Adventures in A/UX, Apple's UNIX for the Classic Macintosh!

from its inception in the 80s the core of the macintosh experience was the simple intuitive mac os interface but over time the original classic mac os went from delightfully simple to overly simplistic and no longer well suited to modern usage so in 2001 apple reinvented the mac with mac os 10 a revolutionary os with the unbridled power of unix just under the surface except that this was more of a re-reinvention because apple had done essentially the same thing way back in 1988 with aux which merged the classic mac os and unix on 68k max and it's one of the best operating systems ever released so today let's take a look at aux on one of the best machines for the task this maxed out quadra 700 and then we're actually going to use it for something incredibly cool so stay tuned [Music] and if you like macintosh shenanigans like this i hope you'll consider subscribing and hitting the thumbs up because i have some big plans for this beautiful quadra and i think they're worth sticking around for and speaking of beautiful if you saw the last video you may have noticed that this quadra is looking a lot more sparkly and beigey and that's because we've had a few nice hot sunny days here in philadelphia and i've given this a nice retro bright bath and it came up phenomenally this case used to be pretty disgusting yellow with big splotches where the stickers used to be and now you can hardly see them at all in fact the only blemish on the front is this unfortunate engraving of numbers that somebody scratched into the surface but before we install aux and turn this jurassic park macintosh into a real unix machine let's talk a little bit about where aux came from when steve jobs introduced macintosh on stage in january 1984 he described its philosophy as radical ease of use with all of the complications of computing hidden beneath an intuitive point and click interface he often poked fun at dos and unix users for having to memorize long strings of cryptic commands to accomplish simple things that a mac user could do with a simple point click drag and drop but it turned out that steve's original vision of the computer as a friendly but sealed appliance took things a bit too far at least for the time after jobs was forced out of apple in 1985 the company warmed up to customer demands for expandability in the macintosh if adding a feature would open up a market then apple would open up the macintosh and add it and this wasn't limited to hardware features back in the 80s and 90s the us government was america's leading source of unix nerds in an effort to ensure that all government systems would be compatible with one another regardless of vendor the us began requiring that all computer purchases be posix compatible which is basically a standard that's compatible with unix software the story goes that apple wanted to have its own unix to tap into massive government contracts as well as to open up the market to huge scientific customers like universities and thus aux was born and it wasn't just a unix layer shoehorned into classic mac os instead it was a full-blown real deal unix with mac os running on top of it for software compatibility and it was genius it's a full implementation of system 5 unix fully posix compatible and it can run unix command line and x windows software it ran mac os 6 or later 7 on top of unix completely seamlessly to the user you could launch and run just about any mac app or game just like any other mac with the ability to tap into unix commands and software whenever you need to but despite the friendly and approachable appearance it was unix first and max second in fact because mac os ran on top of unix you didn't need to run it at all you could run aux as just x windows or just the unix command line if you prefer and since unix was running mac os an errant mac application wouldn't take down the whole system like it could on a normal classic mac the entire mac os was just another process running on top of the unix system which really couldn't interfere with the other unix processes and applications all of this earned aux a dedicated fan base who favored the os for all sorts of servers web servers mail servers and like we're gonna do even mud game servers unfortunately aox didn't succeed in the market and the project was killed in 1995 with version 3.1.1 and it's this version that we're going to install on our lovely quadra here which is going to give us a lovely mac os 7.01 front end with the most stable version of apple unix under the hood now one of the requirements for aux is a cd-rom drive and unfortunately the quadra 700 only has this single three and a quarter inch floppy drive built in and i don't have an external scuzzy cd-rom so we're gonna have to channel our internal draga1 i have borrowed this cd-rom drive from my otherwise dead lc575 and we're just gonna dangle this thing out the top of the quadra and use that to install so we'll just have to take out the original short scuzzy cable here which is absolutely tiny and we'll temporarily use this long cable with multiple connectors and this cable isn't keyed so let me just double check which way it has to go in there we go beautiful now before we dig any deeper into this quadra here i'd like to thank the sponsor of today's video my cat yoshi or actually pcb way pcbway has long been famous for rapid quality pcb prototyping but did you know that they now offer a comprehensive suite of services including custom cnc machining and high quality 3d printing it's really great you can get a quote super fast and thank you so much pcb way for being such long time supporters of the retro computing community now in order to boot the install cd we have to actually use a boot disk which will boot the system and then search for a compatible cd-rom drive and aux is extremely finicky about what cd-rom drive it will accept so using our liberated lc 575 drive means that this will definitely work because it's an apple cd 300 plus so let's turn this guy on all right so we're booted off the floppy now we have this kind of unusually polite message saying i'm sorry but i can't find a volume which looks like an installation cd so let's pop our install disk for aux 301 into our reclaimed cd-rom drive and see if this works and it found it so here we are in the aux installer and i've heard conflicting things about what to choose here so a lot of people say it's best to go into