Apple A/UX: The First UNIX Mac OS!

[@ThisDoesNotCompute]

You may be inclined to think that A/UX ended up serving as the basis for Mac OS X. It didn't...but the history of OS X is something we'll dive into another time.

[@PenguinRevolution]

I always thought A/UX was an interesting Topic. It's amazing how many people haven't heard about it. I always liked the unique way they chose to design it, it's a shame it never took off.

[@TheFlyingScotsmanTV]

Spent most of the 90s developing NeXTSTEP, then Openstep, and finally WebObjects code in 2000 (on OSX Server on Macintosh hardware). EOF and Interface Builder were lightyears ahead of it's time. Happy days. When Jobs went back to Apple in 96 or so I couldn't wait to see what happened. Nearly 25 years later I'm still a NeXTSTEP user in my mind (all mac/OSX household) - though with every passing iteration it gets more like crappy iOS :-(

[@TheFlyingScotsmanTV]

Also - I will say I worked in 1990 on at BT research laboratories - we had possibly the largest network of macintoshes in the world on apple talk at the time - certainly over 1000. I've still got 3 of them in the garage :-)

[@alextirrellRI]

You should look into Apple AIX also.

[@SteveAbrahall]

@@TheFlyingScotsmanTV The largest 2 apple netwoks / sites were Boeing and Nortel (which I think was the worlds sencond largest apple talk network) I worked as a contractor for Nortel for a while and it was mind blowing the size of the apple talk network - I remember this was before the web took off the finder had connections to nearly every conutry on earth - people in Australia would be working on spread sheets on servers in Singapore it was crazy but it worked!

[@PeterGort]

I remember when I worked for Apple Australia around the turn of the century, coming across a BOOK of floppy disks, it was A/UX 2.0 and it came as 20+ floppy disks. We successfully installed it on a IIci that we had lying around at the time, it took the better part of a day to install it. Amongst other things, kernel extensions did not exist, but the OS had the capability of recompiling it's kernel on the fly, the administrator could tell it to recompile the kernel to include certain features (like networking), and it did so on the spot and advised the administrator to reboot once it had completed. It had a seriously brilliant utility called "Commando" that was a graphical interface to generate a command for the command line to execute, including graphical pickers for all the different command line option flags for each of the commands. It also used a case-sensitive file system.

[@ericwood3709]

I happen to have a IIci and am tempted to give AU/X a go on it.

[@jakobole]

What! I'll be damned!

[@buserror]

Commando was also part of MPW, I thought it was awesome, MUCH better than any manual page!

[@sudq69]

i heard kernel compiling and taking "the better part of the day" to install it- and that reminded me of gentoo linux

[@RokeJulianLockhart.s13ouq]

That's a better experience than modern Linux.

[@davedujour1]

A/UX was one of the first UNIX variants I ever supported in my career as a UNIX admin. This was back at a phone book publishing company in 1996. It ran alongside some System V clones. The most interesting thing I remember from A/UX was when the hard drive crashed and we had to get the filesystem table rebuilt without access to a real editor because the filesystem wasn't mounted. No vi, no emacs. So my coworker and I had to learn "ed" on the fly and it sucked. But we eventually got everything back up somehow.

[@tedboggs4569]

I worked at a startup ISP in 1995 called A World of Difference (AWOD) in Charleston, SC. One of the first, if not the first, servers we setup was a Mac IIci running A/UX. It had a 50MHz CPU upgrade and probably the maximum RAM we could stuff in it. It handled DNS, Mail, and News (NNTP) among other things. It was pretty reliable, at least for the time.

[@xnonsuchx]

MultiFinder was often called "MultiCrasher" at the time. Atari also had an actual AT&T UNIX System V Release 4 ported to ST computers.

[@alerey4363]

M.A.C.I.N.T.O.S.H. = most applications crash if not the operating system hangs (a very true statement back in those classic os days)

[@Citizen_Se7en]

Atari!?!?!? WOW!!!

[@mmille10]

The Sys. V release from Atari was for the TT030 (their first 68030 model). It ran on a slightly modified model they called the TT/X, though I think the only difference was it contained a display card that could drive a 19" monochrome monitor. The card probably plugged into its one expansion slot. It ran Unix with X/Windows. I remember being really excited by this at the time, but the TT/X was short-lived. Atari only sold it for several months in 1991, and then cancelled it. Interestingly, in the early '90s, it became possible to run a Unix-like environment on an ST (their 68000 line) using Eric Smith's open source MiNT OS. It was even possible to run X/Windows on it, if you had at least 4 MB of memory. A hard drive was really necessary to have a nice experience with it. MiNT ended up becoming the kernel of Atari's last computer, the Falcon030, which, along with Multi-AES, gave it the ability to pre-emptively multitask GEM programs. The Falcon was released in 1992. I installed MiNT on my Mega STe in 1993, and almost everything about it felt like Unix (running a complete complement of GNU tools helped a lot). The one big exception was it didn't support swapping to disk. So, everything--the kernel, all your processes--had to fit into physical memory.

[@valenrn8657]

Commodore also has AT&T UNIX System V Release 4 ported to Amiga computers.

[@erikkarsies4851]

@@mmille10 Unix (or linux) for the normal 68000 Atari's wasn't feasable cause of the lack of a sufficient mmu. There was a cut down version called Minix. I did see Unix in action on a TT in a Atari Shop (more a 'Shack') with a full X-windows system

[@jagardina]

As someone who lived through this era and was working in the computer field I appreciate this history being preserved. Never worked with A/UX but did run Xenix on an IBM PC back in the day.

