[HN Gopher] A/UX
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A/UX
Author : lioeters
Score : 86 points
Date : 2023-12-28 12:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| lioeters wrote:
| Also on this topic:
|
| - A/UX: The Unix for the rest of us?
| http://toastytech.com/guis/aux.html
|
| - Apple A/UX: The First UNIX Mac OS -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI
| gattilorenz wrote:
| And the Shoebill emulator, if you want to run A/UX yourself:
| https://github.com/pruten/shoebill
|
| Or, apparently, a recent-ish QEMU, but I haven't tried that
| myself
| bregma wrote:
| Ah, yes, good old A/UX. I remember taking half a day to reinstall
| it on a Mac II from a box of floppies, staring at the counting
| fingers on the screen while waiting for the instructions to swap
| disks.
| _jal wrote:
| Yep, me too. I worked at Sybase at the time, and installed it
| to use a beta PowerBuilder to (try to) build some internal
| tools. Granted, I in my early 20s and far less experienced with
| this stuff, but found PB utterly incomprehensible. Unix started
| making sense fairly quickly, although I still had years of
| learning ahead to get to competent.
|
| Only later did I realize how odd it was that they had me doing
| that on a Mac. Those where the days where they had farms of
| various Unix workstations because they ported SQL Server to a
| ton of different platforms. I remember ending up in a storage
| room one day and there were piles of unopened Suns, Apollos,
| DECs, SGIs...
|
| Slightly less of a commitment, there was also MPW, which was
| kind of unix-ish.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...
| mleo wrote:
| PowerBuilder is a word I haven't heard in a long time. My
| first job out of college at a tech consultancy was developing
| a PowerBuilder/Oracle application for a client. Tooling was
| terrible compared to today, but it was a great LOB
| development tool.
| tizio13 wrote:
| Oh man, it took me a second to realize why I even
| recognized Sybase and Powerbuilder. My last job had me
| convert a bunch of PB reports into Crystal. My god I'm so
| glad the design of PB never caught on. Awful program
| jimjag wrote:
| This was one of the most important OSs in my life, for a number
| of reasons.
| latchkey wrote:
| Please don't be so humble Jim! Anyone who is reading this
| should realize that Jim was the backbone of A/UX. He created
| and maintained the infamous A/UX FAQ. If it wasn't for him,
| this system would have been completely useless. He really
| brought light to this operating system.
|
| It was also super important in my life as well. I had a Quadra
| 950 beast of a machine in college (I named it: dolphin) and
| taught myself quite a bit of C by porting existing open source
| software to it (which Jim listed in his FAQ).
|
| I ran all sorts of social services on it... BBS', gopher,
| finger, cu-seeme and most importantly... early ncsa and apache
| httpd. I really got to connect with a lot of people on the
| early 90's internet this way and it shaped my life to this day.
| richharms wrote:
| Thank you for everything you did to support A/UX!
| jagubox.gsfc.nasa.gov will be forever burned into my memory.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Absolutely for ever. All the security updates, software
| updates, third party everything. Jimjag is the real deal. I
| had a pair of Quadra 950s, one running Apple share, and the
| other with the SCSI Card running A/UX. ( 2x4x240M ). Without
| his through amount of patches, and supplements, A/UX would
| have been much harder, despite all the documentation. I could
| xTerm from any machine in my house into my A/UX server.
| Thanks Jim. Thanks for your archive.
| classichasclass wrote:
| Thanks for being there for A/UX! Proud to still maintain a
| mirror of jagubox on the Gopher server, and my clock-chipped
| Q800 runs it splendidly.
|
| gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/1/archive/jagubox-gsfc-nasa-
| gov-aux
| jiveturkey wrote:
| oh my! same here, and more importantly it was thanks to you!
| thank you sir.
