Slashdot Mirror
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 think i would call it a big success, but it was commercially available. you can still find copies on ebay with the box and everything. it was an early attempt to mess with Unix on Mac hardware, which is very interesting. you wonder if this was some inspiration or ground work for some of the Apple spin-offs years later.
a Mac email list i am on was talking about this a few months back. chat started when some people were thinking of the *nix options for Macs that can not run OS X. from people that used it, they generally said it was not the easiest thing around to make it useful today. i guess they implied more that by today's standards you are better off with BSD or yellowdog if you are looking for a productive OS. both of those are actively used on old Macs (pre-PPC chips and everything).
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?
The Lisa ran UNIX.
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