[@tonycosta3302]

When I was an undergrad at Brown, they has a ton of A/UX machines they used to develop one of the first hypertext publishing systems. This was before NCSA Mosaic came out, and was my first glimpse of the internet to come.

[@zynan]

My primary school had 35 of these Macs on an AppleTalk network for students, and more for teachers. I remember helping my teacher set them up after school. Fun. We had another one (I can’t remember which model), that plugged in to a midi deck and an electric piano keyboard.

[@tjs114]

I had several A/UX Macs when I worked at a DOE lab in the late 1980s into the 1990s. We needed A/UX for running the command software for a Venable power supply that had a whole slew of analyzers attached to it and was used for doing test welds. I remember the Macs started out as plain old Mac IIs, but by the time I left in 94 they have been retrofitted into IIFX models because Venables hadn't ported their software to the new PowerPC chip Apple was using. From what I remember, they ended up migrating to Sun SPARC stations. The US Government's POSIX requisite was only for specific departments; most Government agency's were allowed to select hardware and OS that met their needs. The lab I worked at only transitioned to UNIX in 1993 only for the Cray supercomputers -- and it was AT&T Unix on that machine. And we didn't have to pay any licensing feed to AT&T because our lab was operated for DOE by AT&T.

[@greenefieldmann3014]

I was on a guided tour of Fermilab around 2000, and looked over the shoulder of some people working in front of server racks. They had one of the desktop format Mac models running the familiar terminal screen of AU/X. That's the only time I've ever seen it in the wild.

[@DerekLippold]

I never got to tour Fermilab despite driving past it many times 😭

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

7:33 Actually, Andy Hertzfeldt’s “Switcher” provided something similar in 1985. The GUI was slightly different (only the active app was visible on-screen, others were hidden), but the underlying mechanisms were carried over into his later “Servant”, which Apple bought and made the basis of MultiFinder.

[@scifisurfer8879]

I had Switcher installed and it was interesting, but it really never got around the fundamental problem, which was with all versions of Classic Mac OS, of memory fragmentation. That was pretty much the root cause of crashing, apart from bugs (obviously).

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Yes, memory fragmentation was a definite drawback. As was the fact that the entire low-memory globals area had to be saved and restored on a context switch. You had to choose how much application heap to allocate to a program, and if that wasn’t enough, you had to quit it, change the allocation, and launch it again. Funnily enough, present-day Java apps do their heap allocation in a very similar way ...

[@Sam-tb9xu]

All that hassle manually allocating memory and it still wasn’t protected. As a C programmer just starting out in system 7, I would reboot after every bug fix cycle. Bug fixing alway too twice as long as writing the program I’m those days.

[@chandrab]

@@scifisurfer8879 Even before switcher, there was a program called MultiMac that ran on 512k macs that was amazing, overlapping windows and everything. The author was from france I believe, but was anonymous.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

6:09 Fun fact: the “POSIX” name was thought up by Richard Stallman.

[@nicolareiman9687]

Oh my god and i still wonder why this name is so weird.

[@royh4305]

Poor RMS... wonder how he is doing now, after that sh*tstorm and resigning from MIT and all. :/

[@lordseaworth6055]

@James Morrison Why would you change this topic into something different? We don't care about your people and what they did or did not do.

[@lordseaworth6055]

@James Morrison anything to do with the whole Epstein fiasco. This is about Unix not politics and/or hollywood drama

[@lordseaworth6055]

@James Morrison Cause no one cares about your drama.

[@TarakuT]

Most people didn't know what Unix was back when i was using it. I was probably the only 8 year old that was using Unix. It's amazing that you made this video!

[@mmille10]

I ran into A/UX while I was attending college, in about 1991. A friend was IT administrator for a computer lab at my dorm. It had a mixture of Macs and PCs. A problem we had was that when the lab was started, it wasn't connected to the university's network. So, all most students could do with it was write papers, using word processors, and printers in the lab. He got a PC hooked into the network, so PC users could connect to their university accounts, and use the internet, but he wanted to get a Mac hooked up as well. He got A/UX for a Mac SE-30, and I volunteered to see if I could get it hooked into the network, using an Ethernet card that was plugged into it. I worked with it for probably a couple hours, but I couldn't get it connected. My friend later found out the reason was the NIC was bad. Oh well. It was interesting hearing that A/UX was designed to be compatible with Macintosh applications. I had no idea, though I think I could be excused, given that in A/UX's early days, only 10% of Mac apps. would run on it.

[@AdrianYarrow]

Loved this clip, thanks for making it. When I was starting out my career as a systems admin in the early 90’s I looked after two A/UX servers, one was an SE30 and the other a WGS95. Good times! Thanks for the memories 😊

[@JeffreyGroves]

Back in the late 1980s, Georgia Tech had an A/UX cluster in the basement of the library. I spent quite a lot of time on these machines when the other regular Mac and Sun Machine clusters on campus were full. Back in the 1980s, only few students could afford their own personal computer, so we used shared computers located in clusters across the campus.

[@brookegravitt4117]

hey, i remember the NeXT lab too! wasn’t the Sun lab over in the Rich building?

[@spacewolfjr]

I have waited _years_ to see A/UX in the flesh, thank you!

[@peterfireflylund]

Decades!

[@paulie-g]

@@peterfireflylund There's a working emulator and some disk images for a working system. Worked well enough for me to have a look around.

