Old article, but nevertheless, interesting retro reading for the weekend. The first Unix from Apple, A/UX.
Apple’s First Unix, A/UX
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I was just reading one old BYTE magazine with an article about A/UX 🙂
I have always wondered about A/UX, but had never seen any images. This is almost Mac OS X more than ten years ago!! I think it’s amazing what the minds at Apple at that time were able to do, even with a command-line OS like UNIX. The power of UNIX, along with the same ease-of-use as the old System Finder. Again, as I never had used A/UX, I don’t know how well performance was on the machines of that era, but still…the concept was there, and we see it again today in Mac OS X, and in some Linux distros.
I once found an old IIFX that had AUX and a bunch of 8 port serial cards on it. Must have been used for some terminals or maybe modems. I never managed to boot the machine.
I did purchase AUX way back when for my first mac, when I was planning on buying a IISI (3mb ram, 40mb disk) but it was slightly more than than the government loan allowance. And at the same time Apple released the LCII with 4mb ram and a 40MB disk for about 500$ less, so that was my choice right there.
Since AUX didnt run on the LCII, but it did on the 2SI, I still have the AUX CDroms sitting in the basement.
I think A/UX was a true Unix, so MacOS X is more related to NextStep in its BSDishness.
Apple had a better GUI for a UNIX-based system 11 years ago than any Linux has today.
oh yeah man, it’s not like they had anything to base it off of, pfft. [/sarcasm]
“Apple had a better GUI for a UNIX-based system 11 years ago than any Linux has today.”
Yeah this is definitly true, and also sad. If such developments were made under the GPL, imagine where we could be. Sure, Steve Jobs wouldn’t be as rich, but our technology would be much more evolved. Computer programming is like teaching. The real rewards and benifits don’t come from individual reward, and although these are important they do not supercede the wellfare of the greater community.
{ Apple had a better GUI for a UNIX-based system 11 years ago than any Linux has today. }
If it was so nice, Why isnt in use today ? Personally I am glad I never used the classic Mac OS, I always found the interface horrid to look at, KDE is a much better desktop than any that was ever released and that includes Aqua. A/UX was probably a nice OS, but it was nothing innovative.
It’s been known that Apple has extensively researched and developed BSD-style licensed source code for some time now trying to create a Unix-like Operating System. Before reading this article I had never heard of A/UX and thought that NeXT and OS X were all that apple have ever worked on. This article proves that Apple has been working on UNIX code for over 10 years now. Basically my point is that apple has been working on this code for so long and yet they have achieved so little. The few things that they have created (which are mild in comparison) are being kept secret from anyone else for thier own profit. It isn’t a matter of (compensation) as most profess. It’s a matter of profit; making as much money as you can. In the same ten years the opensource community has made much further strides in Operating System developments, and those projects released by private organizations as free software have made a much better impact as far as technology goes. Unix should have remained free from the beginning. Thank goodness for the long BSD battle or we wouldn’t have half the code that we do today.
This article proves that Apple has been working on UNIX code for over 10 years now. Basically my point is that apple has been working on this code for so long and yet they have achieved so little
No Apple worked on Unix 10 years ago then stopped. OS X isn’t related to A/UX at all really. It was based on the “real” Unix code base like Solaris, Tru64, Xenix, and AIX. OS X is based on NeXT OS which is then in turn based on BSD. If OS X was based on A/UX they couldn’t open source it or they would be getting sued by SCO like IBM is.
It just left me with one question though… why did they not push for this instead of their other OS? The article made it seem superior in every way.
Back in 90-94 when I was earning my CS degree my university had a whole lab full of A/UX boxes with 21″ displays. They were uber sweet.
“If it was so nice, Why isnt in use today ? Personally I am glad I never used the classic Mac OS, I always found the interface horrid to look at, KDE is a much better desktop than any that was ever released and that includes Aqua. A/UX was probably a nice OS, but it was nothing innovative.”
If you never worked on MacOS how can you make such a definitive statement like that? Why compare an older UI to a newer UI? OS 9 was a fairly decent UI and MacOS X certainly has a lot going for it in the look department.
As for why AUX is not in use today, it was not the direction Apple envisioned for computing. They still don’t, even with a more UNIX like OS. Notice how Apple has done nearly everything they can to hide the underlying UNIX core in OS X? This is for good reason. Apple believes, and rightly so, that computers should be simple to use and something that melds wth out lives, not something we need to spend endless hours maintaining and patching, ultimaey becoming our lives.
