It's a Unix System! I know this!

@polerix

2 жыл бұрын

Clever girl

@BlazingRushX

Жыл бұрын

Jurassic Park referens?!1!1

@charliekahn4205

Жыл бұрын

Now home to the slowest FSV install ever

@Sebs4247

Жыл бұрын

BRUHHH IT SAYS IT IN THE VIDEO 😐

@markteague8889

Жыл бұрын

Only in California could school children have been familiar with a Unix graphical workstation in that era.

A/UX definitely has strong geek appeal, obscure Unices always do.

@WalnutSpice

2 жыл бұрын

If I remember correctly, Later versions of OS/2 (while still under Microsoft) and later, Win NT 3 betas were compiled with Unix. Guess Microsoft couldn't get the job done with their own tools

@oscarcharliezulu

2 жыл бұрын

@@WalnutSpice wasn’t posix compliance a goal of the original NT kernel?

@mattb154

2 жыл бұрын

@@oscarcharliezulu Not sure about that, but MS quietly released a line of "Services For Unix" add-ons back in the NT4 and 2000 days (maybe even 2k3), so at the very least it was on their mind. There is a funny anecdote, possibly apocryphal, about David Korn confronting someone from MS about the shell implementation they were planning on shipping.

@oscarcharliezulu

2 жыл бұрын

@@mattb154 yeah I think you’re right looking back… the MS dev team had DEC VMS developers in it as well.

@zoomosis

2 жыл бұрын

​@@WalnutSpice They still used their own tools. The pre-release versions of OS/2 1.0 could be built under Microsoft's XENIX using their internal XENIX port of Microsoft C 5.x, but once OS/2 was stable they ported MSC 5.0 (and later MSC 6.0) to it, so it became self-hosting. Microsoft ditched XENIX in 1989 after they saw the future in OS/2. Then the OS/2 split with IBM happened in early 1991. Microsoft had rough pre-release versions of what would become Windows NT 3.1 running later that same year. They were built under OS/2 1.3 using an internal version of Microsoft C 6.0 modified with 386 instruction support (CL386), but again, once NT became stable it, CL386 was ported to it and it became self-hosting.

i love that Drauga1 reference :D

@Teguh_70

2 жыл бұрын

Druaga1

Apple misspelled "compatability" at 18:18. Do you think it's too late to submit a bug report?

@ActionRetro

2 жыл бұрын

🤣

@thomasbonse

2 жыл бұрын

Nah

@HuntingKingYT

Жыл бұрын

Because it's incompatable with X11

@JonRowlison

Жыл бұрын

A bug report on that now would get about the same attention as it would have gotten in 1994. :)

If you truly channeled your inner Druaga1, this video would've been twice as long as everything goes horribly wrong. :P

I worked at Apple in 94 and was involved in a project to test a data warehousing app on A/UX. There was a much bigger box than yours that A/UX was running on, unfortunately I can’t remember the details as I wasn’t expecting to remember. I do recall that our project was cancelled because a not yet public decision had been made to shelve A/UX, even though we were making good progress at the time. The data warehouse was then moved to another Unix vendors system (Apple used multiple Unix providers in their data centre as well as VMS). Great video!

@ActionRetro

2 жыл бұрын

Wow that's so cool! Thanks for sharing!

@robgeheim4842

Жыл бұрын

That must have been a quadra 950 or an aws95, an upgraded 950 with a scsi cached interface.

I was on a Military project for Transcom that ran A/UX, cheaper than the Sun Sparc and ran MS Office. Honeywell sold them. Third party network card drivers were difficult, we endup writing our own device drivers (in C) and adding them to the kernel. I think I got the source code for a driver from Apple and modified it with the source code for SCO driver. BTW - I remember that A/UX made a good AppleTalk ethernet router. I had it at home on my IIfx for years after and it provided internet to all my old macs without an ethernet plug, I could telnet (MUDD) or ftp from anything that could run OS 6. There was an extension to do IP over AppleTalk.

On older UNIX style systems, it's been my experience that if you don't have the Ethernet cable connected when the networking scripts try to bring the interfaces up, the interface won't come up. You could probably have done 'ifconfig ae0 up' with the cable connected to the NuBus card and had it work.

