AU/X thoughts

I wrote this a while back, but found it in the drafts bucket so I apparently never sent it... 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. 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 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). 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.