A/UX appreciation thread

[Rhetorica]

Hot off the presses: InfiniteMac has retired Mini vMac and now uses the Snow emulator for early 68k machines, which allows it to support A/UX, Apple's bizarre SVR2.2 hybrid system that allows programs to mix both Unix and Mac graphics APIs in a very flexible but extremely unportable way.



Does anyone here have actual memories of using A/UX, or was it the OS equivalent of a gadgetbahn—all novelty and no utility? It seems to me like this is the sort of project that could only have come out of a company that no longer believed in the value of its own product ecosystem.

[cuby]

Does anyone here have actual memories of using A/UX

I used to run a small private web server on a Mac IIci with A/UX 3 at my university in the mid 1990s and had an SE/30 also running A/UX 3 on my desk. Not the fastest machines, but quite reliable - and I had uptimes measured in months on the IIci.

[stepleton]

It seems to me like this is the sort of project that could only have come out of a company that no longer believed in the value of its own product ecosystem.

My impression was that this was a way of dealing with a US federal government (DoD?) requirement that computers it bought must support POSIX. Per Wikipedia, "Having a Unix-compatible, POSIX-compliant operating system enabled Apple to bid for large contracts to supply computers to the U.S. federal government." It didn't matter if people actually used this capability at all, the capability just had to be there. A similar story explains the Microsoft POSIX Subsystem for Windows NT.