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afreak

It should be noted that certain 680x0 Macintoshes could run a real UNIX, created by Apple no less.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX

What was unique about it was that it could run System 7 applications alongside your common System V/BSD tools.

I've still got a Quadra 800 at home running it.

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It might be worth pointing out that there is a Macintosh II emulator built solely for the purpose of running A/UX.

https://github.com/pruten/Shoebill

A mirror of the well-known A/UX software repository, Jagubox, has been published at the Internet Archive.

https://archive.org/details/25_12_2009_jagubox

> This will probably be the last release. I won't be able to work on Shoebill going forward (by contractual obligation), so I wanted to race out one last release.

Really sad that companies put these kinds of restrictions on their employees...

Well considering that the author went on to work at Apple, it sort of makes sense. I don't think he was explicitly told not to continue development, but it is likely that some sort of boilerplate part of his contract restricts him.

I don't think it makes any sense, and the fact that it's a boilerplate clause everyone gets makes it worse, not better.

Employers really need to stop trying to control what their employees do while off the clock.

The project depends on reverse-engineering proprietary (if archaic) Apple hardware/software. Do you think Microsoft would/should allow their employees to contribute to Wine? Or Nintendo employees working on open-source emulators?

Do you think I should allow you to drink tea? You'd probably say, "you can't allow or disallow that, you don't have that power." That's what I think Microsoft's position should be with regard to their employees' free time.

The funny thing is that in this case the Apple stuff involved is decades old by now!

I share your view. However, I can also see the employer's perspective in a scenario like the project for the company ships late but all employee's commits to the open source project the employee founded or participates are all timely.

I won't sign a contract the restricts what I do on my free time. Any place that does that is not a place for me.

I can see the employer's perspective as you describe it, as in "psychopaths might think this way," but I can't sympathize with it. I think this is something we need to regulate, just like we say employees can't tell you what god to worship or whether to have children.

s/employee/employer/

If you get a chance to edit that typo I'll delete this comment to reduce clutter. :-)

Thank you for pointing that out. I guess I'll delete mine after you delete yours. I hope it works that way.

Silly me, I didn't get back here in time to delete my comment! But we're probably long off the home page by now, so nobody cares much about a little clutter... :-)

Doing anything else is a form of slavery. Most people are somehow OK with it. That company basically owns you 0-24 and everything you produce for a hand-full of cash.

Also, it appears that a mirror of A/UX Penelope is still up, even after its original maintainer has shut it down.

http://www.aux-penelope.com

We had a lab of I think Mac IIx's running A/UX at Georgia Tech. My understanding was that Apple only did A/UX so they could satisfy a government procurement requirement of having an available *nix for their hardware. We weren't supposed to let people reboot them into Mac OS so the lab was mostly empty all the time.

A/UX 2.0 was much better than 1.x I think though, including the Finder and MultiFinder (previously Mac apps had to be launched from the command line). Trivia: A/UX 1.x used separate programs to be used at the command line to read/write MFS/HFS volumes, and 1.0 only included the MFS one.

au/x was an interesting UNIX, but it did have its flaws.

If the system beep occurred, the kernel would lose interrupts. Needless to say, this was not a good thing.

What manner of madness caused this?

I imagine, the oscillator was software driven, and play_sound (or whatever they called it in the library) disabled interrupts so the sound wouldn't be modified by an interrupt.

I'm surprised that would be the case, at least by A/UX 3 the Sound Manager routines were re-routed to call into special A/UX implementations (which I assume wouldn't be disabling interrupts).

That was a real missed opportunity, the equivalent of OS X decades earlier

It did require a ridiculously expensive computer for its time, well into the workstation range, but with a relatively puny hardware compared to what Sun could offer at the time.

More aptly, FPU and MMU hardware were incredibly expensive in the late 1980's and early 1990's, and the amount of RAM to sustain running A/UX would've crept you closer into workstation territory anyway.

Keep in mind that this was a time when one was not guaranteed to have memory segmentation hardware, let alone floating point hardware. We take this for granted in 2015, but in the period between 1985 and 1995, it was a serious luxury for lots of computer buyers.

That said, with 4MB of 60ns RAM and a 68030 costing you $10k to start on a Mac IIfx and an upgrade to take you up to 8MB potentially costing you another couple grand, why not just go SGI and be done with it?

1MB SIMMs was much cheaper than this by then, though the IIfx was famous for requiring special 64 pin SIMMs.

Equivalent? No. Unix is not the secret sauce of OSX. I never used A/UX. Did it have a GUI at all?

Yes, a variation of the System 7 finder. Personally I used MachTen which was a 4.3BSD variation which ran on top of the usual system.

Those were the Mac IIs, which had 68020 CPUs and could resume instructions after faulting.

Trivia: A/UX 1.0 was released just before the famous DRAM shortage and at one point it was common to buy A/UX Mac IIs just to have the 4MB of RAM in them.

They needed a real MMU though (68851). The Amiga also supposed real Unix on 68030 machines.

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