@robgeheim4842

Жыл бұрын

Probably missing the famous 'newconfig -v bnet' command

Oh, so now you've got GCC on A/UX, you can start porting NetSurf!

"We have our ls, our ls -a..." To be fair this is exactly how I demo a working Linux install to people. What more do you really need?

@slashtiger1

2 жыл бұрын

I prefer *ls -la* to be honest... :D

@kargaroc386

2 жыл бұрын

ls -ash

@thomasbonse

2 жыл бұрын

ls -lah

@ShiggitayMediaProductions

2 жыл бұрын

Just remember.. .Linux and Unix are similar, but different from each other.

@app0the

2 жыл бұрын

Reminded me of the interview bit from the TV show The IT Crowd "you know, e-mails... sending e-mails, receiving e-mails, deleting e-mails... The Web... Using mouse... mices... using mice, Clicking... double clicking...the computer screen of course, the keyboard..." :D

"Insecure". This has me laughing. Imagining a self-conscious Mac that is afraid to do anything.

Back in the day I was really into UNIX and wanted some sort of UNIX workstation in my dorm room. Being a Mac user A/UX really interested me. But unfortunately it was way out of my price range. In addition to the A/UX license, I would have also had to purchase a new Mac, since at the time I only had a Mac Classic. I had to settle for MacMinix, which was a very, very, VERY pale imitation. (This was way before Linux or even FreeBSD existed, otherwise I probably would have gotten a cheapo 386 and run that instead.) One of these days I hope to finish restoring the SE/30 I picked up a while ago (it is in desperate need of a recapping) and I'll definitely be putting A/UX on it. :)

@robgeheim4842

Жыл бұрын

macminix was a macos user space application. It was very good for scripting and file manipulations, unix without unix :)

5:39 - a 3.25" floppy drive must be rare :D

@Thiesi

9 ай бұрын

Not as rare as 5.5" floppy drives though.

I wonder if any A/UX people at Apple ended up working on Rhapsody/OS X.

Commedore tried to do the same thing with AMIX and the Amiga 3000UX that would have wiped the floor with A/UX, in a deal they had worked out with Sun Microsystems, but as usual Commedore managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

@paul_boddie

5 ай бұрын

A 68030-based Unix workstation in 1991 wouldn't have been worth Sun's bother, even if Commodore had managed to reduce the cost to something substantially lower than the $5000 or more that the 3000UX had upon its introduction. There were already RISC workstations from established vendors including Sun delivering far more performance for that price. Previous-generation models at lower price points were still many times the performance of 68030-based systems. Sun and plenty of other 680x0-based vendors jumped rather eagerly to RISC architectures, realising that the Motorola architecture was running out of road. Sun practically switched to SPARC as soon as they could, keeping x86 as an option, and I imagine that SunOS only maintained legacy support for 680x0 in anticipation of Solaris entering the picture and dropping the architecture entirely. Perversely, the 68060 benefited from the Motorola's 88000 effort, which they abandoned in favour of PowerPC, but apart from Amiga users, there wasn't much of an audience for the 68060, unfortunately. As for the low-end workstation market, it isn't really clear whether there was so much demand for things like Amiga Unix or A/UX. These systems were not really attractive to traditional workstation purchasers. In the end, Apple emphasised things like MAE instead. So, I don't think there were any "jaws of victory" here.

Haha, after about 20 years of me being a *nix nerd, this was entertaining, but boy was I groaning a few times from the newbie mistakes I likely experienced myself ages ago 😆 Soon young padowan, soon you shall be one of us. 🤓

It's worth taking the time to learn the vi editor. It's strange when you don't know how to use it. But once you do know it, vi is very fast, powerful, and flexible.

"Hello guys, today we will be running a Blender render farm on our Quadra"

Nice Druaga1 reference!

18:35 most Linux/Unix distros won't allow you to startx as root, maybe that's why u got kicked from x and got the login prompt again; also the sd image u downloaded seems to be made out of a Quadra 950 install, thus the computer name reflecting it

@antfirmin

2 жыл бұрын

This is true now as a default but back in the past you could log into all Unix boxes directly as root from the get go.

