Thanks Jim!
That said, high price killed off most of the legacy Unix vendors/products. The world was changing around them and they weren't ready or able to give up the profit margins they had enjoyed for so long. Personal computers were becoming commodity equipment and free versions of Unix were hard to compete against.
Of course a Unix workstation was twice as fast as a PC and cost twice as much, but it becomes pointless when most of the time it’s bored to death waiting for me to move the mouse.
High price and the differentiation. In the 90s I was working in publishing and publishing-adjacent companies that were throwing out their Unix environments as quick as they could after NT 4 was released. They were all sick of dealing with the crap of having multiple, subtly incompatible *ix environments to deal with: one company I worked for had Irix, AIX, SunOS, Solaris, and both flavours of Digital's Unix products, because various vendors had done deals with the different vendors to ship their products on those variants. Each came with different shells, different userlands, and all required slightly different tweaking and tuning to maintain operationally.
Contrast that with the NT 4 world, where that same business was quite happy to buy extremely expensive Alpha/NT systems so that the same skills, tool, and so on that worked everywhere.
Do you take the Macintosh II with A/UX aka Unix from a company that doesn’t seem all too interested in the product themselves and selling what seems like a toy or do you go with SUN? They hired Bill Joy, and they are 100% committed to Unix?
They simply cost too much for a non commital company like Apple. If anything it’s amazing they saw it through to the end of the Quadra
A/UX was easy to integrate into a mixed SunOS, Solaris, Irix network with liberal use of arch-dependent automounting.
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.
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).
In short, basically the same reasons we didn't all run SCO UNIX or whatever on our IBM PCs. Much the same dynamic for why the Windows NT kernel took so long to come down to home computers (in Windows XP finally). Even OS X's RAM requirements would inhibit its uptake for a few years. "Real" operating systems were too big for the small computers of the 1980s and even early 1990s.
At least, that's my impression from comparing NeXTSTEP and early OS X. A lot of the "base layer" was totally replaced, including those troublesome licensed bits.
8MB was a lot of RAM. Most people were running windos in 2MB or less, at the time.
A similar issue you need a new kernel for protected memory etc.
Apple did make attempts see Taligent
I can't find any solid info on it but have to imagine their experience reimplementing Toolbox was tied into "Star Trek" somehow as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
MAE is 68k macintosh emulator with some OS/toolbox parts handled with native code.
MAE was slow and unstable in my experience unlike yours, and by the time I graduated Macs, I believe, replaced them, which made the lab consistent with what most of the other computer labs had.
I’ve been searching for over a decade now.
The SPARCstation also has a SunPC card in it, so I have Windows 3.11, Mac System 7.5, and Solaris 2.6 all running on the same desktop: https://i.imgur.com/ctvlzCX.gif
That sort of money (except for ridiculous non-linear GPU prices today) would build one hell of a threadripper workstation.
so a moderately equipped modern MacPro.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-w...
No, not at all. This isn't a workstation. It's a Workstation. It's not even a struggle to beat $12k.
A Mac Pro starts at $6k. You can add a 28 core Xeon for +$7k. 1.5 TB of memory is +$25k. Twin Radeons with 64 GB of video ram is another +$10k. 8TB of storage is another +$2.5k. You've picked CPU, RAM, graphics, and storage and you're already over $50k. That's no software. No display. Just the tower, a power cable, a mouse, a keyboard, and MacOS.
If you go to Dell and check out their Data Science Workstations, it's not difficult to configure one for over a quarter of a million dollars. Triple graphics cards, 6 TB of memory, dual 28-core processors. In a tower computer.
"/mac/sys — This directory contains the system folders for startup and login. The System file provided with Release 2.0 of A/UX is almost identical in functionality to the System file provided with Release 6.0.5 of the Macintosh system software."
Additionally I always thought the Gestalt Manager was a System 7 thing and was surprised to learn it was introduced along with system 6.0.4 and A/UX so applications could tell if they were running on it: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma...
Try harder.
If I can’t tell what something’s about from the first couple paragraphs or a quick skim, I’ll tune it out. I have plenty of other content to read.
