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Comment by kerblang | Hacker News Reader

I also thought it was pretty nifty little OS, courtesy of an A/UX office file server that I was tasked to set up in 1993 or so I think. And yes it was a very expensive file server at that.

My recollection was that internals of A/UX emulation were reused to enable the PowerPC transition from Motorola, but I might be wrong about that.

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Unix licenses at the time were ridiculously expensive, even for PC-grade hardware. Adding compilers and development tools was frequently an extra eye-watering expense.

We had 286's running Microport Unix at the company I was at back in the 1980s. I seem to recall that we were using Microport because it was pretty cheap. Compilers and all. I could be mis-remembering.

which to me was surprising about A/UX, you got both C89 and F77!

I think GCC was available back then. Not sure about F77. What C compiler did BSD use?

BSD 4.3 still used the Portable C Compiler. By 4.4 Berkeley was starting to use GCC, but that wasn't available in time to incorporate into A/UX. Plus, IIRC the GNU project was actively boycotting Apple at the time, and so Apple was probably adverse to incorporating any GNU software.

Out of the box running strings on stuff shows the 1984-1985 AT&T-IS 1985-1987 UniSoft Corporation strings.

So it's got to be PCC.

The F77 credits Apple, Adobe, AT&T-IS, Motorola, SUN, CSRG, and Unisoft.

In the A/UX 0.7 build there is a 'greenhills' marker in crt0.o and libc so it looks like they used greenhills before switching (self hosting?) to pcc?

+1 on pcc.

Greenhills was available as a third party compiler. Not sure why there would be markers in crt0 and libc, but perhaps someone at Apple rebuilt. Greenhills was better for most code that mattered.

Can't see crt0 mattering for performance, but maybe there was some interoperability glue to make both runtimes happy.

without the full source it's impossible to say. That said there was a 'tar ball' of 0.7 floating around for well over a decade, but it's able to run under emulation now.

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/aux-apple-unix-68k-version-...

there is a /usr/lib/greenhillls with a ccom68 fcom68 and pcom68 along with some libs and crt files. It's all binaries but I did a compare on crt0 and they match the system one. Maybe it's just a case of the crt0 being assembly and it being.. well the same assembler.

Maybe they were just investigating PCC vs Greenhills or it was a cross thing, or they built PCC with Greenhills. who knows?!

> My recollection was that internals of A/UX emulation were reused to enable the PowerPC transition from Motorola, but I might be wrong about that.

I don't think so. I don't remember a connection, at least, but it'll be in here straight from the horse's mouth:

https://computerhistory.org/blog/transplanting-the-macs-cent...

I watched all of that a while ago and thought it was very interesting. Recommended.

> My recollection was that internals of A/UX emulation were reused to enable the PowerPC transition from Motorola

No, pretty sure this wasn't the case. The RISC LC group used a custom emulator and nanokernel which is not at all similar to A/UX. The RLC couldn't even run A/UX, which was why Apple talked about porting it to OSF/1 for the new Power Macs (which, of course, never happened).

Right, from memory that was going to be A/UX 4.0. But as you say, that never happened.

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