A/UX and MachTen: Serious UNIX for the Macintosh (1993)

Mac Folklore Radio

If an IBM PC can see the light, why not a Mac? Original text by Joel Snyder, SunWorld July 1993.

This review calls A/UX “complete”, but that’s meaningless until another Vancouverite demonstrates that it is possible to port Doom (sans audio) to it! The moment it worked.

The usual emulators won’t run A/UX since it requires an MMU. You’ll need Shoebill (abandoned by the developer now that he works at Apple) or QEMU’s Quadra 800 emulation.

Watch someone else suffer so you don’t have to: netfreak walks you through installing, patching, and configuring A/UX on a Macintosh SE/30. Boy is it slow. netfreak maintains some useful A/UX resources and a knowledge base.

Mr. TenFourFox/OldVCR Cameron Kaiser has documented some interesting MachTen hacks and notes. If you find MachTen crashes shortly after launch, you might have a faulty 68LC040 CPU. I hope you bought AppleCare.

“[X11 performance was] … about six times faster than a Sun 3/50.” Six times as fast as slow is still slow. Macworld November 1992 reports “Even on a [Quadra] 950, please note, A/UX is slow–three times slower than Unix on a midrange Sun workstation.”

A/UX Product Manager Richard Finlayson’s unabridged demo of A/UX 2.0 from the April 1990 Apple VHS User Group Connection tape. Apple’s self-running Macromedia Director demo of A/UX 2.0, complete with simulated Extended Keyboard II typing sounds. Spot the two errors in the simulated CommandShells. The example user might be a play on Richard Finlayson’s name.