On the subject of what happened with Big Mac, the Macintosh II and NeXT, https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-prec... and some of the articles linked from it https://lowendmac.com/2013/next-years-steve-jobs-before-triu... https://www.aventure-apple.com/le-big-mac-apple/ (Google Translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https:/... ) is the best intro that I'm aware of, though there are some additional, important bits of information in Steven Levy's Insanely Great ch. 9 ( https://books.google.ie/books?id=Y6ZQAAAAMAAJ&dq=insanely+gr... ) and the Isaacson bio's ch. 13 ( https://books.google.ie/books?id=JT6FCgAAQBAJ&printsec=front... ). TFA links to some of these, but it missed some of the information in them. (Unfortunately the Adventure-Apple piece needs one big caveat, that it mostly doesn't cite any sources.)
There's also yet another whole strand of Macintosh-adjacent Unix in the Network Server products: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsVAdrdkyoA .
Some key points from these:
* I have little idea how well-founded Apple's detailed legal complaints were, but the overall claim that "Jobs had done research for a next generation product and taken the key staff, namely Page from Apple to make it reality" is almost surely absolutely right, and NeXT was conceived an attempt to do Big Mac outside Apple using the Big Mac team from Apple. One thing that TFA and the LowEndMac miss is that Jobs, apparently, wasn't the instigator: according to Isaacson, Rich Page and other Big Mac people contacted him and begged him to launch a new company when Big Mac was cancelled. (ISTR seeing this confirmed elsewhere, too, but I don't recall where atm.)
* TFA says that "[a]ll that I can find of the Big Mac project is this insanely low resolution image" showing some hardware and a screenshot of the GUI, but it links to an article which features this glamour shot of what was apparently an industrial design for Big Mac: https://i0.wp.com/www.aventure-apple.com/wp-content/uploads/... . (And this is cited: it's apparently from the Appledesign book https://www.worldcat.org/title/appledesign-the-work-of-the-a... .) The resemblance to the original G3 iMac from over a decade later is obvious. Beyond appearances, some other hardware similarities include a lack of internal expansion slots (according to Levy's book, Jobs maintained his opposition to "slots" through his departure from Apple) and a focus on external expandability instead: the G3 iMac was an early adopter of USB, while Big Mac apparently had Apple Desktop Bus. In fact, according to the Adventure-Apple piece ADB was originally developed for Big Mac under the name of Front Desk Bus (though as usual I see no reference to substantiate this). The single most obvious divergence is that Big Mac couldn't display colour, though no doubt this is because of an underlying similarity: the Big Mac project was trying to hit a roughly G3-iMac-like price point in the mid-'80s.
<pinwheel />
I'm emailing someone who did support for the ANS stuff so I'll follow up with something there, although I don't have the machine/software.. not that I'd have the space for such a monster!
I'll have to order those books... it'd be a surprising twist that Jobs was dragged into NeXT? maybe some personal obligation?
* What about the networking, though? (Apart from all other possible inspirations, Sun was already trumpeting that "the network is the computer" by this time.) There's no mention anywhere of any network port on any Big Mac prototype, and it seems reasonable to assume that Big Mac was intended to have no integrated networking hardware. But I don't think this indicates that networking was unimportant to the Big Mac vision. Jobs put plenty of emphasis on networking in his February 1985 Playboy interview https://allaboutstevejobs.com/verbatim/interviews/playboy_19... , and he seems to have been very much on board with (and likely involved with?) Apple's efforts to roll out a LAN offering in 1984 and 1985 https://www.macgui.com/news/article.php?t=491 . I think the most likely explanation was that, like the non-colour screen, this was a cost-driven decision. In 1985 integrated networking would have been expensive and useless to most modem users, and vice versa, while many users weren't yet ready to pay for either LAN or dial-up hardware. And of course networking hadn't yet really converged on (not-quite-)RJ45 Ethernet—Apple itself had only just started pushing AppleTalk!—so even for LAN users there was a good chance that any integrated LAN hardware would be an expensive waste.
* That just leaves the PARC-influenced "object-oriented" element which later showed up on the NeXT in the form of Objective C and the NeXT APIs. Had Big Mac's software already taken some steps in this kind of direction? Or was it an ambition for later, or simply not on the roadmap at all yet? I have no idea.
