9 Jun
2014
9 Jun
'14
1:52 p.m.
A/UX on a WGS 95 with the PDS card maxed with 512KB cache is the fastest 68k
file server I have played around with in my collection. A/UX 3 as a desktop
machine is like using OS 7.01, a bit limited.
-----Original Message-----
From: Sean Caron
Sent: Monday, June 09, 2014 3:36 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts ; Sean Caron
Subject: Re: The Mac inspired loyalty - was Re: Least PC-Compatible MS-DOS
machines?
A/UX has (had?) its warts... Not the best UNIX implementation compared to
what we have nowadays but in light of its contemporaries it was probably no
worse than average. 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 claim was that A/UX made for a more performant fileserver, but
honestly, a Quadra 800 running System 7.5.0 feels quicker and more
responsive than A/UX running on a WGS 95 to me? Of course, System 7.5.0 was
a few years down the line... so I suppose it had improvements in its' own
right... To be fair, I should probably compare A/UX to System 7 or 7.1
running on bare metal. Nevertheless, this is mostly controlling for hard
disk, amount of memory available and so forth.
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? At
the time, NeXTstep has criticisms of its own; it was resource-intensive
(Mach still feels like a hog no matter how modern the hardware) and the
UNIX implementation there wasn't particularly complete or astounding
either...
You did have the OpenStep APIs and toolkits; that was always believed to be
the best part of NeXT... Apple didn't really have an equivalent to that in
OpenDoc or the historical Mac Toolbox. But I've never been a fan of ObjC
anyway ;)
I'm no Apple insider but I could totally see an alternate universe where
Macs are running an operating system with a Classic-like GUI and a
monolithic UNIX kernel underneath. I bet in practice, it would have run
faster than Rhapsody, and that great, easy-to-understand UI gestalt Apple
was known for could have remained unsullied :)
Best,
Sean
On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 6:00 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
On 8 June 2014 00:22, Ken Seefried <seefriek at
gmail.com> wrote:
---
This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is
active.
http://www.avast.com
AU/X was a pretty awful Unix cobbled together to
meet a narrow market
need
unrelated to the markets Copeland was intended to
address. It's
singular
grace was it let Apple say with a straight face "yes, you can run Unix
on
our hardware" (and to a lesser extent, say "and see, it looks pretty
like a
Mac"). It wasn't a contender in the
Unix market, much less the
"platform
to take Apple to the next level" market.
Interesting. In what way was it pretty awful?
In the mid-1990s Apple needed a proper grown-up OS to face up to the
threat of Windows 95, which for all its faults, was a 32-bit OS where
it counted, which could preemptively multitask both DOS and 16-bit
Windows apps, along with its own new 32-bit apps, with a decent GUI.
Microsoft's long-term plan was NT and it spent from 1993 to 2000
gradually improving NT while selling Win9x to keep people going until
the clean new OS was ready.
Apple tried to create a replacement for MacOS and failed; in the end,
it bought one in.
A/UX was a proper grown-up 32-bit OS with memory protection and
preemptive multitasking. It ran (some) classic Mac apps, had a Mac GUI
but was Unix underneath.
A decade later, Apple bought in... a proper grown-up 32-bit OS with
memory protection and preemptive multitasking. After a lot of work, it
ran (some) classic Mac apps, had a Mac GUI but was Unix underneath.
So how was A/UX unsuitable?
I'm genuinely curious - I'm not saying you're wrong, just that with
hindsight it seems obvious, but I don't remember anyone thinking of it
at the time.
--
Liam Proven * Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk * GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
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