (which
| itself was BSD+Mach) + the NextStep frameworks/ui
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Yes the apis eg cocoa are the openstep apis and the
| terminal tools under openstep were BSD
| spijdar wrote:
| NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP were based on 4.3BSD/4.4BSD(not-lite)
| and required a license from AT&T to distribute. I assume
| that, to be legally safe, they would have scrapped that
| code entirely and replaced it with 4.4BSD lite, pulling
| in code from 4.4BSD lite forks like FreeBSD and NetBSD.
| asveikau wrote:
| It also probably has to do with personalities, and who did
| what. NeXT was the Jobs thing. So Jobs came back, and they
| based things on NeXT.
| pjmlp wrote:
| While killing almost everything else.
|
| The video of the audience heat he is taking for those
| decisions and how he goes justifying his decisions is
| worth watching for anyone that needs to go through
| something similar.
| perardi wrote:
| Though he _did_ notably compromise on Carbon. The early
| plan was Cocoa /App Kit all the way, which meant a
| fundamental rewrite of all the important applications,
| namely Adobe and Microsoft stuff.
|
| Which would not have flown.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Sean Parent was key on that whole process, given his role
| at Adobe and Apple, hear his interviews here,
|
| https://adspthepodcast.com/
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| spijdar wrote:
| 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 impedance. I'm fairly
| certain Rhapsody is the same, using the OSFMK kernel and
| 4.4BSD "lite".
|
| At least, I don't think OS X Server 1.0 software would
| have worked on the OpenSTEP for Enterprise stuff?
| pjmlp wrote:
| That much I don't recall, maybe, not sure.
| hedgehog wrote:
| 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.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Nt is not a evolution of dos.
|
| A similar issue you need a new kernel for protected memory
| etc.
|
| Apple did make attempts see Taligent
| hedgehog wrote:
| Exactly. MS rehosted win16 apps on top of a new kernel,
| ported the UI, and encouraged developers to migrate code to
| win32. Apple had pieces of a similar transition with the
| transition to PPC but failed to execute, maybe because they
| were betting on different attempts to rewrite everything
| from scratch.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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
| hedgehog wrote:
| 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.
| temac wrote:
| Yes the GUI was mostly ported from consumer Windows to
| NT. First the 3.1 GUI, then 95.
| icedchai wrote:
| 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
| classichasclass wrote:
| This is correct, but as a practical matter, since the Finder
| was just another process on A/UX everything else (including X
| clients, if any) could keep running. Unfortunately this would
| kill all your Mac apps, including your X server if you were
| running it through MacX.
| hedgehog wrote:
| This is true and was not easily fixable with existing
| applications. They added a kernel supporting memory
| protection in the move to PowerPC but it wasn't until Carbon
| that apps really benefited from that. Carbon was a
| transitional API between classic MacOS and OS X that made it
| feasible to port apps to run on both, but conceivably they
| could have done something similar without the switch to
| Darwin.
| icedchai wrote:
| I remember A/UX...
|
| In the early 90's, a local university had a whole lab of Mac II's
| with A/UX. Unfortunately, they didn't disable the guest account.
| They also had a public dialup and were connected to the Internet.
| A local "elite" BBSer figured this out, and that was how most of
| the local kids got onto IRC for that summer.
| monocasa wrote:
| A/UX only supported m68k macs, right?
|
| I wonder if you could patch the m68k emulator in the later
| nanokernel for PowerPC Macs to support it. Would it be legal?
| Gods no. Would it be a throwback to the kind of really dirty
| hacks I associate with the 90s? Absolutely.
|
| It looks like a decent amount of work reversing the Powermac
| nanokernel has been done:
| https://github.com/elliotnunn/NanoKernel
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| I remember watching a demonstration on a real Macintosh Quadra on
| Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Phk3qVUPqw
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| 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 lightweight layer and
| performed better than the Mac I had at home.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| Has anyone here ever run into a copy of MAE 3.0?
|
| I've been searching for over a decade now.
| vt240 wrote:
| If you are interested in setting it up on Solaris, you can
| send me a message on Telegram or Email.
| selectodude wrote:
| https://www.macintoshrepository.org/32453-apple-macintosh-
| ap...
| teakettle42 wrote:
| Oh, wow -- thanks!
| racingmars wrote:
| Yep -- looks like you got the pointer you needed, but I have
| it running on a SPARCstation 20 under Solaris 2.6 and it
| works well!
|
| The SPARCstation also has a SunPC card in it, so I have
| Windows 3.11, Mac System 7.5, and Solaris 2.6 all running on
| the same desktop: https://i.imgur.com/ctvlzCX.gif
| classichasclass wrote:
| I really gotta get MAE working on HP-UX. I have a
| PrecisionBook here which would be perfect for it.