<pinwheel />
This was already present on the classical Macs, and Lisa, via the Object Pascal frameworks, and later evolved into its C++ replacement.
Copland was also heavily C++ based.
* The Apple Extended Keyboard https://deskthority.net/wiki/Apple_Extended_Keyboard with its Model-M based layout was by far the biggest Apple keyboard up to that point and was clearly part of the Macintosh II power-user vision just as slots and colour were. (IIRC it was explicitly justified as making the Mac compatible with PC software.) And so it's no surprise that Jobs didn't like it: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/841771 .
* It isn't quite directly stated anywhere I know of, but it's clear that rival visions of Macintosh cost, margins and market share were a big factor in the internal strife. Even back at the launch of the original Macintosh, Jobs had been very unhappy that the price had been set at $2500 rather than $2000 https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor... . There's also a video clip from the '90s, almost certainly from his NeXT days, complaining bitterly about Apple's decision to choose high margins and low market share for the Macintosh, but I can't find it atm. Despite the big screen and the ambitious Unix-based OS rewrite which probably imposed a big RAM penalty, Big Mac's creators evidently hoped (realistically or not) that it would compete for something like the mainstream market. On the other hand, whether or not this was quite Gassée's vision from Day 1, the Macintosh IIs were and remained brutally high-margin, priced to soak those who not only both needed a high-end Mac and could afford one but were also trapped on the Mac platform, while the all-in-one Macs (and even the later LCs, to a lesser extent) were kept underpowered but also swingeingly expensive. It's not a coincidence that Gassée popped up to smirk and leer when the 2019 Mac Pro's prices were announced https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20163321 . To be fair, the Macintosh II pricing strategy actually did make Apple a great deal of money, for a while. Meanwhile NeXT was, ironically, in no position to compete for the mass market.
I respectfully disagree that price was the issue. The competition was a Sun workstation. In 1990, a sparcstation was $5k without the hard drive, a configuration that only made sense if you mounted the root filesystem using NFS, which meant you had a more expensive machine with a hard drive on your LAN.
Apple could have succeeded in the workstation space, but they were a consumer focused company.
https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/16/business/low-priced-work-...
I think the Mac II & IIx were a little slow on the sales front, but from what I remember the smaller IIcx and IIci were much more popular.
For those not familiar with the times, this was still at the outset of the Unix wars - Berkeley vs AT&T vs everyone else.
UniSoft was a porting house based in Berkeley that specialized in putting Unix on almost anything. For example, the first Unix implementations for Sun and SGI were Version 7 ports done by UniSoft. The business model problem was that support costs, Time-to-market, and vendor customization rapidly pushed high volume customers into doing all their Unix work in-house. Apple followed the same path with A/UX, pulling the entire project in-house after UniSoft delivered the first version.
UniPlus was a blend of software from AT&T (System V release 2 and later SVR3) and BSD (TCP/IP, sendmail, bind and other utilities) and eventually Sun (NFS). This was viable because AT&T had a semi-official position that UUCP was networking. That was the business wing of AT&T, not Bell Labs. The internal fights at AT&T are items of legend, but basically Bell Labs stepped back and kept to its research charter (with OS work turning into Plan9). AT&T corporate kept adding legal and technical stupid to Unix until eventually the only option was SysVR4 and the unified field theory with Sun.
The Mac-II target for UniPlus used the Motorola 68851 MMU, a table walking highly configurable system. It was a stock item that UniPlus supported, but Apple wanted quite a bit of customization. 4K pages, Nubus memory, and MacOS address space support.
4k pages was a mostly trivial tweak from the 8k baseline, which had been selected at UniSoft for TLB efficiency. Apple wanted 4k because they had a smaller memory footprint and wanted to get better memory utilization. This was a good decision - I tested a 2k page size and it was even snappier for the small memory size, but lost on the TLB issues for larger memory and Apple didn't want the pagesize to be determined at boot time.