@mojoblues66

2 жыл бұрын

twmrc probably gave an invalid argument to xterm

@second2050

2 жыл бұрын

he couldn't launch an x session as he didn't configure the x startup script for the user and it started nothing so it just kicked him back again EDIT: nevermind should have looked earlier at the complete output; xterm crashed; I feel so dumb right now

@SimonTekConley

2 жыл бұрын

Umm unix, you do everything as root. Sudo is a new concept.

I never got a chance to try A/UX, though I did buy a manual for it from a local antique store of all places. The closest I got to this was running MkLinux on a PowerMac 6100 in the early 2000s. I mostly used it as an MP3 player, using mpg123.

@mlogsdon1740

2 жыл бұрын

There are emulators for the modern PC for it. Look up shoebill

@BashShell

9 ай бұрын

Qemu

I worked at a Mac based Ma and Pa ISP in 1994. We had one of the “Big Mac” servers running A/UX for our DNS and internal file server. It was rock solid.

"Sunny days in Philadelphia" now there's an understatement if I've ever heard one 😂Working outdoors at 59th and Race st on the most humid day of the week, almost had heat stroke. Thank you for your awesome videos! I love these historically dense tech videos that actually show the tech in action.

I had never heard of A/UX before, and I am a legit *NIX nerd (started on Slackware in '96, ran OpenBSD as my daily driver, worked as a sysadmin on Solaris, AIX, HPUX, etc...) and I think I'm in love. OSX was a great OS to bridge the feature-set of UNIX with the chewy goodness of Mac OS, but my first computer was a Performa 630CD so the original interface always held a special place in my heart.

Very cool! I've always wondered about A/UX, so it's interesting to finally see it in action.

On the flip side, you can use MacX to connect to a remote server and run stuff like Firefox and other modern X applications. There are some.... issues, mostly because MacX included with A/UX only supports X11R5. Also MacX is a Macintosh program, so it quickly runs out of memory and gets crashy. The dedicated X Server mode is a bit more stable, but less cool to look at.

@ActionRetro

2 жыл бұрын

Oh I have to try this

@NJRoadfan

2 жыл бұрын

@@ActionRetro MacX 2.0 appears to be out in the wild and dates from 1997. I think A/UX came with something like 1.2.

Love this deeper peek into A/UX and the Jurassic Mac-looking good after that retro bright! The icing on the cake (spoiler alert) was logging in on the M1 Mac … too cool and kinda surreal. Thank you for the always compelling content!

"3¼" uh, Sean, it's 3½, right?

@ActionRetro

2 жыл бұрын

Me no talk good 😂

@shadyweaver

2 жыл бұрын

@@tspawn35 4⅜ time? :D

@RetroAnachronist

2 жыл бұрын

The plastic has shrunk over time? 🤷‍♂️🤣

@LiamProven

2 жыл бұрын

Came here to say the same. :-) Nice vid, though. Good to see this fairly-obscure OS getting some air time.

@lvl90dru1d

2 жыл бұрын

3¼ was made too (3.25 by Dysan)

Oh man, this takes me back. I worked at Apple in IS&T in 1989-90, and had A/UX running on an SE/30 on my desk (it had started life as an SE, but I’d swapped in an SE/30 board). Internal chatter then was that A/UX was the long-term future of the Mac, as Blue (which became OS7) and Pink (which became Taligent) were already behind schedule…

I think I have some of the original A/UX tech training materials from when it launched. I remember taking the training on the new Macintosh Portable. I will look around my archives if you're interested.

@ActionRetro

2 жыл бұрын

Oh wow yeah, that would be really interesting to see! What was the training like on the portable?

I think I can explain the 2 network adapters, chances are you have 1 physical NIC which is connected to Unix then a second virtual adapter running as a bridge between Unix & macOS, probably on the loopback adapter (that would be lo or lo0 on modern Linux). You could tell if thats the case by pinging 127.0.0.1 from Unix Shell, macOS should respond to the ping.