| ylee wrote:
| My first year at Columbia in 1994, the university set up a
| single computer lab in the engineering building
| (<https://cuit.columbia.edu/computer-lab-
| technologies/location...>) with them. Although they booted into
| HP-UX and its Motif window manager, MAE provided Mac emulation
| and, in practice, was usually used because most students were
| unfamiliar with X Window, of course.
|
| MAE was slow and unstable in my experience unlike yours, and by
| the time I graduated Macs, I believe, replaced them, which made
| the lab consistent with what most of the other computer labs
| had.
| Lammy wrote:
| > 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
| ksherlock wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/19980613012744/http://www.mae.ap.
| ..
|
| MAE is 68k macintosh emulator with some OS/toolbox parts
| handled with native code.
| cjsplat wrote:
| 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 were Version 7 ports done by
| UniSoft. The business model problem was that support costs, Time-
| to-market, and vendor customization rapidly pushed high volume
| customers into doing all their Unix work in-house. Apple followed
| the same path with A/UX, pulling the entire project in-house
| after UniSoft delivered the first version.
|
| UniPlus was a blend of software from AT&T (System V release 2 and
| later SVR3) and BSD (TCP/IP, sendmail, bind and other utilities)
| and eventually Sun (NFS). This was viable because AT&T had a
| semi-official position that UUCP was networking. That was the
| business wing of AT&T, not Bell Labs. The internal fights at AT&T
| are items of legend, but basically Bell Labs stepped back and
| kept to its research charter (with OS work turning into Plan9).
| AT&T corporate kept adding legal and technical stupid to Unix
| until eventually the only option was SysVR4 and the unified field
| theory with Sun.
|
| The Mac-II target for UniPlus used the Motorola 68851 MMU, a
| table walking highly configurable system. It was a stock item
| that UniPlus supported, but Apple wanted quite a bit of
| customization. 4K pages, Nubus memory, and MacOS address space
| support.
|
| 4k pages was a mostly trivial tweak from the 8k baseline, which
| had been selected at UniSoft for TLB efficiency. Apple wanted 4k
| because they had a smaller memory footprint and wanted to get
| better memory utilization. This was a good decision - I tested a
| 2k page size and it was even snappier for the small memory size,
| but lost on the TLB issues for larger memory and Apple didn't
| want the pagesize to be determined at boot time.
|
| The NuBus memory was a discontiguous physical address space that
| wasn't initialized by the system. It was also an extra 2 clocks
| away compared to main memory. I dealt with the memory map, and
| added initialization hooks so that the memory could be found and
| used early, and built up a test system with two expansion cards
| and 20 MBytes of memory. Slower memory was pretty bad normally,
| but the 68020 I-cache and large register file made it benchmark
| OK. Unfortunately, sometimes the system stack was placed on NuBus
| memory and the impact on interrupt and system call latency was
| horrible. I set it up so that by default any external memory was
| dedicated to the IO buffer cache. Apple wasn't happy with this,
| but they accepted it since there was a driver boot-time flag to
| force a big pool of slow memory.
|
| The MacOS address space was the most interesting. The old Mac
| systems were so memory starved that they took advantage of the 32
| bit memory and 24 address lines on the 68000/68010 to store stuff
| in the high order byte. I can't remember if it was general
| storage or metadata - I seem to have blocked out the usage
| details. I put together a design that would alias the high order
| bytes by creating 256 overlapping top level segments that could
| share the rest of the page tables so that physical memory
| wouldn't be exhausted with page tables to cover the 32-bit
| address space.
|
| Apple decided not to do this - they wanted a 100% user mode
| implementation. I was irritated at the time since they were
| choosing to sacrifice memory protection and security, but in
| retrospect I was only a couple of years out of school and I am
| not sure I fully appreciated the side effects of aliasing
| addresses that way. Still, it would have been fun to implement.
| biggieshellz wrote:
| Wow, thanks for the background here!
|
| FYI,
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
| has more info on what they did in the high order byte, and what
| they had to do to make things "32-bit clean" later on.
| Taniwha wrote:
| 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 that ran in 256k.
|
| I don't think anyone ever used NuBus memory :-)
| Taniwha wrote:
| PS: hi Carl :-)
| walrus01 wrote:
| 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.
| h2odragon wrote:
| in 1988, I got the "opportunity" to buy the most expensive
| computer a local whitebox shop built; which was a 286-20 with
| 1MB of RAM and room for a 2nd MB on the motherboard. There were
| 386-16 machines (just) out, but this was the "Xenix
| workstation". With the fancy EGA monitor and card, and iirc
| 40MB of disk, that came out to be just about $5,000.
