22 Jul
2020
22 Jul
'20
10:26 a.m.
On Tue, 21 Jul 2020 at 23:53, Jason <jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:
A/UX boots macOS, then loads a loader app that takes over the machine and
boots the kernel. The emulator Shoebill “cheats” and reads the kernel from
the UFS disk directly and jumps to that.
That was always really funny to me. Your machine boots MacOS, presumably
because it was easier to let it deal with hardware initialization than to
rewrite it, then hands control over to A/UX which promptly runs MacOS as a
Unix process. Which you can kill.
Oberlin College had a Workgroup Server 95, basically a repurposed Quadra
950, running as an AppleShare file server for a significant number of
users. That was how Apple was marketing these things, and thinking about
it - use our Unix to serve your MacOS boxes! But we have no real interest
in Unix, just buy more MacOS boxes! See: Apple Network Server.
I remember my father mentioning talking to someone from Apple at a USENIX,
probably late '80s or very early '90s, and them admitting that A/UX was
essentially a glorified public beta. That might have been in the A/UX 1.0
or 2.0 timeframe but it says a lot about the sorts of resources Apple was
dedicating to the idea.
-Henry