[@julian.morgan]

Ha! - I had completely forgotten about the shift from Motorola to PowerPC, not that I had any idea or much interest in such details at the time. Like many Apple users in the early days I was just blown away about being able to write, layout and even, to a limited extent, print my own newsletters, leaflets and brochures. At the time the creative freedom and independence was quite revolutionary. My generation, unless specifically trained in computer science at a fairly high level, just assumed only unimaginably clever people actually understood what happened inside the box. Decades later when putting a PC together from DIY components is often significantly less challenging than my kid's Lego kits, I really appreciate the trip down memory lane :)

[@JimLeonard]

Excellent cinematography; thank you for taking the extra time to shoot good video of old CRTs and systems.

[@MagesGuild]

Hahah. I had A/UX v1.0 running years ago on an SE/30 model. I still recall the huge white wall of a box in which the A/UX (factory) package lived, on the shelf of Apple boxes and manuals. Regarding resources, A/UX required more RAM and an extra (external) SCSI HDD that lived under the SE. That machine had three of them (one was a carryover from the 512K model, that used the normal drive bus port, not SCSI!), turning it into a bloody monolith, but we used it for twenty years. One of the drives had system 6.0.8 on it. We tried System 7 for a week or so, before reverting, as it was more demanding than either 6.0.8+MF or A/UX. It's sort of a shame that I didn't whisk that system home at the end of its life as I had done with so many others. I have very fond and remarkably clear memories of using it as a telnet system. On another note, I believe that you can see a Performa model running A/UX 3.x, at one point, in the film 'Jurassic Park'.. You should probably mention the pre-OSX 'Mac OS X Server' OS that Apple flubbed around 1998-9. We had that, too, on a Platinum model G3 tower, for a brief time. Two failed Unix OSes told us to hold off on OSX until Panther rolled out, and after 10.6.x killed Rosetta, we stopped using their products. Several of our servers remain XServe systems running 10.5 or 10.6, to this day.

[@pseudotasuki]

In the period between A/UX and Mac OS X, Apple sold servers running a custom version of IBM's AIX. Not to mention Mac OS X Server 1.0 (AKA Rhapsody). So the modern macOS is arguably their third or fourth Unix.

[@Teluric2]

Mac os cant do mission critical like real unix like aix solaris irix.

[@pseudotasuki]

@@Teluric2 It *is* a "real Unix".

[@scifisurfer8879]

I got a Mac Plus in 1986, and I remember hearing about (though I never actually got to see) A/UX. This video certainly does provoke some thinking about the what-ifs of Apple going full-blown UNIX-based back then. It certainly would have opened up a whole new world for them, particularly once Linus Torvalds' Linux kernel project got off the ground and people were grafting it together with the GNU Project's software. Loved the video!

[@moccamixer]

Now that you mention it: right there was mk linux!

[@livefreeprintguns]

My first real foray into UNIX came in the form of FreeBSD 2.2.6 in the mid-late 90's. What a time it was to be alive!

[@ninja011]

I had an A/UX home server network at home growing up. It was for my grandfather`s home business, all on a bunch of kitted-out Macintosh IIFXs.

[@pascalharris1]

The biggest compatibility problem I’ve found with A/UX 3 is sound. Nearly every application that I’ve tried works - including Insignias SoftPC, and the only exception I’ve found is Apples Disk Copy. That said, except for the most basic toolbox compliant sound, you can expect silence from your Mac. The games will run but you won’t hear anything from them. Other than that though, it’s a great OS - and especially if you’re a Mac and Unix nerd.

[@CarlosLopez-oc9nh]

Thank you for posting this. I remember reading about A/UX but didn't know what ever happened to it, I was a mere teen when it came out and owned my first pc in '95.

[@redmartian]

At 7:12 in the video you can see RSTS running on a PDP-11/70 at Living Computers (Seattle)

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Or possibly RT-11. Or its multi-user variant, TSX-Plus.

[@TimArdan]

This is one of the most interesting videos I've seen on KZbin in a while.

[@jeremytravis360]

The school I worked in had a version of A/UX with a 750 user licence. it cost £16,000 back in 1995. I still have a copy of it somewhere.

[@skirwan78]

Love your videos. They're relaxing and well paced to listen to yet full of pertinent details without getting bogged down. I feel you've found the perfect balance between informing and entertaining. Well done.

[@SSteelification]

if I recall reading that the 68000 cpu itself was quite good at running unix, hence why Sun used it for sunos back in the day

[@MultiPetercool]

The first UNIX implementation on Apple hardware was provided by Microsoft. I worked at a company that had a Lisa with Xenix on it. True story!

[@MegaManNeo]

I find this highly interesting. So far A/UX was only known to me by name which is not much but to see how Apple and Microsoft first messed around with POSIX is fun to imagine since we are so advanced now compared to back then that things just seem as they have always been like that.

[@guspaz]

The first release of what would later become Mac OS X was actually released roughly concurrently with A/UX: NeXTSTEP 0.8 was first shown in 1988, and over the course of 1997 through 2000, was transformed into OS X by way of the Rhapsody and OS X Server projects. They started out with Rhapsody trying to basically just take NeXTSTEP with the UI swapped out for one that looked like MacOS and a compatibility virtual machine for classic mac apps, which later was rebranded "Mac OS X Server", before deciding to do a more major rework that broke backwards compatibility with NeXTSTEP and had a better-integrated compatibility virtual machine as well as compatibility APIs allowing classic mac apps to be more easily ported.