| [deleted]
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| 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.
| da_chicken wrote:
| > _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._
|
| No, not at all. This isn't a workstation. It's a
| _Workstation_. It 's not even a struggle to beat $12k.
|
| A Mac Pro starts at $6k. You can add a 28 core Xeon for +$7k.
| 1.5 TB of memory is +$25k. Twin Radeons with 64 GB of video
| ram is another +$10k. 8TB of storage is another +$2.5k.
| You've picked CPU, RAM, graphics, and storage and you're
| already over $50k. That's no software. No display. Just the
| tower, a power cable, a mouse, a keyboard, and MacOS.
|
| If you go to Dell and check out their Data Science
| Workstations, it's not difficult to configure one for over a
| quarter of a million dollars. Triple graphics cards, 6 TB of
| memory, dual 28-core processors. In a tower computer.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >the equivalent of $12,718.67
|
| so a moderately equipped modern MacPro.
| lsllc wrote:
| Did you include the $699 wheels in that?
|
| https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-
| pro-w...
| fzzzy wrote:
| Where we're going, we don't need wheels.
| itomato wrote:
| ...without a UNIX license.
| jdblair wrote:
| From the article: The damned thing was just too expensive! From
| Wikipedia "When introduced, a basic system with monitor and 20 MB
| hard drive cost US$5,498"
|
| I respectfully disagree that price was the issue. The competition
| was a Sun workstation. In 1990, a sparcstation was $5k without
| the hard drive, a configuration that only made sense if you
| mounted the root filesystem using NFS, which meant you had a more
| expensive machine with a hard drive on your LAN.
|
| Apple could have succeeded in the workstation space, but they
| were a consumer focused company.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/16/business/low-priced-work-...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| In '87 name brand 386's were going for $4500. The Mac premium
| wasn't quite so outrageous considering it came with a superior
| color display when most PCs were still doddering about with EGA
| and Hercules mono.
| [deleted]
| philwelch wrote:
| I don't even think the Macintosh II was all that unpopular with
| Mac users. The Mac II family was sold for six years and was
| discontinued only a year before the switch to PowerPC. I think
| Apple just didn't seriously commit to selling them as Unix
| workstations with A/UX.
| Chazprime wrote:
| > 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.
| classichasclass wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| 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.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| University of Wisconsin Eau Claire CS class of '98 raise your
| hands! We had a lab full of A/UX workstations. It is where I
| learned C++, shell, etc. They were fantastic machines.
| dhosek wrote:
| While I was in college, I was the device drivers editor for
| _TUGboat_ and trying to track all the combinations of OS and
| output device for TeX DVI drivers brought a lot of borderline
| operating systems into my awareness. As I recall, there was a TeX
| port for A /UX. There were also, so many Unix variants, that I
| ended up having to combine them into a single Unix column in the
| table and then in the detailed listings, indicate which Unix
| flavor(s) were supported. Nowadays, when, for all practical
| purposes, any desktop system will either be Windows, MacOS or
| Linux, things are considerably simpler.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| So, has anyone gotten this to run in a Mac emulator on the Amiga?
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| amyjess wrote:
| Because A/UX requires an MMU, that means the only emulator that
| can run it is Shoebill.
| leoc wrote:
| 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-apple.com/le-big-mac-apple/ (Google
| Translate:
| https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https:/... )
| is the best intro that I'm aware of, though there are some
| additional, important bits of information in Steven Levy's
| _Insanely Great_ ch. 9 (
| https://books.google.ie/books?id=Y6ZQAAAAMAAJ&dq=insanely+gr... )
| and the Isaacson bio's ch. 13 (
| https://books.google.ie/books?id=JT6FCgAAQBAJ&printsec=front...
| ). TFA links to some of these, but it missed some of the
| information in them. (Unfortunately the Adventure-Apple piece
| needs one big caveat, that it mostly doesn't cite any sources.)
|
| There's also yet _another_ whole strand of Macintosh-adjacent
| Unix in the Network Server products:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsVAdrdkyoA .
|
| Some key points from these:
|
| * I have little idea how well-founded Apple's detailed legal
| complaints were, but the overall claim that "Jobs had done
| research for a next generation product and taken the key staff,
| namely Page from Apple to make it reality" is almost surely
| absolutely right, and NeXT was conceived an attempt to do Big Mac
| outside Apple using the Big Mac team from Apple. One thing that
| TFA and the LowEndMac miss is that Jobs, apparently, wasn't the
| instigator: according to Isaacson, Rich Page and other Big Mac
| people contacted _him_ and begged him to launch a new company
| when Big Mac was cancelled. (ISTR seeing this confirmed
| elsewhere, too, but I don 't recall where atm.)