If i remember correctly the ISP panix (http://www.panix.com/) started out on AUX.
Man that was a loooooooooooooooong time ago
Thank you very much for this. I love old OS’ and can’t get enough of them. It’s a shame that so many of them were plagued with problems and couldn’t evolve as much as they deserved. It’s also very unfortunate that today’s most popular OS’ are still struggling to implement many features that these extinct dinosaurs had such a long time ago.
Thanks again!
Apple got into Unix because it was the thing back then.
Remember Commodore’s version of System V.R4 on the Amiga? The Amiga 3000UX
We used to joke and call it the Amiga 3000SUX
Such a bad implementation.
Anyway.. Someone at Apple got the idea that they too needed a version of Unix and made AUX, they also came out with Mac X client as well.
It’s amazing. Unix was the future 10 years ago and Linux is considered the future now.
We have not progressed much have we.
you mustnt have finished the article. it states the authors hypothesis that aux never got anywhere because it was written for the 68k. apple realized eventually that this was a dead-end technology (simplified version) and migrated to the powerpc. it was about this time that its financial troubles began and it simply did not have the resources to convert aux over to powerpc. in fact, iirc aux was considered a waste of money by investors and apple shareholders, a few years later it was dropped and the ceo who oversaw it (cant remember name) was fired.
If it was so nice, Why isnt in use today ? Personally I am glad I never used the classic Mac OS, I always found the interface horrid to look at, KDE is a much better desktop than any that was ever released and that includes Aqua. A/UX was probably a nice OS, but it was nothing innovative.
A funny thing preference is. Or in this case, an opinion founded on ignorance.
Why doesn’t anyone use it today? Because Apple no longer supports it. Hasn’t for a while. It was expensive. And so on. Unfortuantely, what is the nicest, most innovative, or technologically advanced isn’t always what people use. Maybe you’re too young to have learned the truth of this. A lot of really great things have come and gone, without ever being popular. You must be a fan of Windows- after all, it must be the best at everything it does if so many people use it!
KDE doesn’t include Aqua. KDE may have a theme that tries to look like the real Aqua from OS X, but it’s very far from the real thing. Aqua is a lot more than the look of the widgets. Aqua could be duplicated on KDE in a combination of a well done theme and some user interface guidelines that were followed by KDE developers. However, it’s pretty unlikely that this will ever happen, at least not for a while. Hell, even a really good theme based on Aqua is very hard to do within the existing framework of KDE/Qt and X11. There are some tricks to get fake transparency, etc, but all attempts so far have been CPU hogging and mostly ugly.
Huh…thats strange, i read all of the text on there and didn’t see that. Maybe i forgot to scroll down to the very end or something, i was distracted while reading that last page. But thanks for pointing it out to me.
Can we get see something like this about XENIX?
For a time Bill Gates thought it was the next big thing, but I can find very little about it.
Sorry I found all the information I’ll ever need
http://www.citizenfilm.com/xenix/
Sorry I found all the information I’ll ever need
http://www.citizenfilm.com/xenix/
Apple as always tied the AUX to its servers, as many companies did and still do.
This meant that when the servers didn’t make it neither did AUX.
There have been a few OS’ that ended the same way.
” We used to joke and call it the Amiga 3000SUX
Such a bad implementation. ”
So what was badly implemented? the machine or the OS. The os was known as either Commodore Unix, or Amix. And for the time was not bad at all, in fact both the Amix and A/UX were pretty strict At&T System implementations.
And all I ask is why Apple didn’t continue on, port it to the PowerPC. They had a superior operating system there and it would have only been a matter of time before the software vendors saw that it was superior to “Classic Mac” and decided to port their applications.
i want to know more info on xenix… i find it cool that microsoft supported a unix operating system, a class which it now derides. so… more info on xenix… (preferably w/ screenshots:-)
Like the author says on the last page, the main reason that Apple never ported A/UX was because of the cost factor. In addition, they knew that better Unices were already available on PPC–they shipped AIX with the PPC-based Workgroup Servers. For the desktops however, the void left by A/UX was filled by MkLinux and later Linux/PPC.
