[TUHS] A/UX [was Linux is on-topic]

[Andrew Warkentin]

On 7/19/20, Michael Parson <mparson at bl.org> wrote:
>
> Maybe if someone could rip the 680[34]0+MMU bits out of Win/FS-UAE
> (Amiga emulator) and patch them into Basilisk II (Mac 68K emulator),
> A/UX might work there.
>
Basilisk will never run anything other than Mac OS, not because it
lacks an MMU, but because it HLEs everything other than the CPU,
patching the Mac OS ROM to call drivers implemented on the host. A
better idea would be to fix MAME's NCR 5380 SCSI device model
to work properly, because AFAIK that's the only thing that stops it
from running A/UX. I did look at it a bit quite a while ago, but had
other stuff to work on, so it fell by the wayside for me.

On 7/20/20, arnold at skeeve.com <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
> ISTR that A/UX was nothing special as a Unix.  Am I failing to remember?
>
> I had had a DMD 5620 at my job, and after I moved to a different place
> and requested one, they graced me with a Macintosh.  It could sort of
> do multiple windows, but it was like having a piper cub after being
> used to a 747.
>
> Other interesting bits for the Mac to maybe recover would be Mach Ten,
> which ran Mach on top of regular MacOS. (Talk about inverted pyramids...)
> There was also a Mach/Linux that I think ran on the Mac at some point.
>
A/UX runs Mac OS as a Unix process (its default GUI is Mac OS although
it does also support a traditional X server), making it the opposite
of MachTen. It has considerable integration between Mac OS and Unix,
and supports "hybrid" programs (Unix programs that make Mac OS system
calls and Mac OS programs that make Unix system calls) (which I don't
think MachTen supports, but I'm not completely sure of that). It is
one of only two Unices that I'm aware of that runs another OS in a
process to provide its main GUI (the other is a much more recent Linux
distribution that runs AROS; I'm not counting  things like running
Windows under Merge or VP/IX because those were usually used in
addition to X11).