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Unix Businesses Operating Systems Software Apple

Apple Unix Before Mac OS X 49

Posted by pudge from the mmmm-taligent dept.
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 ...
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Apple Unix Before Mac OS X More

Apple Unix Before Mac OS X

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  • just A/UX, no big secret (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tps12 ( 105590 ) on Thursday April 18, 2002 @05:11PM (#3368651) Homepage Journal
    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?
    • 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).
      • both of those are actively used on old Macs (pre-PPC chips and everything).

        Except for the NuBus PPC's (when you're using a NuBus slot!). I've had a 7100 for awhile, and it's built-in Ethernet has never worked, so I have a card in there. MkLinux couldn't deal with it, and last I checked even NetBSD didn't have drivers for it. So far the only bright spot compatability-wise regarding that box is when the CD drive (300i) worked in an old DEC Alpha (3000 series, known for being picky with SCSI CD-ROM drives). Would love to get a *nix running on that...can never have too many platforms. :)

    • 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.
      • Also, I'm wondering about the newsworthiness of this article. Basically it can be summed up as "someone found an old Apple operating system for old Apple hardware, and he installed it, and it worked! Then he tried to compile something using the C compiler, and it worked also!"

        Maybe I will see if I can get Windows 3.1 running on a 486. I'm sure my results (if well documented) would make it on slashdot.

    • Yes. The poster is young and ignorant. I.too, thought this was common knowledge.

      "Hey! Did you know that Apple made an all-in-one design before the iMac? Apparently, they called it the Macintosh. Wow! Look what I discovered!"
    • ... yes, and it was a damn shame that it ran only on 68k macs. We managed to get a copy and ran it on an old Quadra - imagine a System 7 version of OS X and you get the rough idea. It's a pity they didn't port it to PPC. If someone pesters me [mailto] enough, I might upload some pics, if what you saw at As The Apple Turns [appleturns.com] didn't satisfy your curiosity.

  • OS X is 2nd time around (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Thursday April 18, 2002 @05:18PM (#3368699) Homepage Journal

    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!

  • 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?

    • 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.

  • Woah (Score:1, Informative)

    by trollbot ( 542020 )
    Nobody has ever heard of this before! [google.com]

  • Network Server 500/700 running AIX (Score:3, Informative)

    by Gogo Dodo ( 129808 ) on Thursday April 18, 2002 @05:22PM (#3368726)
    An odder curiosity than A/UX was the Network Server 500/700 [apple-history.com] that ran AIX.
    • I have an ANS 500 that I stole the 150mhz CPU board from a dead 700 and "upgraded". I've got 3 drives that I rotate through for booting, one with YDL, one with NetBSD and one with the AIX that came with it. Only problem was needing to put in a USB PCI card and a NIC as the onboard NIC gets cranky (something about endian-ness of the driver).

      Pretty swanky box, HUGE amount of disk space/drawers, a RAID card and dual PCI buses. It makes a damn fine SMB, NFS, tftp, DHCP and bootp server and crunches RC5-64 packets for me too.
    • We still use them at work, and so does Apple-Oz. Unfortunately, they are big beasts which are not upgradable. I wonder if a G4 motherboard will fit in one...hmmmm... ;)
  • 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/ [faqs.org]
    It's really long and covers any question that would ever have about this old OS.

    Orange

  • I did QA for A/UX (Score:2, Informative)

    by gsbarnes ( 14192 )

    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}

  • ...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 [freemint.de].
  • it has some really nice bits.


    commando has to be the biznez.


    And of course it runs my System 7 progs - I have SIMTower running almost constantly....without crashing...

  • X also (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jebediah21 ( 145272 ) on Thursday April 18, 2002 @08:13PM (#3369776) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • 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.
    • That was actually an SGI machine, running the "fsn" 3D file system navigator on IRIX. There were Apple machines in the movie, she just wasn't using one in that scene.

  • Ahhhh... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jimjag ( 68949 ) on Friday April 19, 2002 @10:45AM (#3373504) Homepage
    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

  • MAE (Score:2, Informative)

    by fraserspeirs ( 113052 )
    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 [apple.com].

    In fact, Fred Sanchez said at Usenix that the folks that wrote MAE also wrote Classic for Mac OS X.
  • And how about the Apple II running CP/M [google.com]?

    Lee Joramo [joramo.com]

  • 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 :)

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