Apple A/UX

~ the last words ~

i missed a/ux. it died three years before i first plugged a modem into a phone jack in ankara. by the time i was on a 33.6k ttnet line in '98 reading about old apple hardware on usenet, a/ux was already a dead branch of the macintosh family tree, a thing the old guys mentioned when explaining why mac os x had a unix kernel underneath.

a/ux shipped in february 1988 at the uniforum conference, seven months late, for the macintosh ii. it was at&t unix system v point 2 point 2 with bsd networking on top, stitched into a toolbox that could open a regular mac classic application inside a unix process. the trick was the startup environment that let the mac side talk to the unix side. for a stretch it was the only way to get a real unix workstation that could also run system 7 inside a window.

version 3.0 in 1992 was the high water mark, the most capable mac-running unix any vendor shipped that decade. then apple's operating system strategy collapsed in stages. taligent fell apart in december 1995 and copland got cancelled across 1996. in september 1995 a/ux 3.1.1 shipped as the last release. fourteen months later apple bought next for what became mac os x.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

a/ux ran on a narrow slice of macintosh hardware: the ii line and the quadras that had a 68k processor with an fpu and a pmmu. the powerpc transition ended that. apple did not port a/ux to powerpc. it was already clear by 1994 that the company would need a real next-generation operating system and a/ux was not it. the cleanest way to describe the product is that it was apple's experiment with what would happen if you bolted a unix kernel under the classic mac toolbox and shipped the result as a workstation product. it sold to a handful of universities and a few cad shops with us-federal procurement contracts.

~ what got buried with it ~

the counterfactual is the part the apple history forums still argue about. if apple had picked a/ux as the basis for the next-generation mac os in 1995 instead of buying next in december 1996, the powerpc port would have been done in-house and mac os x would have been a system v derivative. instead the company picked mach and bsd through next, jobs came back, and the entire arc from os x server 1.0 in 1999 through ios was built on the part of the bet that was not a/ux. the system v branch of the macintosh family tree just stops in 1995.

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