
Running a/UX on a Macintosh SE/30 - kristianp
http://www.datormuseum.se/macintosh-se-30
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jiveturkey
Title has a typo: 'a' should be capitalized 'A'.

Ah, this is near and dear to me. My first Unix was A/UX on an SE/30\. My
second Unix was A/UX on a Quadra 950. From which I naturally ran a warez site
and irc bot. Gopher/Veronica/Archie were still in their heyday then, and
Eudora was the GUI mail client of choice.

From there I "graduated" to IRIX and did real work. Molecular simulations and
visualizations. A huge step up from the Mac hardware ...

~~~
jfengel
In the late 80s, Virginia Tech's CS department mandated A/UX on a Mac 2,
making us incompatible with every other computer on campus. It was great
having a real Unix, but since networking wasn't a big thing yet, it was still
pretty isolated. (The campus had a computerized phone system that could have
been adapted to networking, but it wasn't set up for it, and in fact hampered
even dial-up networking because of the nonstandard phone jacks.) CS
assignments were submitted on floppy disk.

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jasomill
"Apple Workgroup Server 95" is a Mac model, not a rebranding of the OS as the
author claims.

I mention this because, per Apple sales literature[1], the version of A/UX
that shipped with that machine was "highly tuned", presumably for the
68040-based Workgroup Server 95 — basically a Quadra 950 — and this may be why
he initially had trouble installing what his screenshots suggest was a copy of
A/UX 3.0.1 from the Workgroup Server software bundle on an SE/30, which is a
68030 machine with a considerably older architecture.

While I'm not at all familiar with A/UX, it's certainly true that,
historically, it was not unusual for bundled copies of Mac OS to be at least
somewhat model-specific.

In other words, when resurrecting older Mac models, use retail OS media when
possible. The obvious "impossible" case is when you want to install an OS that
shipped before the model in question, as retail media will often lack
necessary hardware support that would have been slipstreamed into bundled
copies.

[1]
[https://archive.org/details/WorkgroupServer95](https://archive.org/details/WorkgroupServer95)

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tolger
I remember running A/UX on a Mac IIsi. It was a quirky UNIX, based on SysV r3.
I remember the first thing out of the box was to compile GCC with the included
non-ANSI C compiler. Then you could actually start compiling everything else,
like Emacs, LaTeX, Ghostscript, GNU binutils, etc.

The best part is that you could run a lot of productivity Mac software such as
Word, Excel, Powerpoint. I used it during my last two years in college and was
really sad when it was discontinued.

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jimjag
I loved A/UX... it was a fun OS, and porting various software to it was a
great way to learn things. It also got me seriously involved in the Free
Software and Open Source movements with my work on jagubox.

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ncmncm
I used one of these for years. I bought it with 8GB of RAM, and never knew
bigger modules could be used. I used an 80G disk drive.

As I recall, it took a couple of hours to compile Gcc the normal way (i.e. 3
times over).

~~~
DogRunner
MB, it was megabytes ;-)

~~~
ncmncm
It is hard to type MB anymore, because I have caught myself doing it and fixed
it so many times.