This guy keeps a page of links to screenshots of old OSes.
http://toastytech.com/guis/indexlinks.html
Don’t see any links about Xenix, though
Some historical background about Xenix:
http://www.computerhope.com/unix/xenix.htm
http://www.sco.com/company/history.html
i used to have a/ux running on my quadra 800 with 73 mb ram and a 1gb hd me not being a *IX geek decided i wouldnt use it but ive still got it on cd if i decide to reinstall it
Personally I am glad I never used the classic Mac OS, I always found the interface horrid to look at, KDE is a much better desktop than any that was ever released and that includes Aqua. A/UX was probably a nice OS, but it was nothing innovative.
Oh my god, you are completely insane.
There are only two contenders (or rather, two condending groups) for the “Best desktop operating system” at the present time, and neither of them are KDE.
Seriously, if you think KDE is the world’s best desktop environment you are a master of the art of self-delusion.
I’ve ran into this article few times before, but I’ve never managed to figure out, where I could get a copy of A/UX, or maybe even the real thing. Does anyone have any idea? You there, in the back? No?
Of course, there’s NetBSD if I want some UNIX action for an older Mac, but.. just for the kicks, you know
*I* have used A/UX back in those days (1989-90).
It was my first contact with Unix (A/UX and SunOS at the same time).
I remember fondly the excellent integration between MacOS applications (which was not called MacOS then, but system 6.x) and Unix applications.
The most important part, for the newbie I was, was Commando. I miss it even today as it was an impressive tool to discover the power of standard Unix utilities and I’d really like to have it now to introduce Linux to new users.
It shouldn’t be too difficult to have an equivalent now on KDE, Gnome OS/X or whatever, but I’ve never seen any effort in this direction.
We can even imagine some sort of common implementation, each Unix command dialog(s) (yes, the richest commands had several dialog boxes, as there were too many parameters to fit in a single dialog) being decribed by an neutral file (XML ?) which would be parsed at run-time to build the dialog box.
Apple, or someone else, please, give me back Commando.
And I liked it. I would still be using it if I hadn’t left my IIfx in NZ when i moved to the UK.
Getting System 6/7 software to run was always a pain, as the filesystem that A/UX used did not play nicely with what apps like Stuffit Expander expected. Also, without Stuffit Expander, you can;t install anything because it seems every peice of Mac software assumes it’s presence.
Eventually I got a few apps like BBEdit running, which was nice.
However, I had apache and perl running and could quite happily use my Linux boxes via the bundled X server, and the machine was more useful as a little server to me than a desktop as it only had 1 14″ screen – I did have 3 graphics cards in it, which would have driven 3 monitors at up to 1024×768 or thereabouts, which would have been nice.
There were a few keyboard issues with the shell, like backspace/del/arrows etc. not being mapped correctly – probably could have fixed that with a little effort, and overall I was pretty impressed with A/UX.
It certainly made amazes me that Apple took so long to get back to essentially the same place they were with A/UX, and if Apple had developed A/UX – or at least the concept of a UNIX-based OS with a MacOS compatibility environnment instead of dumping it for the clearly inferior System 7, then who knows where we would be.
To quote Waaaa
“So what was badly implemented? the machine or the OS. The os was known as either Commodore Unix, or Amix. And for the time was not bad at all, in fact both the Amix and A/UX were pretty strict At&T System implementations.”
Why? Because it was slow. real slow. Ever try and mount a floppy?
I played with AT&T 3B2s (I think thats what they called them) They were also Motorolla 68030 based. Anyway they were much faster.
Also to get Color you needed the Lowel card to get 256 colors.
The Amiga was a good computer and AmigaDos was cool at the time, but Amiga Unix was not optimized and didn’t support the chipset.
I want to try it.
http://www.google.ca/search?q=AUX_3.1_Update.toast_image.gz&ie=UTF-…
Does it run on Basilisk II-JIT? 😉
Apple was impressed with Steve Jobs’ NeXT. They wanted some of that action themselves. A big problem with what they did is that they never provided a usable Xwindow integration, which would have exported and imported graphics sessions. I was using Macs on the desktop and Sun workstations as departmental servers. It would have worked better with Xwindows, but was pretty acceptable even without.
trying.
> There are only two contenders (or rather, two condending groups) for the “Best desktop operating system” at the present
time, and neither of them are KDE.
BeOS would rank nr1.
