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Apple Unix Before Mac OS X
cascadefx writes "I found a great article over at Applefritter about Unix on an Apple before Mac OS X. It seems that Apple played with a commercial version of Unix (AT&T Unix to be exact) on top of which ran the good old 68K Mac OS stuff. Great piece that covers a lot of the UI and architecture. It also has screen shots of the thing up and running in 2001, and the author steps through issues like networking and compiling code on the platform. Enjoy." The article's a good read, and brings back some fond memories ...
I don't know why the headline and intro here make it sound like this is some kind of top-secret research project that's only now being revealed. Wasn't A/UX a fairly well-known and succesful product?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Right, now I remember there used to be some A/UX for the Apple back in the 1980s.
Then, too, even earlier, there used to be Xenix for the PC by MS.
Mebbe Redmond should come up with it's own 2nd generation UNIX?
Then, every major OS could be a UNIX variant and easier to cross port.
Also, MS would have a chance to prove it can compete on a level playing field. They have talented staff, probably many with UNIX experience. Let them loose instead of having them tend the spaghetti of Windows and Office!
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Didn't the FSF forbid porting GPL'd programs (at least those that they owned the copyrights to like GNU Emacs, gcc, bash, etc.) to A/UX as a protest against the Look and Feel lawsuit?
Nobody has ever heard of this before!
Greetings, for free software!
An odder curiosity than A/UX was the Network Server 500/700 that ran AIX.
I spotted two identical A/UX manuals at an IKEA. They were there about a month ago and were being used as props. Kinda neato.
Get the A/UX FAQ here:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/aux-faq/
It's really long and covers any question that would ever have about this old OS.
Orange
The Lisa ran UNIX.
Back when I was an undergrad at Berkeley (c 1986), a friend and I got a job at a place called Unisoft, as Q/A people for A/UX. Unisoft used to be in far west Berkeley, then moved to Emeryville, and I'm pretty sure they've folded now. The big project was writing/improving A/UX (I'm not sure whether they're the only company that touched the code before or since). I can recall writing bug reports for the new keyboards (ancestors of what Apples still use today) and the man page for sed.
I can also recall a vaguely major release where the engineers dared us to crash the system. Took me all of 5 minutes using an old trick I saw someone do in a lab: while (1) { mkdir x; cd x}
A/UX is old, old, old. And it's about as interesting as running Unix of any kind would be on a 20k 68040 chip Quadra.
Boring.
...for their "Falcon" computer. They used MiNT, a Unix-like kernel, upon which they put a multitasking version of GEM, their (somewhat Mac-like) GUI, and called it MultiTOS, TOS being their single-tasking OS. It ran most legacy Atari programs, and you could use GNU/BSD Unix tools. It had no virtual memory/disk swapping though.
This thing is still being worked on.
And poke her, with the soft cushions!!!
commando has to be the biznez.
And of course it runs my System 7 progs - I have SIMTower running almost constantly....without crashing...
Apple also had an X Client as well. I found both the CD's in a drawer in the SysAdmin's office. I should borrow them sometime and get it installed on my old 9500, but with YellowDog out and my lack of time I don't think it will happen anytime soon.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
Why do we have to keep getting this tripe from nitwits who don't know UNIX from a hole in the ground? Enough already!
Don't you remember in Jurassic Park, when the chick goes in and uses the Quadras or whatever they were, and she says, hey this is unix, I know this. It was obviously AUX.
More to the point, why does Slashdot have to approve this stuff in the queue as 'news'? Lame.
La de fricking da.
I will always have a fond place in my heart for A/UX. It was, after all, the first thing that made me "noted" among the 'Net community. Yeah, the Jim Jagielski of 'jagubox' is the same Jim Jagielski of Apache/ASF and 'jimjag' of /.
Oh the horror... the horror
More interesting, and relevant to today, than A/UX is the old Macintosh Application Environment. It was an environment, not unlike classic, that ran System 7 apps on Solaris and other commercial unices.
Manuals are still available from Apple.
In fact, Fred Sanchez said at Usenix that the folks that wrote MAE also wrote Classic for Mac OS X.
Lee Joramo
/. wannabe editors can't seem to break out the mold...
- good read
- must read
- fun read
- interesting read
- fast read
...only the fourteenth time this week this phrase has been handtrucked out....please stop.
I found this article interesting as I currently administer a Workgroup Server 95 with A/UX and Apple Share Pro Server being used as a fileserver for our dept at work, just to keep a central repository of useful mac utils and such. Was neat to see that somebody else knows what A/UX is :) Our Mac techs gave long blank stares when I mentioned the name :)
I would have owned a mac sooner than I do now :)
Dave
I adminstered A/UX, what a piece of shit. constantly needed to be rebooted and then Apple stranded us by discontinuing it.
That's the free X server for (classic) MacOS, right? How well does it work? I've thought of using it on my G3 to work on my Linux box, at least until I upgrade it to OS X.
Constitutionally Correct