| donatj wrote:
| This reminds me of the old Computer Chronicles episode about A/UX
| - worthy of a watch. Wish we still had computer reporting of that
| caliber
|
| https://youtu.be/nId-Nsj5OX4?si=sk2A28Xo5ivL8Rqf
| _0xdd wrote:
| One of my favorite TV shows to watch on archive.org. Things
| were so much simpler back then.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| >Wish we still had computer reporting of that caliber
|
| Today, when a new CPU is released instead of having a sales rep
| on the show to demonstrate how much faster it spins a wireframe
| in a 3-minute segment, there are publications that will spend
| two weeks benchmarking it who will then release an hour-long
| video and thousands of words of writing on every aspect of it.
|
| Youtube videos on A/UX go into much more detail than Computer
| Chronicles ever could and I'm saying that as the founding
| member, president, and CEO of the Stewart Cheifet Appreciation
| Society.
|
| Action Retro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Phk3qVUPqw
|
| Paul's Crap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veOLuYgWkls
|
| We are living in the golden age of technology reporting, if you
| know where to look.
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| I have to say, Action Retro is probably one of my most
| favourite YouTube channels. His enthusiasm for old computers
| is just contagious.
|
| Also, 68K.news, which appeared on the HN frontpage
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26623362), was made by
| him.
| drooopy wrote:
| I've always wondered why Apple didn't kept on developing A/UX as
| their replacement for classic Mac OS but instead chose to focus
| on either Frankenstein-like experiments, such as Copland or
| purchasing technology stack from 3rd party companies.
| bluepizza wrote:
| They licensed Sys V to build A/UX. That must have been quite
| expensive.
| cstross wrote:
| I am _guessing_ here, but I worked at SCO (when it was a UNIX
| VAR, not three vexatious lawsuits in a trenchcoat) and the
| killer was always licensing fees, especially to AT &T. Sun
| bought a royalty-free license to SVR4 from AT&T which became
| Solaris, but it cost them on the order of $200M (if the figure
| I was told was accurate). SCO had a royalty-free license to
| SVR3.2 but had to pay out $250 to licensees for each copy of
| SCO Open Desktop 3 they sold (the precursor to SCO Open Server
| in 1995) for stuff like Motif, IXI Desktop, the Microsoft C
| compiler they still used ...
|
| I suspect Apple went to AT&T for royalty-free terms and were
| quoted a price that, in the troubled Spindler/Amelio era, they
| simply couldn't afford for a niche product (the servers).
| drooopy wrote:
| Yeah, after some quick looking into this, cost seems to be
| the reason why. And ultimately their decision to purchase an
| external solution seemed to have paid off handsomely.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| They could have ported their user space to Linux or BSD
| though?
|
| I never used A/UX, so I can't comment on its relative
| quality.
|
| But it took _half a decade_ for Apple to ship OS /X after the
| palace coup that brought Jobs back and killed off all their
| indigenous OS development. And what they ended up shipping
| with the first revision of OS X didn't really feel very "Mac"
| like, and ended up being this weird fusion of NeXT tech with
| a sort of pseudo-Mac UX.
|
| I guess I wonder what was wrong with the A/UX _tech_ that
| stopped them from utilizing that as a foundation for
| something new.
|
| EDIT, answering my own question: from WP " _cooperatively
| multitasks all Macintosh apps in a single address space by
| using a token-passing system for their access to the
| Toolbox._ "
|
| Not sure if this would apply to "hybrid" apps that used the
| Toolbox but with Unix syscalls as well, but I'm guessing yes,
| and that sounds like a serious limitation. Pure (non-GUI)
| unix applications would be fully multitasking, but GUI apps
| would have the same kinds of limitations as on System 7 --
| poor/no memory protection, cooperative multitasking, bad
| memory management.
| 65a wrote:
| At the time BSD was mired in a lawsuit from AT&T, and Linux
| was working but it wasn't clear it would become the most
| widely adopted *nix. This was Linux kernel 1.x days.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yeah I was a Linux user in those days (1992 and onwards),
| and yes, 1.x was a bit rough around the edges but the
| momentum was pretty good. And 68k support was good fairly
| early on.
