I wrote this a while back, but found it in the drafts bucket so I
apparently never sent it...
> A/UX has (had?) its warts...
Warts like a toad with skin cancer.
It was based on SVR2 (another quick-n-dirty port from Unisoft, the goto
guys for "I got an mc68k, I need to ship Unix next week and the budget is
tight"), which was already 4 years old when A/UX was released (SVR4 shipped
a couple of months after A/UX). Various bits of SVR3 and BSD were bolted
on with different degrees of frankensteinisms. Some apps were newish
versions, some were ancient R2 versions (like UUCP, important at the time),
so moving between Unixes was frustrating. The native dev tools were pretty
awful, networking was flaky (NFS was particularly fun in a dev environment)
and the filesystem seemed to be moderately unstable for most of it's run.
It didn't actually implement all of POSIX (or a bunch of other things) so
porting software was always an adventure. And whenever I tried to use some
neeto-keeno Apple-ism slapped on the top, I was always tripping over some
new-and-different showstopping bug. That's just what I remember 20+ years
down the road.
So, yeah...pretty warty.
The company I worked for at the time hacked our TCSEC B-level technology
into that mess so that Apple could extend the "see...we got POSIX" line to
"see, we got Orange Book evaluated" so they could sell to military &
intelligence customers. So lot's of crawling around in the kernel.
Not pretty. But enough sold to justify the contract.
> Not the best UNIX implementation compared to what we
> have nowadays but in light of its contemporaries it was
> probably no worse than average.
When A/UX came out in 1988, it went up against the likes of SunOS 3.5, Sony
NEWS-OS 3, SGI IRIX 3 and Ultrix 4. I would argue every one of them is a
much better Unix implementation than A/UX. So much better it's really not
even a contest. My daily-driver-at-the-time Sun 3/160 w/ SunOS 3.5 was so
much faster, functional and stable it was physically painful to think "time
to muck with A/UX". Even SVR3.2 was more consistent and stable, if not as
feature-filled (and I really thought layers+dmd5620 was wonderfully clever,
but that's a wild tangent).
To really get to contemporary levels of crappy, you've got to go down to
Xenix. And unlike A/UX, Xenix could run Microsoft Word well.
When A/UX was finally put out of it's misery in 1995, it still ran only on
mc68k, still based on SVR2.2, and was up against Solaris 2.4, OSF/1, Irix
6, UnixWare 2, AIX 4, Ultrix 4.5 and eminently usable versions of Linux and
*BSD, all running on platforms a order of magnitude or two faster than what
A/UX ran on.
> The Mac OS GUI was still single-threaded, cooperative-
> multitasking, no protected-memory System 7.0 with some
> application compatibility issues... so the benefits of UNIX
> weren't really extended throughout.
The much vaunted MacOS emulation layer didn't really show up till version
3, and didn't work particularly well if you didn't have the latest versions
of your applications from mainstream vendors. More than "some" application
issues (as in anything that wasn't written 32-bit clean was a coin toss you
usually lost).
> That all said, I don't see why A/UX would have been any less
> suitable a foundation for Apple's next-generation operating
> system than NeXTstep?
Mercifully no one at Apple even considered going down that road.
A/UX existed so Apple could sell hardware to the Federal sector. Even
though the A/UX team looked around for other markets, it was a checkbox
product and it never had any more mindshare with Apple senior management
than that. And it shows.
On 2014-07-09 02:22, cctech-request at classiccmp.org wrote:
> Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2014 14:22:40 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com>
> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Subject: Re: best dos machine
> Message-ID: <20140708142144.O37762 at shell.lmi.net>
> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
> (IBM never called it "motherboard" due to use of the word "mother..." <snip> Fixed drive (IBM didn't called it a "hard" drive)
On Tue, 8 Jul 2014, A. P. Garcia wrote:
> and don't forget to use our favorite numbering system, hexidecimal, because ibm was too prudent to call it sexadecimal...
"FIXED" disk?? "FIXED" In a veterinary context??!?
No - "Fixed" as opposed to "Removable"
Remember big-boy machines had disk packs (Winchesters, etc) that you
swapped in and out.
In DEC speak: RK05s, RP0x and so forth.
And btw: the IBM XT originally came with 5.25" floppies the fixed hard
drive came later.
Dave.
I posted a couple more vintage computing videos to Youtube:
1. http://youtu.be/N12pQBiRd7A
Raw video of John Maniotes of Purdue-Calumet describing the IBM 1620
software library donated to the IBM 1620 Restoration Project at CHM.
2. http://youtu.be/ZQzDSOXHd70
Video of a XDS Sigma-9 and Sigma-6 mainframes with associated peripherals.
Enjoy!
--
Lee Courtney
From: John Wilson <wilson at dbit.com>
> It seems as if 32-bit API support for PAE kind of didn't happen -- wasn't
> AWE32 supposed to be a thing on Win32? I couldn't make it work in real
> life. And I couldn't find a Linux equivalent.
John...I probably don't understand your use case, but Linux has had pretty
robust PAE kernel support for a while. User space apps are of course still
limited to 4G-ish, but the kernel can see up to 64G. I've used it on
bigmem servers that had to run legacy apps that had heartburn with 64-bit
distros. There were a couple of things that were weird (I seem to recall
issues with vmalloc()...it's been a while), but generally worked as
expected.
KJ
Hi,
I realise not everyone on this list is into events like this but I must
admit to having fun exploring my OSI C4P as part of this competition. Some
classiccmp people have already helped me with this (e.g. Dave, Philip Lord)
and progress thus far has been good.
Anyway, I thought I'd post the link showing the sequence of events here for
those who might be interested (warning..it's long and will get longer).
http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2014-06-30-fixing-C4P-ram-expansio…
When I started this project, I had some difficulty figuring out those
jumpers on the 527 RAM board. By chance, I was flipping through "The first
book of the Ohio Scientific Computer" last night and lo and behold, there
was a few pages devoted to this. However, these pages were not mentioned
in the index, which is why I missed it! In fact, there is a whole section
missing from the index!
Had I known that section was there it would have saved me much
head-scratching.
Gotta love OSI's rough and ready documentation!
Terry (Tez)
I know some people don't take kindly to people posting advertisements about things they wish to sell.
Also sometimes they don't like postings that are not considered "on-topic"
So I created a sub-reddit on reddit for people to look and post items for computer collecting.?
http://www.reddit.com/r/computercollecting/
You will see events, sub reddits and lots of craigslist and other ads for machines that are for sale.
There are two other sub-reddits that may be of interest
The Vintage Computing Sub-Reddit
============================================
http://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/
The Retro Battle Stations Sub-Reddit
=============================================
https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/
Please feel free to come and contribute.?
>
>P.S., and not for the OP: Flames about top-posting will be redirected
>to /dev/null. Take your flames to Google for making it the Gmail
>default and making cut-and-paste so unusable on Android.
>
My grandfather used to say "A bad workman blames his tools".
Regards,
Peter Coghlan.
Does any one know if there's a copy of the PDP-11/70 Processor
Handbook somewhere out there on the intertubes? Manx says no,
similarly looking on BitSavers finds nothing.
Cheers,
Christian
--
Christian M. Gauger-Cosgrove
STCKON08DS0
Contact information available upon request.
