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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 ...
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.
Actually, they didn't "forbid" it per se, as in they didn't have it in their license that you couldn't port it to Apple, however they did formally protest it, and encouraged others to not support GNU software on Apple. The software they distributed contained an /etc/Apple.txt file that had a rant about it.
Except for the NuBus PPC's (when you're using a NuBus slot!)
Have you seen http://nubus-pmac.sourceforge.net/?
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
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}
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.
What they actually *did* do as well was not accept any A/UX specific patches for any GNU stuff. That was one of the big reasons for jagubox, was to provide a place for various ports, but mostly for the GNU stuff.
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.