Thanks to Twitter, here’s an interesting footnote in computing history.
As A/UX development was winding down, Apple was working on another project called the Macintosh Application Environment. This was an emulator that allowed users to run Mac software under Sun’s Solaris or Hewlett Packard’s HP-UX. A great deal of A/UX technology went into the design of this ill-fated product. This page is a pictorial tribute to the Macintosh Application Environment, running under Solaris 8 on an Ultra 10 workstation. If you want to try the MAE, you’ll need a Sun box running Solaris 9 or below – The software does not appear to work under Solaris 10.
This is absolutely fascinating, and I had no idea this existed.
The link doesn’t seem to work. Here’s one that does:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190704001310/http://www.aux-penelope.com/mae/index.htm
So this begs the question: aside from having to emulate the Toolbox, was this virtualising the software? Or was it emulating a Mac including the processor?
It had a 68K emulator for the low level HW calls and the ROMs, and I think the rest of the Mac Apis was running natively on SPARC/HPPA.
It was basically the macintosh personality from A/UX ported to Solaris/HPUX.
We had it running on an old Sun box we had in one lab I worked at. It made sense as a way to run office software on Unix.
I recall using this around 1998 with version 3 which supported System 7.5.3 on Solaris, they used to have a trial you could download and run for limited period of time to try it out. From memory this emulates the entire Classic MacOS environment (68K CPU, minimum hardware) and was Apple’s only time they ever supported emulation on non-Apple hardware, it was a bit of a curiosity at the time so I am not sure how many people bought licenses overall since the Solaris/HP-UX environments were significantly more expensive at the time.
As an aside Quix with their DayDream emulator were the only company who was successful in licensing the Apple ROMs for emulation on NeXT, to my knowledge nobody else was able to license the ROMs for such a use (excluding licensed Apple clones, Mac OS X Server Blue Box, Classic environment or other internal Apple uses).
At the time in 1998 everyone was getting used to the freshly launched Bondi Blue iMacs with the latest G3 PPC CPU’s, Mac OS 8 and wondering what USB ports were for and if you really needed a floppy drive so there wasn’t that much interest in MAE being limited to System 7.5.3 only.
From what I was told, Apple never got much return from A/UX which seems to have cost a pretty penny in licensing costs. MAE is basically is basically the mac subsystem of A/UX ported to other unixes. Which is also why it only ran system 7, since that’s what A/UX was stuck with when it was killed.
They figured they could recoup some of the costs by selling to the high end workstation market. I don’t think they recouped much though.
Apple had such a schizophrenic software strategy during those years….
I’d say that’s true of A/UX, it seemed a solution that was made that was seeking a non-existent problem to solve at the time. They did have the right idea about merging the GUI usability of Classic Mac OS with the power of Unix and X11 (which is what we have effectively with macOS nowadays) however back in those days GNU/Linux was still relatively small with limited x86 hardware support so for serious work professionally supported Unix variants were preferred.
Perhaps some of the developers moved onto Rhapsody/Mac OS X Server 1.x to help get the Blue Box working (which was close to what the Classic environment was like, minus the merged Coherence mode windowing style from memory) as this was up and running before Mac OS X was released and was quite more obviously OpenSTEP based before it was refined into Mac OS X. It would be interesting to hear from them at some point in time I think.
A/UX is ancient is from the late 80s.
From what I have read it was because Apple needed a POSIX compatible OS for their Macs to be considered for federal contracts. Apparently the US government was supposed to standarize all their IT infrastructure around POSIX. I think that’s the reason why NT also had a POSIX subsystem from the start.
So the easiest way for apple to get a POSIX os was to basically get a 68K unix (which there were a bunch back then) and just bolt on the Macos on top as a process.
I have MAE 1.0 running on a Sparc Ultra 5. Version 3.0 is around on the web but requires activation from Sun. Which is never going to happen.
Back when I was at megaglobalpharmaco way back when, we had a few MAE licenses running under Solaris 7 on Ultra 2s, IIRC. Performance was ok. In our case, MAE mainly was used to run Mac productivity apps on Solaris consoles during quiet moments in the data center, back in the days when Macs didn’t have a place in the data center. In truth, however, we ran it just because we thought it would be fun to try it.
I used MAE at a former employer a long time ago. We had it on HP-UX. It was clunky, but there were a lot of commercial OS-on-OS emulation/virt environments around this time (SoftWindows95 on IRIX, Sun WABI and later SunPCI, SoftPC and SoftWindows on Macs, and so on). MAE was mostly reliable and you could run a word processor or spreadsheet program and not have to physically move yourself from the workstation to a Mac. As is usual with these environments, if you were wanting to use Mac programs, you were better off with a Mac from the time than trying to run it in MAE.
On the topic of A/UX, it is an interesting historical Unix to look at. The integration of MacOS with Unix was done well and the architecture behind making it actually work is pretty neat too considering Macs were built to only boot MacOS. One thing I thought was nice in A/UX was Commando which would present a Mac dialog for command line building. If you were completely new to Unix, this was at least somewhat more user friendly and Mac-like. For example: http://toastytech.com/guis/auxcmdo-ls.png
I have an ongoing A/UX project here to get a Quadra 700 restored and running A/UX. Currently problem is needing a supported CD-ROM drive that does 512 byte sector. I do not miss old hardware. This is my second A/UX system, the previous being a Quadra 950 which is long since gone. The Quadra 700 with A/UX will once again live in my house!
The Quadra 950 was such a great machine. I used mine well into the 2000’s.
System 7 – hello old friend – we made such a good team