[@RockwellAIM65]

NeXTStep was a whole lot more efficient tho. Rhapsody was slow + OSX was a real poop-dogger in comparison.

[@JeffreyGroves]

This is my memory of NeXTSTEP as well. We had one NeXT machine at Georgia Tech back in the 1988 timeframe. It was kind of lonely in a back hallway of the Rich Building as I remember.

[@RockwellAIM65]

Ahhh another random point. Apple A/UX seemed to need 8 megabytes of RAM to run. NeXTStep could get along with 4 megabytes of RAM! I ran a headless NeXT cube in this configuration as a server. It had a giant resistor on the monitor port with 4 megabytes of RAM in our office. Quite fun. It helped to be clever at managing resources but it did work fine.

[@PotatoFi]

Fantastic video! A good friend of mine just got A/UX running on his SE/30. I’ve just gotten my own SE/30 and CD-ROM drive, and as soon as I repair the logic board, I think it will become my A/UX machine. REALLY looking forward to getting that up and running, and seeing what A/UX can do.

[@alerey4363]

a/ux can do little than playing with some commands; as it's justa a sandboxed bunch of emulated commands running INSIDE macos 6, which is always a sneeze away from crashing with type error 11 bombs which will render the whole unix unusable; apple made that "Unix" as crashable as macos 6 itself, good job apple! no wonder it failed miserably

[@Pyrrho_]

@@alerey4363 This is incorrect. The MacOS compatibility layer (that adds a Finder, Mac GUI and very limited Mac app support) was unstable, especially w/ AU/X 3.n on a SE/30. The POSIX-compliant UNIX underneath was fine.

[@Pyrrho_]

I want an SE/30 myself more than any old Mac to do the same.

[@alerey4363]

@@Pyrrho_ Im sorry but if apple planned to "port" an os like Unix to their crappy os the WORST thing they could do was to put that on top of the unstable bombing classic native os; which btw was slow, super limited in terms of resources (ram, disk, i/o, graphics) plus unstable like house of cards so there u have it, another absolute failure by apple (which btw charged thousands of dollars for that bullshit experiment); only when they decided to switch to Darwin-based osx AND then to intel processors they really had a first class os base

[@Pyrrho_]

@@alerey4363 AU/X didn't run on top of System 6, the Mac Compatibility Layer ran on top of AU/X.

[@MattMcIrvin]

I had a friend who went into Virginia Tech's computer science program around this time, and I recall they'd standardized on everyone getting a Mac II that ran A/UX. For CS students, having a Unix OS on a personal computer was a great thing--this was before Linux existed. The Mac II itself seemed tremendously technically impressive to me, with its 256-color graphics.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

When I first saw one in 1987, the Mac II was the most wonderful machine in the world.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

The Amiga’s HAM was a hack, with severe limitations. The Mac II could do 256 colours simultaneously on-screen without hacks. And then later Apple added “32-Bit QuickDraw”, which could do up to 16 million colours. The Amiga was never able to match that.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

I remember seeing the famous “Mandrill” picture displayed in HAM on an Amiga. It flickered like crazy. And yes, the Amiga’s hardware was a leap forward and a millstone around their necks at the same time. The Mac OS’s more software-intensive architecture turned out to have a longer life.

[@lhpl]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 32 bit colour, while supporting multiple graphics cards with varying resolution and depth as one desktop, allowing windows placed across several screens. Even today, I believe some systems struggle with doing that.

[@eduardorpg64]

Amazing video! I love your style: the way that you speak (that is neither too slow nor too fast), and I never got bored during the video. The facts were quite interesting. Keep up the good work!

[@MentorMoments]

Thanks for the interesting video and a step back in time. I worked in computer accessory development during the later 80s and early 90s with a company called Advanced Gravis Computer Technology. One of the products I brought to the table was the Gravis SuperMouse. It was a 3-button programmable mouse and the only one, to the best of my knowledge, that emulated the traditional 3-button mouse used on a Unix system. We worked with Apple on this and at one point demonstrated our mouse in the Apple booth at trade shops.

[@MichaelPaoli]

Ah, I was A/UX certified! :-) ... one of my very few certifications (mostly 'cause I typically don't bother - but this one was super easy for me and right there for the taking). And for me, it was quite trivial to get certified for A/UX ... I was already very proficient in and familiar with UNIX(/Xenix/...) - had already been using it for years by then. So getting A/UX certified was relatively trivial and fast for me - watch Some Apple A/UX hypercard stack play - mostly redundant with what I already knew, commit a few A/UX specifics to short-term wetware memory (specific hardware models Apple had that supported it - notably minimum requirements, which version of X was included with A/UX at the time - that was probably about it - all or most everything else was basic common UNIX stuff), immediately take the certification test - easy pass - and done. A/UX certified. It was dog slow ... but perhaps somewhat amazingly it mostly worked. I think I only had a relatively few occasions to use it - was in environment supporting retail through fair sized business PC & Apple sales ... very few customers were using A/UX ... and little of it landed in our tech department for, e.g. support or whatever ... but when it did, the techs would be like, "Yeah, let's get Michael, he knows this stuff." - and the A/UX systems would land in my lap, or they'd call on me for assistance with the operating system aspects of it.

[@patrickbetts5504]

In the late 90s, we used an Apple Network Server 500 as webservers that ran AIX 4 that was a Unix version made by IBM, and ran on PowerPC processors. It didn't run macos at all. Didn't stay long. We switched to SGI machines.