|
| * TFA says that "[a]ll that I can find of the Big Mac project is
| this insanely low resolution image" showing some hardware and a
| screenshot of the GUI, but it links to an article which features
| this glamour shot of what was apparently an industrial design for
| Big Mac: https://i0.wp.com/www.aventure-apple.com/wp-
| content/uploads/... . (And this _is_ cited: it 's apparently from
| the Appledesign book https://www.worldcat.org/title/appledesign-
| the-work-of-the-a... .) The resemblance to the original G3 iMac
| from over a decade later is obvious. Beyond appearances, some
| other hardware similarities include a lack of internal expansion
| slots (according to Levy's book, Jobs maintained his opposition
| to "slots" through his departure from Apple) and a focus on
| external expandability instead: the G3 iMac was an early adopter
| of USB, while Big Mac apparently had Apple Desktop Bus. In fact,
| according to the Adventure-Apple piece ADB was originally
| developed for Big Mac under the name of Front Desk Bus (though as
| usual I see no reference to substantiate this). The single most
| obvious divergence is that Big Mac couldn't display colour,
| though no doubt this is because of an underlying similarity: the
| Big Mac project was trying to hit a roughly G3-iMac-like price
| point in the mid-'80s.
|
| <pinwheel />
| leoc wrote:
| * 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) that
| influence in the famous clip from the 1995 _Triumph of the
| Nerds_ "lost" interview where he talked about not understanding
| the importance of PARC's networking or OO work originally
| https://www.bhooshan.com/2017/12/07/quotes-steve-jobs-lost-i...
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHaTRWRj8G0 . Furthermore Alan
| Kay had just joined Apple in 1984 https://www.quora.com/What-
| was-Alan-Kays-experience-like-wor... . But there were plenty of
| other, very immediate possible inspirations for Big Mac in the
| commercial workstation market. There was high-end stuff like
| Apollo/Domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo/Domain or
| Lisp machines, but above all there was Sun. By 1983 the Sun-2
| workstations had proven that you could already get a real Unix
| running on a desktop machine, using the same m68k architecture
| family as the Mac, that you could put a PARCish GUI on top of
| it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunView and that you could
| make money selling it. And on the other hand Sun's high prices
| and gimcrack user experience would have bred confidence that
| Apple could do much better, at least with a couple more years
| for prices to decline. I can't think of anything to confirm
| that Sun was an influence, but it more or less has to have
| been.
|
| * What about the networking, though? (Apart from all other
| possible inspirations, Sun was already trumpeting that "the
| network is the computer" by this time.) There's no mention
| anywhere of any network port on any Big Mac prototype, and it
| seems reasonable to assume that Big Mac was intended to have no
| integrated networking hardware. But I don't think this
| indicates that networking was unimportant to the Big Mac
| vision. Jobs put plenty of emphasis on networking in his
| February 1985 Playboy interview
| https://allaboutstevejobs.com/verbatim/interviews/playboy_19...
| , and he seems to have been very much on board with (and likely
| involved with?) Apple's efforts to roll out a LAN offering in
| 1984 and 1985 https://www.macgui.com/news/article.php?t=491 . I
| think the most likely explanation was that, like the non-colour
| screen, this was a cost-driven decision. In 1985 integrated
| networking would have been expensive and useless to most modem
| users, and vice versa, while many users weren't yet ready to
| pay for either LAN or dial-up hardware. And of course
| networking hadn't yet really converged on (not-quite-)RJ45
| Ethernet--Apple itself had only just _started_ pushing
| AppleTalk!--so even for LAN users there was a good chance that
| any integrated LAN hardware would be an expensive waste.
|
| * That just leaves the PARC-influenced "object-oriented"
| element which later showed up on the NeXT in the form of
| Objective C and the NeXT APIs. Had Big Mac's software already
| taken some steps in this kind of direction? Or was it an
| ambition for later, or simply not on the roadmap at all yet? I
| have no idea.
|
| <pinwheel />
| leoc wrote:
| * "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 working on a successor Mac in the time between the
| release of the original and Jobs' firing.) Jobs likely didn't
| even know it existed, as it was hidden from him to prevent
| him from killing it. At some point (according to Levy) this
| meshed with Jean-Louis Gassee's vision of a high-end
| Macintosh line which would give power users the things they
| liked about the PC. He went so far as to get "OPEN MAC"
| number plate for his car, where 'open' in this case referred
| to slots. _Insanely Great_ _seems_ to suggest that Gassee had
| this ambition even before he heard about Milwaukee /Little
| Big Mac, but it's not competely clear on that point. In any
| case, after Jobs was gone and Gassee had been given the
| reins, he killed off Big Mac and Milwaukee was allowed to
| become Macintosh II.
