Apple A/UX: The First UNIX Mac OS!

in 1984 Apple released a product that represented a new era in computing but only a few years later the company was already looking to replace its operating system this time let's take a look at what could have been the future of the Macintosh by the late 1980s Apple was pushing to diversify it did this with its product line by introducing new computers like the Macintosh to desktop and expanding on its popular laserwriter printer series but it also wanted to increase sales in markets it had traditionally been weakened the Mac had gained a strong foothold in graphic design and publishing but Apple needed to appeal to a wider business audience for the platform to keep its momentum the popularity of IBM PC clones was growing quickly for small workgroups the Mac's appletalk networking was ideal but it wasn't robust enough for larger groups of computers or for connecting Mac's to the servers and mainframes found in big corporations so in 1988 Apple released a UX it was more than just additional features slapped on top of the existing Mac OS though it was entirely new and based on UNIX which itself had seen rapid adoption for use with servers and workstations aox was short for Apple UNIX and it was seen as a way to bridge the gap between the two Apple had contracted with a company called unis off to port UNIX to its Mac hardware but that was no easy task it was actually quite the feat of engineering in order to put it into perspective we need to talk about how the Macintosh itself worked you're probably familiar with how the typical PC has a BIOS or basic input/output system and computers from the 80s the BIOS acted as a bridge between the parts inside and the operating system specifically this is known as a hardware abstraction layer but that's all it did the operating system had to be self-contained if you booted a computer running say Doss it wouldn't load the data it needed to operate from disk into RAM that was a somewhat slow process but more importantly Ram was expensive and computers generally didn't have much of it so in order to fit into available memory os's had to walk a fine line between features and functionality but the Macintosh was different because Apple controlled both the hardware and operating system it could tie the two together in ways the typical PC couldn't underpinning the classic Mac OS was something called the Macintosh toolbox this was a collection of routines that defined how the OS and user interface worked the Mac's designers realized that some of those routines would be used so frequently yet changed so little that they could be stored in the computers ROM therefore on Mac's the ROM wasn't just a BIOS but also a core part of the operating system it handled things like the bootloader the behavior of the menu bar and even drawing the mouse cursor the ROM was so integral to the operation of early Mac's that it actually shared address lines with the RAM acting as a sort of extension of the computer's memory Elvia to read only one it was this integration that made a UX unique from other forms of Unix in order to boot a UX the computer had to first start up a lightweight Mac OS installation and then a special secondary bootloader could kick off the UNIX startup process but when that was done users were left with a very interesting environment the computer was running on the UNIX kernel but it still had the friendly Mac graphical user interface and that's because it was actually running the Mackall in a virtual machine a o-x could execute three different kinds of applications a typical unix program a classic Mac OS program or a so-called hybrid app that could take advantage of both systems the built-in CLI program called command shell is a good example of this it's a UNIX process but takes advantage of the Macintosh toolbox for its user interface in typical Unix fashion users could have their own accounts which wasn't an option with an ordinary Mac the Mac OS virtual machine started when a user logged in and was compartmentalized in such a way that each user could have their own UI settings but for simplicity a default aux installation would automatically log in as the root account network security wasn't really a thing back in the 80s but y.base aux on Unix to begin with if Apple wanted to sell computers that could communicate with UNIX systems why not just bright software that would let the Mac OS do so it all came down to one particular customer that Apple wanted the chase Uncle Sam as you could probably imagine the US government needed to have quite a bit of custom software written for its various functions you couldn't exactly go to a computer store and pick up a copy of something that could say calculate the income taxes for an entire country of course it would be expensive and inefficient to have to rewrite all that custom software as operating systems came and went overtime so in 1988 the National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST adopted something called POSIX that's an acronym for portable operating system interface for UNIX and it was designed to set standards for making software compatible between operating systems there were several varieties of UNIX available at the time each with its own differences and they in fact competed with each other this was called the UNIX Wars and it's quite the story in and of itself POSIX his intent was to get software written for one flavor of Unix to be able to work on another because frankly no one knew at that point how the UNIX Wars would shake out spoiler alert BSD ended up winning nist published federal information processing standard 151 which basically meant US government agencies had to buy computers that were posix-compliant or jump through paperwork hoops to get an exception the Mac OS on its own was nowhere near being compliant but US government contracts were generally very lucrative so - Apple aux made sense it could get them a foot in the door with the government and also potentially pick up sales from research institutions and higher education both of which also commonly used UNIX systems but aux also got apples something else a way out of a corner it had painted itself into with the Mac OS the designers of the original Macintosh from 1984 were very creative in getting the machine to work within the constraints of its hardware but this resulted in many low-level technical limitations