|
| I can see that a large company like Apple wouldn't have
| gone near it at that point though.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Apple was transitioning away from 68k by the time Linux
| was released. So 68k support wasn't really that useful to
| them.
|
| In your original question I think you're forgetting the
| context of the Unix market of the time. It was the high
| Unix Wars and A/UX was a minority position of a minority
| player.
|
| The buzzword of the decade was Object Oriented and anyone
| not elbows deep in an existing Unix was trying to build
| an OS around objects. It was entirely unclear if jumping
| on the Unix bandwagon at that time would have a future.
| Even with Apple's acquisition of NeXT it was their high
| level OpenStep that was of most interest rather than the
| BSD base layer.
| nxobject wrote:
| And with some success too: Cocoa/AppKit is still hanging
| around as an actual API that's still being used by
| application programmers after 30 years, unlike winapi.
| twoodfin wrote:
| I'm sure there were organizational, business, and technical
| failures, too, but it seems to me like Apple's disastrous
| ~decade attempting to put the Macintosh on a modern
| foundation was primarily a _product_ failure.
|
| They _wanted_ to do the right thing and synchronize the OS
| kernel switchover with the PowerPC transition, but chose to
| pursue a radical software compatibility break alongside the
| hardware swap.
|
| When that failed for what should have been predictable
| reasons, they had no choice but to fall back to a pure
| emulation strategy with no OS architectural changes, and
| the opportunity to put the MacOS on a new path was lost.
| SllX wrote:
| Apple actually did investigate Linux with MkLinux (a
| project to port Linux to PPC and run it on top of Mach).
| Neat, but arguably a symptom of their larger issues which
| were less technical and more leadership which was stifling
| whatever technical and design excellence there was left.
| Plus the Clones were eating them alive.
|
| Any OS they released to replace the classic OS, which at
| that time would have been System 7, needed Macintosh App
| compatibility, and they wouldn't have needed Linux or Unix
| or BSD or OPENSTEP or BeOS if they could have just shut up,
| clamp down on the mission creep and ship Copland. Apple's
| Executive leadership in the mid-90s was unable to execute
| on that, and none of their side-projects were going
| anywhere in a sustainable (to Apple) fashion either.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, after AT&T was allowed to gain commercial value of UNIX
| they were clearly minded in recovering all the lost revenue
| from the free beer days of UNIX early adoption.
| classichasclass wrote:
| They did. The original plan was a PowerPC native version of
| A/UX "4.0." This was the PowerOpen idea, in which both A/UX and
| IBM AIX were to be personalities and value-adds on a central
| OS. This new A/UX would still have been able to run Macintosh
| applications natively. Eventually it faltered because of
| second-system effect from Pink/Taligent running at the same
| time, as well as Spindler's brief flirtation with NetWare. This
| is the reason the Apple Network Server ended up running vanilla
| AIX.
|
| (disclosure: my work. https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-
| apple-network-server... )
| jimjag wrote:
| Yep... the move from m68k to PowerPC was pretty much the
| deathknell. To really be a successor to A/UX, the core code
| would have had to be ported to that chip, and the amount of
| work required was simply too expensive to be justified. I
| also had heard, unofficially at the time, that Apple's
| license for the UNIX parts of A/UX were specific to the m68k
| architecture, and that they would have had to renegotiate the
| license to even be allowed to port it to the PowerPC.
|
| What is interesting is that after A/UX died, some
| alternatives did spring up, such as Yellowdog Linux (which
| was NOT a macOS/UNIX hybrid, but rather vanilla Linux).
|
| It is a shame, because if Apple had continued in investing it
| it, we would have had MacOSX much, much earlier.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Apple wouldn't have had "MacOS X" (as we got it) earlier.
| Had they kept up some Unix system they still would have
| been saddled with Toolbox, just running on a Unix kernel.
| They likely still would have produced Carbon but they'd
| still have a very backwards facing application API. It
| might be more stable thanks to privileges and process
| isolation but there's not necessarily a future there.