[@JimJagielski]

Ahhh... A/UX. I was the editor of the A/UX FAQ and ran jagubox.

[@ThisDoesNotCompute]

Hey Jim! I came across many references to jagubox while researching this episode, and archives of the FAQ came in handy for getting my own installation set up. Thanks for all your work over the years!

[@lhpl]

Hi Jim, I used your wonderful collection of ported software back in the nineties, and it would be impossible to exaggerate how important and useful it was to me and probably most other admins of A/UX servers. Thank you!

[@dsmous]

I ran A/UX on a Workgroup Server 95, a model of the Quadra 950. In 2007.

[@demonicsweaters]

I used to have a bunch of old macs back in the early 2000s, and I tried many times to get A/UX to work as well as Debian 68k and never had luck with either of them.

[@darioperezdario2638]

Very interesting video. You tell a story that I did not know at all. I understand that Microsoft purchased a license for Unix System V from AT&T and sold it under license to other companies, calling that version UNIX: XENIX.

[@MarianneExJohnson]

Great video! I remember seeing A/UX being demoed at a trade show back in the day, and expecting it to eventually become the new MacOS. I was hoping for that because the crashiness of MacOS was particularly annoying for programmers like myself, who would crash our machines pretty much on a daily basis. I read parts of the saga on Usenet and in BYTE magazine as it unfolded, but this video filled in a lot of the blanks.

[@bwc1976]

I remember eagerly awaiting Copland as our savior, and then it fell through and the OS 8 and 9 we got instead were just facelifts of System 7.

[@lhpl]

@@bwc1976 But they were pretty facelifts!

[@vascomanteigas9433]

The idea to build a modern MacOS (after 7) Over a UNIX kernel, which A/UX would be a warming up prototype, was One of ideas but the majority of Apple board do not like that model. Essentially, much of MacOS shenaginans like system extentions would be gone and replaced by UNIX daemons. Also the common Mac User would complain the sudden appearance of terminal tools, and an alien functionality. Even in my imaginary scenario where the Linux kernel would be choosen, features like systemd or cups would need to appear on late 1990, in order to GUI tools actually Change the underlying operating system services.

[@wysoft]

About 15 years ago I managed to get enough stuff scrounged to load A/UX on a IIcx. Had proper video, Ethernet, and max RAM which I think was 48MB, and a 2GB SCSI drive. It ran pretty well and was stable enough that I just left it running in the basement storage/computer room and would telnet into it once in a while to mess with it, try to see if something would compile on it, etc. One day I went to telnet into it and saw it was down. Went into the basement and saw it was off and would not power up. Opened it and found the large caps had burst, leaked all over the main board and corroded it beyond repair. RIP IIcx :(

[@stevedickson4744]

I had one A/UX system on a mac 2 that apple sent us at the phone company in the 80s. I also had a compaq and a sun and a regular apple all on the desk. It didn't suck at all .

[@RamLaska]

REALLY good analysis. A/UX was an odd bird. From my perspective as an undergrad at the time, NextStep stole a LOT of A/UX's Thunder. It was even more user friendly, more powerful, and ran on nicer, but similar hardware.

[@eMorphized]

It was also really hard to port to anything and ran only on hardware that rivaled Sun's offerings in price.

[@doalwa]

Very cool video! I still have a Macintosh IIci in the attic running AUX 3.0.1...haven’t powered it on in 15 years, though. But AUX was such a quirky and interesting system, shame it never really caught on.

[@lhpl]

Please check and remove it's battery if you haven't done so already!

[@junktionfet]

I know I'm a few years late to this video, but man, this was gold. Thank you for the excellent explainer. I learned a ton here

[@orlandoquaranta577]

Nice to se a photo of NIST in Boulder (CO) where I used to work (not on this) and where I still go every now and then. Some of the best in my field are there, very cool place.

[@andrewbrady8564]

Fantastic coverage of the A/UX story!

[@stephenpeters9125]

Wow this is the sort of content that should be on the history channel

[@simianinc]

Wow. I'd forgotten all about A/UX. Thank goodness for NeXTSTEP and OS X

[@SteveFullerBikes]

Good memories. A friend of mine ponied up his own money to purchase A/UX in the very early 90s. I remember the giant line of ring bound manual pages that covered the headboard of his bed. One of my first interactions with UNIX of any sort. Installed and running on an SE/30 he purchased.

[@BrianBoniMakes]

I ran A/UX in a professional graphic arts environment, we got into it when one arrived running an image server software. It was to bridge the mac and unix machines which it did as it ran both protocols. The machine was too small to support very many users and was replaced when Apple upgraded its unix network tools by a VAX server running VMS and a bridge was no longer needed. We also ran the next Apple unix AIX on a huge AWS and that fixed all the problems of A/UX but it didn't run mac os but you didn't need it at that point. At about the same time I also ran MK Linux, MachTen and Be/OS for various reasons which were usually to make one piece of software available to a group of macs. This was also the point that we changed to SGI front ends for any serious work, NextStep machines also started to show up.

[@MR-vj8dn]

What a fantastic presentation. Thank you! I would argue that this video contains the highest resolution images ever taken of SIP RAM. 😄 Oh! Haven't seen them in a while.. Big thanks for brining back memories.

[@WesFanMan]

Wow. Erich Ringewald. I took a job at a company called Tecmar in 1985 as Erich’s replacement. I forgot he had worked on MultiFinder. Thanks for the memory.

