Installing A/UX 1.1 like it's the 90s
thomasw.dev
thomasw.dev
Funny how that rhythms with having a macOS install next to Asahi Linux. The more things change:)
Also, swapping through 26 floppies to install would have been... Something.
Windows 95 was about that size, and Office was closer to 50?
At my very first job I remember installing stuff that way...ugh
The later MacOS running on A/UX ran in a single A/UX (system V) process
Our standard agreement for porting Unix to new hardware (we did something like 150 different boxes, not just macs) required a minimal ROM monitor that could download code from a serial port (we could provide source), we'd take it from there, write S/A code to store data on the harddrive, download a file system, start downloading kernels into ram debugging the disk and serial drivers until we got a shell prompt ... then moving development onto the box
I still have a legit copy of Word on 10 floppies.
It was bad. And when you'd copy so many floppies, typically one would fail and you'd only notice when installing. We weren't very advanced back then (at least I wasn't): no fancy an 11th "parity" disk that'll fix any other one that'd fail. At least not for me.
The data CD-ROM was a very welcome addition to the world back then.
We installed it from a QIC tape when it wasn't delivered on a SCSI hard drive. Not sure if that option was generally available tho; we were doing kernel development.
Learnt TCP/IP with this setup. Good Times(tm)
A/UX was created so Apple could bid on government contracts that had a "must be Unix and/or POSIX" checkbox (common requirement at the time). IMO, they should have either gone all-in on a "MacOS apps running perfect on a Unix kernel" and picked a better kernel, or done the Atari thing and tossed the legacy OS and gone all in on a "Unix on Apple hardware". Instead it was 'meh' all around.
Perfectly normal.
You would need a few for MS-DOS (I think only MS-DOS 3.3 was the last that could fit into an high density one).
Followed by about 10 for Windows 3.x, similar numbers for Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++, Clipper, Word, Excel (replace with the competition),....
And before installing all of that, don't forget to as very first step, create backup floppies from all of them, and actually use the backups during the installations, while keeping the originals in a safe place, not that the drive could damage one of them.
The page mentions there's an emulator that should be able to run it. Don't know if there's a local copy that could be used along with some method to transfer the sources. Cloud boxes might not suffice.