|
| With NeXT, Apple got OpenStep which (IMHO) offered a
| superior programming model than Toolbox/Carbon. They also
| got a superior display subsystem, networking, and better
| first party tooling. Those are the things that made what
| got called "MacOS X". Just a Unix dragging Toolbox around
| wouldn't have gotten Apple where they are today.
| Aloha wrote:
| A modernized version of Toolbox in the form of Carbon
| running as native unix applications in a preemptive
| multitasking system on A/UX would have been pretty good -
| maybe not as good as Cocoa, but good enough probably.
|
| Is win32 fundamentally worse than Carbon or Cocoa? if so
| it seems to have not meaningfully effected the success of
| Windows.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The thing with raw Win32 is that only hard-core C folks
| use it as is.
|
| It is similar to using Carbon.
|
| Already in the Win16 days, anyone that cared about
| productivity was using C++ frameworks like OWL, Turbo
| Pascal, later MFC/VCL, Delphi, VB.
| runjake wrote:
| To your point the "Hello World" Win32 C example in
| Charles Petzold's earlier editions of Programming Windows
| is infamous.
|
| http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2014/12/The-Infamous-
| Wind...
| jimjag wrote:
| Well, that's assuming a very specific, and stale,
| development direction; I think we would have seen a more
| native and natural migration to something very macOSX
| like. Sure, not exactly macOSX as we know it today, but
| something that we would have used and appreciated as much
| as what we now have.
|
| What made OpenStep so useful was that it was immediately
| _available_, but imagine if it was used as a source for
| tech to be added to the continuing A/UX development,
| instead of basically being Step One.
| dmd wrote:
| And if that's not weird enough for you, the same era of Macs also
| had IBM AIX!
| sillywalk wrote:
| Here's a brochure [PDF]
|
| https://www.1000bit.it/js/web/viewer.html?file=%2Fad%2Fbro%2...
| aquova wrote:
| This Does Not Compute on Youtube made an interesting video
| showcasing A/UX and some of its features and limitations:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwrTTXOg-KI
| ramijames wrote:
| I love this YouTube channel. Just feels like hanging out with
| some dude while he geeks out over stuff I like.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| For a short period of time, Apple did a marketing push around
| A/UX. I remember A/UX ads and commentary appearing in several
| computing magazines, including the famous sumo in a tutu ad:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/b1j7b1/old_apple_adver...
| remoquete wrote:
| Apple's A/UX had Commando, a graphical assistant for assembling
| Unix command-line incantations. I'm baffled that this hasn't been
| redone.
| linux2647 wrote:
| For those who'd never heard of that before, ToastyTech has a
| screenshot: http://toastytech.com/guis/auxcmdo-ls.png
|
| (via http://toastytech.com/guis/aux3.html)
| Affric wrote:
| That is genius.
|
| Does anyone know how it worked?
|
| Each command would have to have been done individually yeah?
| atommclain wrote:
| I think Commando was also part of Macintosh Programmers
| Workshop, which another commenter here noted was kinda unixish
| (which I agree.) I've never used a tool like MPW, it's text
| based, and you can install additional tools and write scripts,
| but it also has some graphical components to it. Hard to
| succinctly describe, but very odd.
| ksherlock wrote:
| The thing about MPW is that instead of running a shell in a
| 80x24 character cell terminal emulator, you're running a
| shell in a text editor. Kind of like emacs with eshell, but
| more of a text-editor feel.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Porting Doom to a /UX_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31670484 - June 2022 (34
| comments)
|
| _So what is the deal with A /UX anyways?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28593552 - Sept 2021 (162
| comments)
|
| _Apple a /UX: The First Unix Mac OS_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002427 - Jan 2020 (6
| comments)
|
| _Installing A /UX on the Quadra 610 (2018)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21881271 - Dec 2019 (58
| comments)
|
| _Running A /UX on a Macintosh SE/30_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20198692 - June 2019 (8
| comments)
|
| _Shoebill - A Macintosh II emulator that runs A /UX_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7740533 - May 2014 (3
| comments)
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(page generated 2023-12-29 23:02 UTC)