[@jovetj]

I've never heard of A/UX either. This was rather interesting. Kinda weird to see Apple style something in the likeness of Big Blue...

[@CapnSlipp]

Despite how unprofitable Apple was from the late 80s to mid 90s, they did work on a lot of cool “experiments”. Things like A/UX and the QuickTake camera are experiments that didn't pan out, while others like HyperCard were beloved and inspired some of the most pervasive tech we use today.

[@WarhavenSC]

@@CapnSlipp They also paid Novell to port Mac OS to x86 during that time. My dad got to see it in action, even though it never fully came to fruition. I remember my dad coming home super excited one day, saying Apple was going to shake up the PC market _again._ He contends that Win95 never would have been a thing had Apple gone through with the release -- but at the same time, Apple might not be selling hardware today either had they done it. Who knows? Also, the original OS X Server still used Classic UI, even though OS X at the time had adopted the new Aqua interface. Was pretty cool, as it harkened back to A/UX.

[@NaokisRC]

@@WarhavenSC From my personal experience of OS 9 atleast, Windows 95/8 felt far more stable and in control. I can use a legacy Windows 98 PC and it will be fine for ages of use but I've had a fresh install of OS 9 on my power mac crash or freeze frequently, almost once per use really.

[@cthulhuhasrisen1009]

That satisfying click as the ram slides into place ❤️

[@PrinceWesterburg]

Cthulhu Has Risen - and £800 vanishes from your bank account

[@vanderaj]

A/UX was great ... when you worked at an Apple reseller, and could get NFR pricing on the PMMU and FPU for a second hand Mac II you bought cheaply from the reseller, and NFR pricing for A/UX. Even back then, NFR (not for resale) pricing on A/UX was nearly $400 AUD, which was a LOT on money back then. I love my A/UX 3.0 experience, and the Unix experience led to a sys admin career, but so little Mac software ran on it, that I basically had to dual boot, and I'm pretty sure this is the reason that by the time System 7.5 came out, A/UX was truly doomed. Technically, brilliant, and preceded Carbon by a LOT, but honestly for the lack of horse power of a Mac II, it performed more than acceptably in Unix tasks at the time.

[@bichwattefaq]

What is NFR? Not for resale?

[@darkwinter6028]

Some of those technical limitations were the direct fault of Steve Jobs... he wanted an appliance, not a platform. It wasn’t until he got shoved out the door, and went through the experience of creating the NeXT system that he saw the light...

[@kirishima638]

Not really. The only way to fit a real GUI OS into 128K of RAM with a high resolutiion display back in 83/84 was to bake half of it into ROM. You can blame Jobs for a lot of things but not this.

[@darkwinter6028]

Kiyoshi Kirishima - Actually, I can blame both him and Jef Raskin. See www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Diagnostic_Port.txt

[@flaggerify]

He was long gone before A/UX was created

[@leocomerford]

Jobs had been converted to the idea of a Unix machine with a Mac user interface (and a simple bootloader rather than a ROM containing much of the OS) before he left the company. In fact he had been leading a group inside Apple with a mandate to produce one: lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-precursor-mac-ii-next-cube/ translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aventure-apple.com%2Fle-big-mac-apple%2F . (NeXT was basically his attempt to do the same thing, only outside Apple this time.) However it seems that he was still committed to the idea of an all-in-one Mac without much expandability, certainly internal expandability.

[@ivankintober7561]

there huge difference between pure unix vs BSD unix....BSD is more improved version of ATT VERSION OF UNIX that SUN took over and continue development...reason BSD is better choice....net drivers was superior than ATT UNIX version.....hence too many bugs under ATT version that SUN have to iron it out with many upcomming SUN OS patches until become SOLARIS ....NO WONDER SOLARIS WAS VERY BEHIND DUE TO UNIX SYSTEM 5 ATT MADE WAS CRAP....WHILE BSD 4.4 WAS THE FUTURE FOR APPLE AND PC'S WITH FREEBSD...THEN DRAGONFLYBSD.....WITH OWNED KERNEL AS STEVE JOBS DID...WAS AMAZING WITH MAKING MAC KERNEL IS BASED ON DARWIN

[@makerofstartup7902]

Many retro video, and on that time actual facts - I love it! Tank you!

[@Billy123bobzzz]

Great job, nice to see a video on Apple that is accurate and unbiased. I used these system back in the day so this was rather nostalgic for me.

[@acalthu]

Thus, MACINTOSH = Many Applications Crash, If Not, The Operating System Hangs.

[@deathdoor]

Finally, finally! A video that talks for real about the differences between architectures.

[@Lysander-Spooner]

Colin, great info. I am old enough to have experienced this release when it was new. My first Mac was the 1984 512K model. Things moved really slowly back then!

[@ADADIZZLE]

My first Machintosh was the same but I was a poor kid and my grandmother gave me her old work computer. I learned how to code on this thing in 2001 I was 13.

[@moccamixer]

@@ADADIZZLEHyperCard? 😜

[@xIXIRobIXIx]

missed all your informational videos :) glad You're back

[@lillywho]

So what about those Unix Wars? Can we expect a video on those as well?

[@scarboroughyork]

Great video, however the photo at 07:12 is VMS via DIGITAL System, it looks like DOS, filenames 8.3, its not UNIX.

[@seanodonnell3683]

Top job Colin, I thoroghly enjoyed this!

