Running A/UX on a Macintosh SE/30 | Hacker News Reader

Running A/UX on a Macintosh SE/30

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25 pointskristianp8 comments

Title has a typo: 'a' should be capitalized 'A'.

Ah, this is near and dear to me. My first Unix was A/UX on an SE/30. My second Unix was A/UX on a Quadra 950. From which I naturally ran a warez site and irc bot. Gopher/Veronica/Archie were still in their heyday then, and Eudora was the GUI mail client of choice.

From there I "graduated" to IRIX and did real work. Molecular simulations and visualizations. A huge step up from the Mac hardware ...

In the late 80s, Virginia Tech's CS department mandated A/UX on a Mac 2, making us incompatible with every other computer on campus. It was great having a real Unix, but since networking wasn't a big thing yet, it was still pretty isolated. (The campus had a computerized phone system that could have been adapted to networking, but it wasn't set up for it, and in fact hampered even dial-up networking because of the nonstandard phone jacks.) CS assignments were submitted on floppy disk.

"Apple Workgroup Server 95" is a Mac model, not a rebranding of the OS as the author claims.

I mention this because, per Apple sales literature[1], the version of A/UX that shipped with that machine was "highly tuned", presumably for the 68040-based Workgroup Server 95 — basically a Quadra 950 — and this may be why he initially had trouble installing what his screenshots suggest was a copy of A/UX 3.0.1 from the Workgroup Server software bundle on an SE/30, which is a 68030 machine with a considerably older architecture.

While I'm not at all familiar with A/UX, it's certainly true that, historically, it was not unusual for bundled copies of Mac OS to be at least somewhat model-specific.

In other words, when resurrecting older Mac models, use retail OS media when possible. The obvious "impossible" case is when you want to install an OS that shipped before the model in question, as retail media will often lack necessary hardware support that would have been slipstreamed into bundled copies.

[1] https://archive.org/details/WorkgroupServer95

I remember running A/UX on a Mac IIsi. It was a quirky UNIX, based on SysV r3. I remember the first thing out of the box was to compile GCC with the included non-ANSI C compiler. Then you could actually start compiling everything else, like Emacs, LaTeX, Ghostscript, GNU binutils, etc.

The best part is that you could run a lot of productivity Mac software such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint. I used it during my last two years in college and was really sad when it was discontinued.

I loved A/UX... it was a fun OS, and porting various software to it was a great way to learn things. It also got me seriously involved in the Free Software and Open Source movements with my work on jagubox.

I used one of these for years. I bought it with 8GB of RAM, and never knew bigger modules could be used. I used an 80G disk drive.

As I recall, it took a couple of hours to compile Gcc the normal way (i.e. 3 times over).

MB, it was megabytes ;-)

It is hard to type MB anymore, because I have caught myself doing it and fixed it so many times.

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