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

[Rich Morin]

My spouse (Vicki Brown) worked in the initial A/UX group and I contracted for it (reviewing the man pages).  Here are a few historical tidbits...

A number of A/UX boxes were purchased and immediately reloaded with Mac OS (because only the A/UX boxes were available with 80 MB disk drives).

A/UX had an "Eschatology" feature whose purpose was to bring a damaged operting system back to a known working state.  It was based on a text file of metadata and a small set of replacement files (e.g., commands).

The A/UX installation kit was delivered on several dozen floppy disks.  In order to minimize the number of disks, Vicki implemented a bin packing algorithm.  It grabbed promising sets of files, compressed them, and checked the resulting size.

One challenge in building the kit was creating a boot floppy.  To make this possible, Vicki created a precursor to busybox: a single program which ran under various names, providing subsets of common commands' functionalities.  Because this shared the libraries, it saved lots of space...

-r