the custom install and set up your partitions and stuff but i'm just going to do the easy install here and then choose software and let's see what kind of stuff we can put on here so we definitely want all of the unix utilities networking you know all the server stuff programming stuff it even comes with games including fortune hangman and quiz those are unix games of course so yeah just about everything except for printing and accounting and uucp and install and we're going to install right over mac sd all right so it took forever to initialize the disk and partitions but now it's installing pretty quickly in this kind of very generic looking mac os installer it looks just like every other classic mac installer all right installation is successful so let's restart alright so here we are booted into our lovely mac os 7.01 front end for aux 3.01 but before we explore let's install the 3.1 update which shouldn't take that long and let's just watch this boot process because it's interesting right now it's booting into a minimal system but it's going to switch right here and boot into aux because mac machines cannot natively boot unix they have to boot mac os first so this boots a minimal mac os and then switches into unix and then boots mac os on top of unix and that's just interesting and here we are booted into aux 3.1 and really not that difficult of an install everything just kind of worked but before we poke around too much i just want to take a moment and uh well completely forget everything we just did because it was completely unnecessary you see if you're trying to run aux on your own system and you have a scuzzy to sd there's a way easier solution thanks to some kind folks on the 68k mla forum who have created a fully complete install of aox 3.1 on an sd card image that you can simply dd to an 8 gig or bigger sd card and they have everything you could ever want installed and ready on that disk including all of the ports of the gcc tools which we're gonna need for our server shenanigans on this machine and also pretty much every bit of aox software ever created from the jagu box mirror which is on a separate partition on the card so i've already made up a card with that install on there and we're gonna switch to it because it's pretty much the install that we just did but better pretty darn easy with the scuzzy to sd and actually while i'm in here i'm also going to install this dana port networking card which has rj45 for ethernet which will be much more convenient than the aaui port that's built into this quadra for networking which you can use but i'd rather just plug an ethernet cable directly into the machine and i'm pretty sure this will just work in aux with no configuration needed but i have been burnt by that assumption before so i guess we'll find out all right so here we are at the login screen on this properly configured install of aux and the username and password here is just root and password very secure but like the github instructions say you probably shouldn't connect this thing to an insecure network this is a very old and insecure now version of unix so the first thing you'll notice here is that we have a pretty bog standard install of mac os 7.01 and it's on our of course quadra 700 here which were maxed out at 68 megs of ram but when we look at what's running we have our system software and then we also have our command shell which is the unix system so the first interesting thing you can do is click into the apple menu and choose command shell and this is your link to the underlying unix system and one of the things i love about the pre-built sd card here is that they've already configured the bash shell which is a much more modern shell than the default one that aox comes with and we have all of our normal goodies like ls and ls-a but we don't have any modern conveniences for example there's no nano text editor and for that reason i've actually moved one of the aux specific apps to the desktop here text editor which is a mac os program but it is also a very nice easy to use and plain text editor so if we need to edit config files it's a lot easier to do it in here at least to me than it is to use something like vi and this pre-built sd card also has fun stuff on here of course like the after dark screen saver because really what classic mac is complete without after dark and even though you're using unix you don't have to go without the creature comforts of flying toasters or actually my favorite one satori come on that is much cooler than flying toasters and then just for you purists out here we'll take a look at the flying toasters actually i guess we don't have flying toasters because application is unexpectedly quit because of error type 1. well all right we have some after dark some other interesting stuff to note is that we have two disks on the desktop from the sd card here we have our root unix file system and that houses all of your normal unixy stuff but it also houses a bunch of mac stuff for example applications tend to install here as we can see right here so we have all of our mac applications but then under mac partition this is actually your system so this is your macintosh system folder along with some aux startup goodness so this is the application that launches aux from the mac os initial startup so don't mess with this stuff because you will kill your system and you cannot upgrade system 701 if you change out this system folder stuff will break okay now before we check out some of the other deeper features here i just want to run an experiment because my zip drive did not want to work properly with a ux here so i'm curious what would happen if we just install the extensions from the regular iomega installer disc so i've got my iomegaware install disk that came with our new inbox scuzzy zip drive let's see if we can install it and uh i guess not bad f-line instruction but that shows us one major major benefit of aux is that even though that said it crashed the whole system and we had to restart it really just restarted the mac os process on top of aux and now we can just log in again it did not bring down the whole computer it did not kill the unix processes that are running in the background so that's pretty cool okay so since we're logged down i want to try something else that i'm super interested in seeing if we go to options and change session type we can actually change what we're logging into so we have the aux finder