I was really excited to see this video. It's cool to actually see A/UX in action! I have a Quadra 700 that's in storage until I get to my new house. I wanted to try this back in the day but could never find a copy, but I'm definitely going to install it when I get my Q700 back! If you decide to take a deeper dive, I'd love another video!

"the jagubox mirror" Still amazed that jagubox is still providing value

Ah Sean, if I realized you needed a CD-ROM enclosure I … would have no idea I was going to get this monster to you. 😅 It's got room for five of 'em and weighs a ton. Intended as a duplicator. Ooh, bash 3.2… Heh heh heh… Careful with that one if you're gonna network it.

X11 session crashing is due to xterm (x11 terminal emulator) binary missing. it can’t init and exit directly (it’s the expected behavior from x11). (It’s working though : the x mouse cursor is the default empty display) Anyway it should display just like the console session, minus titlebar, and with a weird/unusual x cursor.

I've always thought A/UX was such a missed opportunity. I have no idea if this would have been financially feasible, but even beyond the obvious, it could have stabilized the "classic" Mac OS because the classic Mac OS was so simply written by comparison, you essentially could have launched additional instances of it for any classic app and went a long way to giving it the benefit of multiprocessing and memory protection...even if only in a pseudo form...as each instance of the classic Mac OS running would have been an individual unix process (meaning a crashing Mac OS app could take down its instance of the Mac OS, but not the others or the machine itself.)

nano would likely build here if you want it

I love that you will run a mud from this. I first started mudding on a Mac LC and I'm watching your video while playing a mud in 2021.

I'm so happy guys like you can make our hobby so interesting :)

A Quadra 700 yeah! The machine I used at my first development job. Some 30 years ago this month. You can still find lots of working Apple CD300 external SCSI drives on eBay fairly cheap.

@moccamixer

Жыл бұрын

I just sold one 4 months ago

Very Cool Sean That Was A Great History Lesson on UnixUnder The Mac Operating System And That Is Amazing How You Can Remote In The Quadra As A Sever On You Modern Mac

there is nothing cooler than "flying toasters"!!! have them on win10 🙂

One thing about getting drives to mount under Mac OS Classic is that you don't necessarily need the driver/utility/extension software to mount it. Sometimes all you have to do is make sure the jumpers are set right on the IDE (primary, secondary, cable select) or SCSI (ID 3 and terminated) drive and turn the drive on before you turn the Mac on and it'll mount from boot and show up on the desktop as if it were always there. The software is only needed if you turn the drive on after you turn the Mac on or if the drive isn't a standard drive (PC only or has a special BIOS on it the software looks for). This is true of a bunch of PC only optical drives that the CD extension in Mac OS Classic or the Mac by itself can't necessarily see which is why you need third party optical drive mounting software like FWB CD-ROM Toolkit.

I had this running in my dorm in college! Even then it was obscure! But it was a secure shell server for that time because a lot of people didn’t know what it was. But imagine if Apple corp didn’t abandon this and decided to go all in on this and just make more improvements, created developer kits, and ported their apps to it, instead of going with classic macOS. They might have not even needed to buy NeXT.

Just seeing a Zterm icon brings back so many memories of early 90s BBSing.

I've been watching a lot of your vids recently but this video is the one that made me sub.

A/ux is my personal holy grail. Someday I hope to set up a system like this. I’m so glad to see interest in it.

As far as the networking, there are a couple things. Firstly, you need to have the ethernet cable plugged in when you try to bring the interface up. Detecting media state change and doing something about it is a relatively modern facility (if needed, it would've been done with a handwritten shell script back then provided you could even query the media state). Secondly, when you have multiple interfaces configured in the system, the system has to guess as to what the default route is. You have to tell it. You would've been able to ping an address on the same subnet I'd bet, since the route for that is clear in your case (two interfaces on different subnets, one on the same class C), but you tried to ping cloudflare's anycast dns at 1.1.1.1 and it has no way to tell that packets destined for 1.1.1.1 need to go out of a particular interface configged on 10.0.0.0/24 and 192.168.x.x/24. Finally, you really should just configure it properly, presumably in /etc/inittab since it's a SysV system.

Floating, gesturing arm LOL

Oh yeah, I've been waiting for this!

More more more! Please and thank you!