that were difficult to later work around for example the OS didn't get application multitasking until late 1987 with the release of multi finder but even that was simply hacked on top of the OS and only offered cooperative multitasking add to that the fact that there was no memory protection nor any real way to add it and it meant that a bug in a single program could cause the entire system to crash many Mac users got into the habit of saving their work frequently as there was often no telling of when their computer would hang and they need to reboot UNIX fixed many of those problems it had long since adopted memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking UNIX processes were sufficiently isolated from each other so a problem with one wouldn't affect the others under a UX if a Mac program crashed the worst that would happen is the Mac OS virtual machine would go down with it but the rest of the system would stay up and running by the early 90s Apple was so hopeful about the future of a UX that it announced plans to make it available on a variety of computers everything from a typical Mac desktop to powerful rs/6000 servers as part of a now infamous agreement with IBM that story itself is quite the rabbit-hole one we'll jump down another time despite all its promise though aux ultimately flopped as far as I can tell there were a few reasons for this a big factor was cost Apple had decided to base aux on the system v UNIX kernel from AT&T it was the most popular form of Unix at the time but Apple had to pay licensing fees for it furthermore aox was a bit of a resource hog requiring more RAM and hard drive space than the Mac OS so much so that a typical aux installation on an 80 megabyte hard drive left only 10 Meg's free for users to store files Apple sold an aux upgrade kit for the Mac 2 that included a larger hard drive 4 Meg's of RAM a memory management chip and a copy of the software for about $5,000 u.s. then B almost $11,000 today and that didn't even include the cost of the computer itself and along those lines aux only worked on specific Mac models so you couldn't install it on just anything the Mac needed to have a floating point math coprocessor and hardware accelerated memory management which generally were only present in the most expensive models and even then only certain parts would work while my Mac se 30 is officially supported by aux the third-party cd-rom drive I tried to install it with wasn't due to a lack of drivers I had to switch to a specific model of Apple branded Drive aux actually had a bit of a rocky start it was supposed to have been launched in 1987 but got delayed by 7 months and when it was released it wasn't exactly fully baked its initial version could only run one Mac program at a time and it didn't even support color because of the way Mac programs were commonly written only an estimated 10% of them would run on aux though this did get better with subsequent releases a number of publishers had initially jumped on board to write software for the OS but they started dropping out once they saw it was going nowhere fast and that's because it was really a nice OS for a very niche audience Apple didn't sell proper servers at the time just desktops so they couldn't competitively bid against computing monoliths like IBM or Sun for big projects aux was too complex and resource-hungry for the typical Mac user they just wanted a simple easy to understand computing experience but aox also wasn't powerful enough for the UNIX diehards they didn't care about the Mac's UI and the hardware was too expensive and limiting aux did eventually receive favorable reviews and a small portion of power users loved it but most everyone else wanted something different even the whole US government POSIX compliance thing never panned out while the plan was to get all government workers using UNIX based computers relatively few did many simply needed to use typical office productivity programs like word processing and spreadsheets which were things UNIX wasn't terribly user-friendly at so Doss and Windows still managed to count government offices as part of its market share the icing on the cake happening in 1993 when Windows NT became POSIX compliant and beyond those reasons there were two things working in parallel that ultimately sealed AO X's fate first was Apple's transition to the PowerPC platform aox had been written specifically around Mac's that used motorola 6800 to get aox running on it would have involved a massive rewrite of the software for a while this was actually expected to occur in late 1991 Apple said a UX version 4 would be released around 1994 and run on machines produced by Apple and IBM part of that whole infamous agreement rabbit-hole story thing but at that time they were still on a UX version too and Apple had done very little marketing of that operating system meanwhile improvements were still being made to the classic Mac OS such as system 7 which was released in May of 1991 and that's the second thing that really killed aux Apple simply didn't focus on it even though for a time it was considered the replacement for the Mac OS it was never treated like it other OS projects continued or cropped up since aux has launched there were no fewer than four attempts to define a new future for the Mac before Apple finally pulled it off in the late 90s over time Apple had become very dysfunctional and aox simply fell by the wayside its final release was version 3.1 dot one from 1995 it was primarily intended for a machine called the workgroup server 95 which was really just a tweaked Quadra 950 it's hard to say just how many aux systems actually ended up in use but by the turn of the millennium it had largely become forgotten yet just a few short years after its first attempt at a UNIX based operating system had fizzled out Apple saw much more success the second time around if you liked the video I'd appreciate a thumbs up and be sure to subscribe you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at this does not come and as always thanks for watching you [Music]

Channel: This Does Not Compute

Views: 304,992

Keywords: Apple, Mac, A/UX, UNIX, AT&T, System V, BSD, operating system, computer, computing, retro computing, IBM, Macintosh, ROM, Motorola, POSIX, NIST, Microsoft, Windows, This Does Not Compute

Id: nwrTTXOg-KI

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 03 2020