|
| * The Apple Extended Keyboard
| https://deskthority.net/wiki/Apple_Extended_Keyboard with its
| Model-M based layout was by far the biggest Apple keyboard up
| to that point and was clearly part of the Macintosh II power-
| user vision just as slots and colour were. (IIRC it was
| explicitly justified as making the Mac compatible with PC
| software.) And so it's no surprise that Jobs didn't like it:
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/841771 .
|
| * It isn't quite _directly_ stated anywhere I know of, but it
| 's clear that rival visions of Macintosh cost, margins and
| market share were a big factor in the internal strife. Even
| back at the launch of the original Macintosh, Jobs had been
| very unhappy that the price had been set at $2500 rather than
| $2000 https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh
| &stor... . There's also a video clip from the '90s, almost
| certainly from his NeXT days, complaining bitterly about
| Apple's decision to choose high margins and low market share
| for the Macintosh, but I can't find it atm. Despite the big
| screen and the ambitious Unix-based OS rewrite which probably
| imposed a big RAM penalty, Big Mac's creators evidently hoped
| (realistically or not) that it would compete for something
| like the mainstream market. On the other hand, whether or not
| this was _quite_ Gassee 's vision from Day 1, the Macintosh
| IIs were and remained brutally high-margin, priced to soak
| those who not only both needed a high-end Mac and could
| afford one but were also trapped on the Mac platform, while
| the all-in-one Macs (and even the later LCs, to a lesser
| extent) were kept underpowered but _also_ swingeingly
| expensive. It 's not a coincidence that Gassee popped up to
| smirk and leer when the 2019 Mac Pro's prices were announced
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20163321 . To be fair,
| the Macintosh II pricing strategy actually did make Apple a
| great deal of money, for a while. Meanwhile NeXT was,
| ironically, in no position to compete for the mass market.
| alkz wrote:
| Around 15 years ago I got my hands on a quadra 700 and managed to
| install A/UX on it. I don't remember the details but i really
| struggled to find an external SCSI CDROM drive compatible with
| the OS, if memory serves me well there were just like 2/3
| specific drives supported by the installer. In the end I probably
| used a SUN one which looked like a mini pizza box sparcstation.
|
| Taking also in account that that version of A/UX ran only on the
| quadra 700/800/950, it's probably one of the OS with less
| hardware support around
|
| The OS itself was so simple, it didn't even use init scripts to
| start its services, but everything was (re)spawned by
| /etc/inittab like /bin/getty; this was so clever I started doing
| it with all the services I wanted to automatically restart on my
| other linux servers
| jonpurdy wrote:
| For those interested, Shoebill* is an emulator designed
| specifically to run A/UX and it's works very well!
|
| * https://github.com/pruten/Shoebill
| scruffyherder wrote:
| also Qemu is mainlining Quadra 800 support for 3.0.1
|
| https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=11326
|
| On a test of compiling about 4MB of source code, Qemu is 7x
| faster than Shoebill!
| hadlock wrote:
| I can't remember if Apple themselves hosted AUX or not on their
| website, alongside System 6 and 7.5, or if you could get them,
| ahem, from other locations.
|
| Anyways, remarkably, A/UX could run on a Macintosh LC II and III.
| The LC III was remarkable in that if you found the right DIMM, it
| wouldn't reject a 32MB SIMM RAM chip. Long story short, you could
| buy an Mac LC II for $10 in 2000, and install A/UX on there. The
| tricky thing was that Macs all used SCSI drives back then, and
| most macs required the SCSI drive to have a special bit flipped
| (in, I guess, firmware? or bootloader?) that marked it as a Mac
| hardware scsi drive.
|
| A/UX was unique in that 1. it did not require a Mac specific SCSI
| drive and 2. utilities existed to convert any scsi drive to be
| marked as a "Mac hardware" scsi drive.
|
| TL;DR ran A/UX for a couple of weeks on a $10 Macintosh LC II
| that I bought at a computer consignment shop in the early 2000s
| pjmlp wrote:
| The only time I saw it live was in 1994 at the old Lisbon
| Computer Expo.
|
| It seemed an interesting experiment for the about 15 minutes I
| was allowed to play with it.
|
| Never saw it again other than in computer magazines articles.
| sneak wrote:
| Does anyone have a .zip or something of an emulator with this all
| up and running?
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