[@TheSulross]

Then Linus Torvalds, working on a PC running MINIX (an academic teaching OS modeled after UNIX, but targeted at the time to 8086 real mode CPU) wrote a new UNIX-like OS. He targeted the Intel 80386 CPU, which had protected mode for kernel operation and a user mode for user applications, and an integrated MMU for doing page mapping of memory. Eventually this OS went on to be called Linux, licensed under GNU, support the POSIX API and the X-Windows GUI. And eventually this UNIX-like OS exceeded all other variants of UNIX (including BSD) in industry importance and dominance. One guy, a college student, succeeded wildly at doing what Apple failed very miserably at - bring a UNIX-like OS to the masses.

[@mrkitty777]

The entire GNU suit existed like the GCC compiler and all commands for a terminal already existed in it. It's GNU Linux that was needing a kernel and Linus was there just in time to harvest all work and make it work. Thousands of programmers started working together because of Linus and Linus is a good dictator in this regard. Linus didn't kill people but Bill G did kill a lot. In the Linux community most projects have a dictator. The dictator decides to merge pull request w.g. And yes it's really called dictator.

[@punchar4161]

Enjoyed every part of this documentary. Thankyou.

[@darioperezdario2638]

I have never been a big fan of Apple computers, because when I was a child and a teenager there were simply very few people in my country who used them, due to their high cost. Here in Argentina, in the 1990s, most of them used PCs. I was only really interested and liked from 1999 onwards, when they appreciated the G3 Imacs. Since then I liked them and now I have a Power Mac 64 QuikSilver from 2004 and a Power Mac G3.

[@macmuseum]

Fascinating! Thoroughly enjoyed the video; thank you!

[@dogcowrph]

Feel free to do as many old Mac topics as you can. I got a Mac Plus in 1986 and have used a Mac ever since.

[@rabidbigdog]

A/UX on a IIci was a delight.

[@OldAussieAds]

This is a great video. I sometimes wonder what would have had happened if A/UX had become the default Mac OS back in the 80s - or at least in the 90s when resources weren't as scarce. If this got mainstream attention from Apple it would have kicked butt!

[@tenthconcept]

Apple by far has the least understood, underrated, and most interesting operating system history out there. Apple is honestly the worlds biggest UNIX distributor. UNIX roots go back YEARS before Linux, and they are the possibly the last American manufacturer working to integrate the entire system. Hardware, software, hard disk, file system. processors, kernel, applications, frameworks, programming languages, APIs, ... They really make the entire widget, and will not compromise on this stuff. I have about 6 Macs from 1987 to the present. They all still work!

[@Teluric2]

Any user who has used macs that long must love apple unconditionally Apple is a dwarf in the profesional, / engineering world. Apple doesnt exist in the server worls.

[@PenguinRevolution]

This is a great Historical video Collin. I love how you cover so many historical topics on your channel.

[@henrikwannheden7114]

Apple also developed and released MkLinux, a Mach kernel based Linux system for PowerPC based Macs. It became a bit redundant when Apple bought NeXT less than half a year after MkLinux's first release. It used the same kernel as Mac OS X though..

[@eMorphized]

It's not Linux if it doesn't run Linux. If it runs Mach and BSD, it's a Darwin system.

[@henrikwannheden7114]

@@eMorphized MkLinux ran the Linux kernel as a service under the Mach kernel (akin to a hypervisor, I guess?) and just because something is based on BSD (which MkLinux is not) and Mach it isn't necessarily Darwin. Darwin is a very specific operating system .

[@RockwellAIM65]

I was going to do a very similar video. You did great. You need to follow this up with A/UX 2.0 vs A/UX 3.0, running on machines from the Mac II to the Mac IIfx for hte former, and Quadra and Workgroup Servers for the latter. THe Mac II required a PMMU to be added in order to run A/UX. It was a very neat system. However, NeXT crushed them... which is sad... because NeXT crushed noone. Until they crushed Apple, with the NeXTStep->Mac OS X transition. Oh the irony! Good luck on a followup to this.

[@scifisurfer8879]

I've never seen anything about the actual _events_ of Steve Jobs' so-called "time in the wilderness" but evidently he must have been learning a lot about other underpinning OS platforms because he ultimately chose BSD upon which to base NeXT OS. It would be fantastic to see a video done on that.

[@Sam-tb9xu]

I’d be very interested in how he sold Bloomberg on NextOS for the Bloomberg terminals.

[@station2station544]

trim that display to the right a little.:). I use to be a Field Engineer for Apple back in the Scully days. I remember seeing apple Workgroup Servers in the field from time to time - mostly at large school districts.

[@jaimeduncan6167]

I am amazed by the quality of the video and the information presented. It seems coming from a different age, when stuff like Byte were a thing.

[@numericalcode]

This video is packed with great history!

[@HowieIsaacks]

The acquisition of NeXT brought UNIX to the Mac. Today all of Apple's products run UNIX. I love it!

[@scifisurfer8879]

Merging NeXT OS into Apple's OS development stream was without a doubt the single best technological thing Apple did vis a vis desktop computers, because without that they wouldn't have had a platform for very much longer. I would introducing the iPod as second, and switching to x86 *_and_* coming out with the iPhone are I think tied for third.

[@tenthconcept]

How can you say this after watching this video? It’s clear that A/UX brought UNIX to the Macintosh a full 10 - 12 years before NeXT.

[@kitander6921]

A/UX predates NextStep.

