A/UX

A/UX has a graphical user interface (GUI) including the familiar Finder windows, menus, and controls. The A/UX Finder is a customized version of the System 7 Finder, adapted to run as a Unix process and to interact with the underlying Unix file systems. CommandShell is a GUI for the underlying Unix command-line interface. An X Window System server (called MacX) with a terminal program can interface with the system and run X applications alongside Finder. Alternatively, a full-screen X11R4 session can run without Finder. The Commando utility assists users with entering Unix commands, resembling the one in Macintosh Programmer's Workshop. Opening a Unix executable file from Finder opens a dialog box that allows the user to choose command-line options for the program using standard controls such as radio buttons and check boxes, and display the resulting command line argument for the user before executing the command or program. This feature is intended to ease the learning curve for users new to Unix, and decrease the user's reliance on the Unix manual. A/UX has a utility that allows the user to reformat third-party SCSI drives in such a way that they can be used in other Macs of that era. of 68k-based Macintoshes with a floating-point unit (FPU) and a paged memory management unit (PMMU), ==History==

A/UX 1.0 was announced at the February 1988 Uniforum conference, seven months behind schedule. The base system has no GUI, with only the command line. It can run one Macintosh application at a time, using the System 6 GUI interface, although it is compatible with only about 10% of the existing Macintosh software library. It was initially aimed at existing Unix customers, universities and VARs. The system was initially sold pre-installed on the Macintosh II for , a larger monitor could be added, or a kit could upgrade an existing Mac II for a lower price. A/UX 1.1 was released in 1989, and supplies the basic GUI of System 6, with Finder, Chooser, Desk Accessories, and Control Panels. It provisions Unix with the X Window System (X11R3) GUI, the Draft 12 POSIX standard, and overall improved speed comparable to a low end Sun workstation. Having its first POSIX compliant platform allowed Apple to join "a growing list of industry heavyweights" to be allowed into the US federal government's burgeoning $6 billion bid market, Coincidentally, the AIM alliance had launched the Apple/IBM partnership Taligent Inc. one month earlier, with the mission of bringing Apple's other next-generation operating system Pink to market as a universal operating system and application framework. Contrary to all announcements, Apple eventually canceled A/UX 4.0. In 1995, PowerOpen was discontinued and Apple withdrew from the Taligent Inc. partnership in December. In 1996, Apple discontinued its Copland project which had spent two years in the public view, intended to become Mac OS 8 and to host Taligent software. From 1996 to 1997, the company deployed a short-lived platform of Apple Network Server systems based on PowerPC and a customized AIX. Apple's serially failed operating system strategy yielded no successor to the badly aged System 7. Apple acquired NeXT in 1996 and introduced Mac OS X Server 1.0 in 1999, which merged Mac OS 8 upon the Unix-based NeXTSTEP operating system. The final release of A/UX is version 3.1.1 of 1995. Apple had abandoned A/UX completely by 1996. ==Reception==

A/UX 1.0 was criticized in the April 1988 InfoWorld review for having a largely command line interface as in other Unix variants, rather than graphical as in System 6. Its networking support was praised. BYTE in 1989 listed A/UX 1.1 among the "Excellence" winners of the BYTE Awards, stating that it "could make Unix the multitasking operating system of choice during the next decade" and challenge OS/2. Compared to contemporary workstations from other Unix vendors, however, the Macintosh hardware lacks features such as demand paging. The first two versions of A/UX consequently suffered poor performance, MacUser said that after months of lab testing, it "easily meets or exceeds nearly all our expectations. ... A/UX 2.0 is, on the whole, a superb combination of the Mac and UNIX System V 2.2 and 4.3 BSD extensions ... A/UX is the most interesting and impressive software to have come out of Apple since HyperCard. A/UX 2.0 is not just great UNIX software – it's great Macintosh software." The review considered system performance adequate except maybe for heavy use of CAD and compilers, even on the fastest Macintosh IIfx which has less UNIX speed than the average workstation like a SPARCstation 1+. A/UX 3.0 was praised in the August 1992 issue of InfoWorld by the same author as the publication's 1988 review, describing it as "an open systems solution with the Macintosh at its heart" where "Apple finally gets Unix right". He praised the GUI, single-button point-and-click installer, one year of personal tech support, the graphical help dialogs, and the user's manuals, saying that A/UX "defies the stereotype that Unix is difficult to use" and is "the easiest version of Unix to learn". Its list price of is much higher than that of "much weaker" competing PC operating systems such as System 7, OS/2, MS-DOS, and Windows 3.1, but low compared to the then prevailing proprietary Unix licenses of more than . The review found the system speed "acceptable but not great" even on the fastest Quadra 950, blaming not the software but the incomplete Unix optimization found in Apple's hardware. Though "a very good value", the system's price-performance ratio was judged as altogether uncompetitive against Sun's SPARCstation 2. The reviewers thought it unlikely for users "to want to buy Macs just to run A/UX" and would have awarded InfoWorlds top score if the OS was not proprietary to Macintosh hardware. ==See also==