I have never heard of this, and now I want to try it out! Also, didn’t know you were Philly based, always nice.

Back in the day, I installed MacBSD (later part of NetBSD) on my IIcx. I've wanted to try A/UX for awhile. I have a Q700 and a ZuluSCSI and am going to have a go finally.

Oh man, after dark, that’s a blast from the past!

Interesting, I may have a use for my Quadra 800.

YUP, I ran one of these at an elementary school 25 years ago. That thing ran like a tank.

Back in the days the US ministry of defense required for companies that wanted to sell equipment (servers) to the government that it should be 32 bit capable and ran unix. A/UX 1.x was released and Apple sales could proceed. Big question was: has it been a method, an opening to expand hardware sales or was a real software business case in place ? Any takers ?

Great video! That was really interesting!

This feels a bit like an precursor to WSL. Run a consumer desktop operating system with easy access to a production grade operating system running in the background.

I wonder why Apple didn't show A/UX more love? Maybe if they maintained it longer so it worked with Power PC perhaps they could have developed it into a replacement for later Mac OS classic versions or Copeland or even a different OS X if we lived in a timeline where they never acquired NeXT and OS X never came to be.

@robgeheim4842

Жыл бұрын

In that time apple started to have money issues. Too much money went into future products. The market prospects for unix in the 80'90's was too low in numbers..

it is really interesting, how often Apple re-invented the wheel when it comes to operating systems. imagine how successful A/UX could have become, if they didn't charge 700$ for it. Yet from the current perspective, they stumpled from stop-gap solution to the next one. And after all, unix came to rescue again. Being a die-hard linux user, I still have to give Microsoft credits on how they managed to keep their API stable and their work when it comes to compatibility - windows-1 applications can run unaltered in Win10 32bit!

Great video! Would maybe have enjoyed if you'd shown us the back of the computer so that we could see where things were plugged in. Perhaps you could install it facing the wall so that we have an easy view on the camera.

A/UX is way more interesting than I thought.

Beautiful.

We used A/UX on our mac file server in the early 90s it was excellent... I think Apple missed a serious opportunity

@MaddTheSane

2 жыл бұрын

Licensing probably prevented Apple from having it be the OS for Macs.

@robgeheim4842

Жыл бұрын

@@MaddTheSane I think higher management didn't see the merits of it. Low sales because of high pricing..

@mardus_ee

Жыл бұрын

@@MaddTheSane Not licensing, but a very high list price: Per Wikipedia, the A/UX operating system's $709 cost in 1992 would be $1400 in 2021. A/UX was meant to be offered in government bids. IBM OS/2 2.0 cost $195. Windows retailed for $150, and was even then preinstalled on new computers.

Have to say, a Quadra 700 running A/UX has to be the sexiest mc68k Mac ever. OK, maybe after the Lisa.

I think it sees both Ethernet cards: it said that it sees 1 "ae" card (nothing about "ao" cards), and then it didn't let you configure the ao one, because it had to be rebooted first due to the ae card having been just set up.

Yes Drauga1 reference, I approve!

Right on!

I joined Apple just before the iPhone launch, before that, I hacked and slashed old world machines with cpu cards etc, and unsupported osX beige machines. What fun, I learned more about the hardware doing that. These days my oldest is a new world g4 but I still miss those beige macs, thanks for doing all this!!

A MUD running on an old Macintosh? Nice! I remember playing MUDs in the mid '90s. :)

Fantastic video.

Nice. I was expecting much beefier hardware in the Quadra though. Even my SE/30 can handle 128MB of RAM.

I remember using a text editor called Pico back in the day? Or maybe that was a bit later 90s.

@DerekWitt

2 жыл бұрын

I use its successor, nano, all the time. I feel more at ease using pico/nano than vi.

@zaxchannel2834

2 жыл бұрын

That one came with pine email

@thomasbonse

2 жыл бұрын

@@zaxchannel2834 I remember pine and elm. Still prefer vi/vim.

@zoomosis

2 жыл бұрын

Pico began as part of the PINE e-mail client in the early '90s. Nano was a clone of Pico written from scratch in the late '90s to work around Pico's licencing issues. It wouldn't surprise me if there's an A/UX port of PINE (and consequently Pico), given the timeline.