in 24 and 32 bit but we also have console emulator and x11 so if we log in as root and password and choose x11 we're gonna boot into well what this calls apple's adaption of the industry standard x window system for aux x11 is a pure x environment and no macintosh compatibility is provided so we'll choose this session only and uh yeah all right well it does not appear that x windows works quite right on this install i'm not quite sure why but let's try console and see what this is like with a pure command line interface all right that's pretty cool and yeah we are in the bash shell and uh it has this nice little kind of quasi-window decoration about it but yeah it's pretty cool we have our ls we have our ls-a we can watch system processes on top no we can't we don't have top all right so uh that's fine but let's exit okay so all the aox stuff we've seen so far is pretty straightforward but let's do something now that's unfortunately a little bit more complicated and that's setup networking so if we try to do it like we would on a regular mac we go into control panels and then mac tcp we'll find that this is actually read only we cannot make actual changes in here and that's because we have to set up networking on the unix side and the mac side goes through the unix side of aox to get out to the network so using our text editor we just have to edit a few config files okay so forget all that stuff i said about finding the right config file to put our ip address in it's actually a lot easier than that thanks to a little script called new config which is kind of a wizard from the apple developers back in the 80s to set up networking at least most of the way in aux okay so after it builds the kernel and uh it's not joking about taking several minutes it starts to ask us a bunch of questions about our network interface so it found one ethernet card installed so actually i don't think that new bus card is working i think it's only detecting the built-in ethernet but we'll say yes we'll configure this interface for ip and then for internet address i'll just put what i want this quadra to be on my home network here enter a net mask and uh yeah all right well it's actually it turns out it did see both ethernet cards the only thing is i don't know which is which so it sees ae zero and that's the one i've configured for my network here and then it sees a0 and that one's still configured with the original settings that this sd card install came with why don't we reboot the system i'm going to plug in the ethernet cable to one of those cards we'll see if it works and if it doesn't i'll plug it into the other okay so i've removed our haphazard cd-rom drive and i've buttoned the quadra back up and i have the ethernet cable plugged into the built-in ethernet so let's try a ping and see if we can talk to the outside world it does not appear so all right let me plug ethernet into the ethernet card and see if that one works okay so networking is really fighting me on this so i think what i'm going to do is take out that ethernet card and reconfigure with new config but we'll come back to that later for now let's check out some of the other software that comes on this pre-configured sd card install so the main thing i'm interested in is under user local and we have all of our gnu utilities including gcc to compile software grep less all sorts of stuff and then if we add this stuff to our path we then have access to gcc and we can compile software including the circle mud that we're going to run live from vintage computer festival east this year in october and that's the grand plan that i have for this quadra we're going to use it as a server for our display which is going to be most likely me and steve from mac 84 and we're going to have a bunch of computers set up as clients to play the mud and the mud server is this fella right here so i'm going to configure the environment a little bit more and get all the files and stuff circle mod source code and everything on here and we'll see more about that in upcoming videos because i'm going to actually configure this so i can do the development on this machine using my powerbook 1400c which is now lovingly upgraded to a g3 okay so i took the nubus networking card out and we only have the built-in networking of the quadra now and i have the ethernet cable plugged in i reran new config and it gave me the 192 addresses again and my network of course is 10 dot so i ran ifconfig and it's a 0 which is the built-in network adapter and i gave it the address 10077 and told it to broadcast at 10 000 and set it to up and now we should be on our network so yep i can ping my router at 1001 and we are now connected after all of that nonsense so now i want to try something really cool so this is my m1 macbook pro and i should be able to telnet into the quadra oh yeah look at that how cool is that apple computer aux all right so login as root here vt100 yeah welcome to aux here on my macbook pro my modern computer i can now work on my stuff on the quadra from the couch using any computer including my m1 macbook pro or i can use my powerbook 1400c which has wi-fi this is uh this is pretty awesome okay so that'll do it for these unixy macintosh shenanigans and i'm really excited for this machine being set up like this and aux is well mostly working i don't know why that other networking card gave us so much trouble but the built-in ethernet works just fine and yeah this is now on my home network and i can connect to it remotely which means i can start working on the mud server which is what i'm so excited about with this machine and i hope you'll be at vcf east this year because i'll be there and see from academy 4 should be there we'll have a table together where this machine will be set up and many of the other macs that you'll have seen on this channel will be there so if you enjoyed this video i'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more unixy macintosh shenanigans please subscribe down below and thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to stig124 justin greg chris and sorta eclectic who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping to make these shenanigans possible [Music] you

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 74,070

Keywords: retro, vintage computers, macintosh, apple, retrocomputing, retro computers

Id: 9Phk3qVUPqw

Length: 27min 17sec (1637 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021