The NuBus memory was a discontiguous physical address space that wasn't initialized by the system. It was also an extra 2 clocks away compared to main memory. I dealt with the memory map, and added initialization hooks so that the memory could be found and used early, and built up a test system with two expansion cards and 20 MBytes of memory. Slower memory was pretty bad normally, but the 68020 I-cache and large register file made it benchmark OK. Unfortunately, sometimes the system stack was placed on NuBus memory and the impact on interrupt and system call latency was horrible. I set it up so that by default any external memory was dedicated to the IO buffer cache. Apple wasn't happy with this, but they accepted it since there was a driver boot-time flag to force a big pool of slow memory.
The MacOS address space was the most interesting. The old Mac systems were so memory starved that they took advantage of the 32 bit memory and 24 address lines on the 68000/68010 to store stuff in the high order byte. I can't remember if it was general storage or metadata - I seem to have blocked out the usage details. I put together a design that would alias the high order bytes by creating 256 overlapping top level segments that could share the rest of the page tables so that physical memory wouldn't be exhausted with page tables to cover the 32-bit address space.
Apple decided not to do this - they wanted a 100% user mode implementation. I was irritated at the time since they were choosing to sacrifice memory protection and security, but in retrospect I was only a couple of years out of school and I am not sure I fully appreciated the side effects of aliasing addresses that way. Still, it would have been fun to implement.
The early 68k systems used in the early macs only brought out 24 address bits, Apple did indeed use that memory for metadata - memory was tight - the first Macs had 128k, we were shipping Unix systems at UniSoft that ran in 256k.
I don't think anyone ever used NuBus memory :-)
FYI, https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor... has more info on what they did in the high order byte, and what they had to do to make things "32-bit clean" later on.
I wonder if you could patch the m68k emulator in the later nanokernel for PowerPC Macs to support it. Would it be legal? Gods no. Would it be a throwback to the kind of really dirty hacks I associate with the 90s? Absolutely.
It looks like a decent amount of work reversing the Powermac nanokernel has been done: https://github.com/elliotnunn/NanoKernel
https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=11326
On a test of compiling about 4MB of source code, Qemu is 7x faster than Shoebill!
After I got the Apple offer, I met with people up the management chain to the VP a step above the entire A/UX org (3 people up from my potential hiring manager). The VP had no problem admitting that he didn't really see a reason for Apple to be in the Unix business and that he had no criteria for measuring the success of the effort or justifying substantial additional investment.
Bonus points for honesty, but I decided at that point that the project was doomed.
I think in the long run it became a checkbox for Federal sales and it made inroads at some universities where Unix (for IT dept) + Mac S/W was a selling point.
What year was the Apple interview?
Taking also in account that that version of A/UX ran only on the quadra 700/800/950, it's probably one of the OS with less hardware support around
The OS itself was so simple, it didn't even use init scripts to start its services, but everything was (re)spawned by /etc/inittab like /bin/getty; this was so clever I started doing it with all the services I wanted to automatically restart on my other linux servers
https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42/files/4BSD%20under%20...
decompress and run the batch file.
I didn't bother installing X11 as anything else is a better X11 than the one mouse button Mac.. I enabled TCP/IP and you can telnet in on 127.0.0.1 42323
Enjoy!
Anyways, remarkably, A/UX could run on a Macintosh LC II and III. The LC III was remarkable in that if you found the right DIMM, it wouldn't reject a 32MB SIMM RAM chip. Long story short, you could buy an Mac LC II for $10 in 2000, and install A/UX on there. The tricky thing was that Macs all used SCSI drives back then, and most macs required the SCSI drive to have a special bit flipped (in, I guess, firmware? or bootloader?) that marked it as a Mac hardware scsi drive.
A/UX was unique in that 1. it did not require a Mac specific SCSI drive and 2. utilities existed to convert any scsi drive to be marked as a "Mac hardware" scsi drive.
TL;DR ran A/UX for a couple of weeks on a $10 Macintosh LC II that I bought at a computer consignment shop in the early 2000s
In the early 90's, a local university had a whole lab of Mac II's with A/UX. Unfortunately, they didn't disable the guest account. They also had a public dialup and were connected to the Internet. A local "elite" BBSer figured this out, and that was how most of the local kids got onto IRC for that summer.
It seemed an interesting experiment for the about 15 minutes I was allowed to play with it.
Never saw it again other than in computer magazines articles.
I only just found out I could upgrade it to 32GB of RAM.