@DerekWitt

2 жыл бұрын

@@zoomosis there is such a port of pine. It’s called alpine

huh. did not realize you were in philly. neat. never got to play with A/UX myself (though my dream is to find a MacIvory card and put it in an A/UX mac), but it was required for college when my brother went, so I was always kinda envious and wanted to use it.... sadly I was restricted to 'linux on 40 floppies' instead.

Nice, A/UX is a really interesting operating system and one that I'd love to mess around with! Also congrats on passing 20k subs! I just noticed that, keep up the good work!

22:20 Perhaps it didn't have routing set up correctly? Default gateway and all that is typically fetched via DHCP. No default gateway, no talking to other computers.

@thomasbonse

2 жыл бұрын

More accurately, no taking to non-local devices.

There are a couple ports of linux for 68k machines including a Debian port, and another called "m68k", I'm sure there far from production stable, but it would sure be interesting to see just how far it could be taken.

Shoutout to you being a cat lover !

I remember A/UX, and desperately wanting it. It was hideously expensive though, like well over $1000 IIRC

Does the cdrom emulation of the scsi2sd not work with a/ux (you said it's finicky) or did you just forget that that's an option?

It's a UNIX SYSTEM!!!!!!

The long hang time for a login prompt on the A/UX machine is because its trying to look up your OSX's domain name and you have to wait for that to time out. IIRC if you put the OSX machine's ip and name in the A/UX's host file it should come up with a login prompt quicker.

@robgeheim4842

Жыл бұрын

A /etc/hosts entry would solve some issues. When not needing appletalk that can be switched off, ditto the sendmail startup may be followed by an & and a fixed ntp server may be removed to be replaced by a cron task every hour. Having written that, on a server reboot times aren't that much a goal to achieve..

You tried to ping an internet IP address using that other card, then when you went back to the built in card, you pinged an internal IP, did you check that the gateway was correctly set?

Accessing that A/UX server from an M1 MacBook was epic!

can you x window from the M1 mac to the A/UX or vice versa?

I loved that ansi apple logo

Wow haven’t seen this in years!

It's my favorite frog design Mac. I salute you, the taking hand. Why they never went with aux puzzels me. We're all on Unix Linux today, even Microsoft.

@robgeheim4842

Жыл бұрын

A/UX is 68k only. In that era Apple was haveing financial and focus issues. 68K was speed lagging behind intel, Apple ][ era had ended. The PPC was about to be released which also brought AIX and the ANS500/700. Imacs again filled the apple bank . Scully leaves the building and nextstep with Jobs is brought in ...

I can’t go to VCF east; because it’s, well, *east* and I’m so far west that day trips to the Pacific Ocean are practical... so.... Any way to safely bridge that MUD server to the internet at large? Perhaps set up a MUD level reflector on a Raspberry Pi, with a couple of Ethernet ports? (I’m assuming such a thing exists... I really don’t know). 🤔

'We're gonna have to channel our inner druaga1.' Hello fellow smoker. :)

So... PCBWay Apple I project when? Come on, I'm sure they would love to sponsor it... Complete that collection... You know you want to. Or at least, that some of us want to see you doing it.

@app0the

2 жыл бұрын

You could probably convert the eagle files from Vince Briel's book into gerbers and order one, not sure how legal in terms of copyright that would be though.

I've never seen a talking hand before. ;) Very informative video. :)

I have a problem you! Whenever I watch one of your videos i find myself buying old Apple tech lol just joking keep up the good work

@ActionRetro

2 жыл бұрын

😅😂

Hm, Apple-branded trackball is also a Kensington Expert Mouse. Maybe the logo is just a sticker.

So if I heard you correctly A/UX is a version of ATT SysV?

Might be able to start X from command line

A/UX is what Mac OS 9 could have been in 2000 instead of them destroying it!

Out of curiosity, will the mud server be available on the internet or just local? I won't be able to travel to you but would love to try the MUD out.

@ActionRetro

2 жыл бұрын

I'm going to try and get it online

why i watch action retro is because of his videos and using a extension redux youtube makes your videos even more retro