Actually, though it’s not Unix, it has enough POSIX compatibility, and it shares many semantics with Unix (filesystem, devices, …), while having a seducing, userfriendly GUI. That is what I call a good OS
No wonder why Apple wanted to buy Be (they are really screwed… they failed to maintain A/US, they never bought Be… to finish with buying NeXT and cloning it only to add fat inside :^)
It does not run on Basilisk/Basilisk-JIT 🙁
The reason A/UX appeared is not Apple being impressed with NeXT. NeXT Cube, together with the very first version of NeXTStep, was introduced somewhen in October 1988, can’t remember where, possibly San Francisco, while the first version of A/UX was introduced in March 1997, together with the first colour-enabled (and 32-bit hardware) Mac II powered by MC68020. Actually, I might be wrong, this is true for Europe, the introduction happened at CeBIT fair in Hannover that year, don’t know about U.S., it probably happened a bit earlier. A/UX was the reason for Apple to put MMU chip (as far as I remember its name was MC68851, or something like that) in Mac II, since MC68020 didn’t have MMU part like MC68030 and 68040 did. MacOS didn’t need any kind of memory management, but it was and still is essential for UNIX (that’s A/UX) to run.
Of course, what I mean is March 1987, not 1997. A “little” mistake.
I think stopping development of A/UX was Apple’s biggest mistake in the late 80’s. This is what SHOULD have happened. Apple should have switched to A/UX in 1989 or 1990. This was before Windows 3.1, so there would have been no competition for a multitasking, multiuser, memory-protected OS on PC class hardware. Then in 1991 or 1992, after A/UX had a chance to mature a few years, Apple could have switched from the 68xxx cpus it had been using to a more powerful RISC processor (there would have been several choices at that time, including the RS6000/PPC processor that they eventually did choose). When they switched hardware, it would have been only A/UX that would have been ported, and this would have been an easier task than what they did because A/UX, like other unix OS, is largely written in portable C, not low-level assembler. In 1992, the PC choice would have been between Windows 3.1 running on slow x386 hardware or a mature A/UX running on fast RISC hardware. Apple would not have lost its market share, the bar would have been higher for “acceptable” OS features, and everyone, even those who chose not to use Macs, would have been better off over the last decade.
By delaying the switch to a real OS in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Apple gave Microsoft an unnecessary marketing advantage. Microsoft has not used its market dominance over the last decade in a positive way. It was this mistake by Apple that allowed Microsoft to hold back the industry the way it has.
I presume Basilisk doesn’t emulate the PMMU, which is necessary here as A/UX is an Unix, and needs memory protection.
>It does not run on Basilisk/Basilisk-JIT 🙁
Shame…. I fancied having a play.
If Apple had continued with A/UX, they might have encountered more competition on the desktop(SGI, Sun etc.). Why risk more competition, when they could continue with their own alternative?
It *should* run on Basilisk II for Linux, but not for Windows.
What everyone seems to forget is the hardware demands of UNIX. Whereas MacOS could run rather comfortably on a 68000, a memory-protected UNIX wouldn’t run at all. The memory requirements were also steeper. Likewise for the hard disk space required. If you were into running A/UX, you’d have to pay a whole lot for the pleasure. Apple can’t be blamed for this, they don’t have much of a say when it comes to HD and RAM prices.
I’d note that the assertion that DPS is technically superior to X11 is not shared by members of the display technology community, for instance see here:
http://dps.sourceforge.net/
There are arguments to be made for both sides (as to where widget libraries are placed) but the issue isn’t as cut and dried at this article makes out. Still, interesting to read about it.
Will it run on basilisk for BeOS ? no chance ???
I believe that the commercial 68k mac emulator Softmac has a degree of MMU emulation… however this software has a bad reputation for reliability and an appalling one for customer support.
It’s also only designed to run Mac OS prior to 8.1 ( 8.5+ has PPC code in it and won’t boot on a 68040 ) so if A/UX does run it’ll be more through luck than good planning…
I’d go for a warez copy if you must…..
I presume Basilisk doesn’t emulate the PMMU, which is necessary here as A/UX is an Unix, and needs memory protection.
yup :/
Will it run on basilisk for BeOS ? no chance ???
nope :/
It *should* run on Basilisk II for Linux, but not for Windows
Now why is that?
>This was before Windows 3.1, so there would have been no competition for a multitasking, multiuser, memory-protected OS on PC class hardware.
Uh, Windows did not offer something close to that until NT 4.
I missed experience with A/UX, although I have bumped into it’s existence while using LinuxPPC. I have appropriate hardware that I would really like to try it out on. I would welcome any tips or solicitations related to obtaining a copy of the software.
[email protected]