[@guaposneeze]

This is fairly pedantic, but might be somewhat interesting context. The video starts by saying that after a few years, Apple was "already" looking to replace its operating system. I think this is projecting modern perspectives onto the early 80's. The Lisa is a much unloved, mostly forgotten computer from 1983 that is mostly remembered as a sort of beta test for the Mac. But at the time, there weren't any long lived architectures for home computers. Software vendors for the home market were practically non existent (Microsoft literally made a name for themselves in this era by being a company that specifically wrote software for microcomputers.) The Lisa was actually surprisingly advanced in retrospect, with multiple processes, a proper filesystem, and even stuff like named pipes for interprocess communication through the filesystem. Stuff that Classic Mac OS could never manage, even in the 90's. But the Lisa didn't really support developers writing new software for the GUI environment. The market barely existed, so Apple didn't have any interest in catering to it. They planned to make the Lisa, give it a bunch of features, and then basically throw it away a few years later and replace it with something else because there would be no need for backwards compatibility. The Macintosh was released as a more open platform so you could buy third party software for it, but in 1984 nobody really had any old software they would want to bring to a new machine. So in 1984, Apple was basically planning on throwing away the Macintosh and replacing it with a new platform with better, newer software. That's part of the reason the platform had so many short sighted hacks that were hard to work around in later years. Not everybody saw the rise of the independent software vendor in the 80's as a foregone conclusion, and Apple was sort of caught off guard by the fact that they needed to make new models of Macintosh going forward. So if you had asked somebody in 1984 at the Mac launch about the possibility of Apple working on a whole different OS by 1987, they would most likely have considered it pretty unsurprising. Apple was already working on at least for different incompatible platforms at the time in the Apple II, Apple III, Lisa, and new Macintosh. How remarkable would one more be a few years on? Anyhow, long comment for nit picking a small statement, I know. But home computer OS's when the Mac launched were small dinky things that could be worked on relatively quickly, didn't need many features, and didn't need much backwards compatibility. So at the time it wasn't so much, "already" as "what took so long?" The internal machinations that stifled progress and created a stable platform by accident are nearly as interesting as the attempts to modernize that platform with stuff like AUX.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

The Lisa was advanced, but complex, expensive and slow. The (lack of) speed was partly due to hardware (having only a 5MHz CPU) and partly due to software (written in Pascal). Part of the development of the Macintosh involved taking the QuickDraw graphics engine originally created for the Lisa, and rewriting it in tight assembly-language code (plus adding a few enhancements). The original compiled Pascal code took 160K of RAM on the Lisa; on the original Mac, it was squeezed into just 22K.

[@zincmann]

Great mini documentary Colin! Never been a Mac fan but you do a great job educating those who are not.

[@Hyvelez]

Amazing video! Have looking for good videos on Apple A/UX, but haven't found any good ones until this one randomly showed up at the the youtube front page.

[@2.7petabytes]

Fantastic delivery and history! Many thanks! Can’t wait to hear more concerning further Apple development over the years

[@earlyburg]

Every developer stands on the shoulders of the developers who came before them, and will be instrumental in helping future developers take it to the next level.

[@WillieMatthews]

I never knew apple tried to go to Unix before OSX. This was a very interesting video.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

6:09 Looks like NIST was still called NBS at that point (as per the newspaper article).

[@mitchelvalentino1569]

Awesome video! I love Apple history, and I love Unix. Thank you!

[@stanguay169]

Excellent and I'm waiting for Part 2 : OS X !

[@oziphantom9465]

sounds like A/UX was the os/2 warp of the mac. You use os/2 to get a better windows 3.1, in that it can run multiple 3.1 applications in isolation. Or you could have just bought an Amiga in 85 and got multitasking and colour ;)

[@frankperdue6585]

I remember lusting after A/UX , I got those same vibes when I installed NetBSD on an SE30 🤘

[@RockwellAIM65]

Nice memory jog there! Any particular install/version that you favor?

[@frankperdue6585]

@@RockwellAIM65 I just remember about 15 years ago I got an SE 30(for $15 at Goodwill) and I was so excited to install Net BSD.... But the clock battery was dead and as you know Unix kind of depends on the clock. Long live the all-in-one Macs 🤘🏻🤘🏻

[@stevehascall4441]

The A/UX team crafted a pretty neat OS. The IIfx probably deserves a mention too, I think it was the closest thing to a UNIX workstation Apple made in the 68k era. Never had one myself, but a low end SPARC box would run circles around a Quadra’s I/O. Any mention of NT’s POSIX implementation should involve spitting on the ground. Weirdnix was far too polite a term.

[@thewacokidd06]

I think you might need to dive into the “Next” OS before going into too much detail on OSX. Apple management was crazy for firing Jobs, but I don’t think OSX would be the same if he hadn’t.

[@scifisurfer8879]

Steve Jobs himself has said his departure from Apple and going off into the wilderness was something he kind of needed. Also, he made the most of his time away in terms of learning credible business leadership skills. As much of a hardcore Macintosh person as I have been most of my computing life, in retrospect I think Apple wouldn't have survived Steve's continued leadership. He had a monomaniacal focus on the Macintosh project and would have taken Apple right down the drain. Remember that at the time the Macintosh was _not_ Apple's flagship or even their premier product. That honor went to the Apple II platform. The Apple II was the real breadwinner at the time, and I think Steve would have completely torn it up if left to his own devices. That said, none of Steve's replacements were all that good. Absolutely none of them had the full, necessary feel for the technology world, though possibly John Sculley was the least worst of the lot.