Birbla

Discussion summary

Discussions focus on installing and running A/UX 1.1 on vintage hardware, with some users attempting to port open source software and share installation experiences.

What the discussion says

  • Some users successfully installed A/UX on older Macs like Quadra 650.
  • Others shared challenges with floppy disk swapping during installation.
  • Enthusiasts reminisced about building software and running early internet services on A/UX.
“I got a Quadra 650 and put A/UX on it successfully.”
— asveikau
“Swapping through 26 floppies to install would have been... Something.”
— kjs3

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  • Hacker News
  • I wonder if Nethack 3.4.3 or Slashem 0.8 could build on a recent version of A/UX...
    by anthk
  • Would be interesting to see that. I used to build it on Coherent, HP-UX, and Aix at least IIRC. Maybe others. It was kind of fun except for all the curses and termcaps.

    The page mentions there's an emulator that should be able to run it. Don't know if there's a local copy that could be used along with some method to transfer the sources. Cloud boxes might not suffice.

    by a96
  • I picked up an SE/30 at the MIT flea (SwapFest) in 1999, hell bent on running A/UX on it. Never even got an installer disk image to boot.
    by baron3dl
  • I got a Quadra 650 (if memory serves) super cheap on eBay circa 2003 and put A/UX on it successfully. I still have that machine but it hasn't been powered on in quite some time.
    by asveikau
  • there will always be a special place in my heart for a/ux. i ported a lot of open source software to it. ran a bbs, cu-seeme server, gopherd, httpd, and many other early internet services on it. this really gave me an early taste for what the internet would become.
    by latchkey
  • > To start off the install, we begin with the “System setup and README” disk. We need to partition the disk, and then do something counter-intuitive: install System 6 on a Mac partition. This is because there’s a Mac application that kicks off the A/UX boot process: SASH; the A/UX standalone shell. This ‘pre-boot environment’ allows for launching an A/UX kernel and also some disk and recovery operations.

    Funny how that rhythms with having a macOS install next to Asahi Linux. The more things change:)

    Also, swapping through 26 floppies to install would have been... Something.

    by yjftsjthsd-h
  • A/UX 1.0 came on a pre-written 80MB disk, which indeed would have been a lot easier.
    by classichasclass
  • > Also, swapping through 26 floppies to install would have been... Something.

    I still have a legit copy of Word on 10 floppies.

    It was bad. And when you'd copy so many floppies, typically one would fail and you'd only notice when installing. We weren't very advanced back then (at least I wasn't): no fancy an 11th "parity" disk that'll fix any other one that'd fail. At least not for me.

    The data CD-ROM was a very welcome addition to the world back then.

    by TacticalCoder
  • > Also, swapping through 26 floppies to install would have been... Something.

    Perfectly normal.

    You would need a few for MS-DOS (I think only MS-DOS 3.3 was the last that could fit into an high density one).

    Followed by about 10 for Windows 3.x, similar numbers for Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++, Clipper, Word, Excel (replace with the competition),....

    And before installing all of that, don't forget to as very first step, create backup floppies from all of them, and actually use the backups during the installations, while keeping the originals in a safe place, not that the drive could damage one of them.

    by pjmlp
  • Also, swapping through 26 floppies to install would have been... Something.

    We installed it from a QIC tape when it wasn't delivered on a SCSI hard drive. Not sure if that option was generally available tho; we were doing kernel development.

    by kjs3
  • If I remember correctly, there's an interesting historical reason for this: a lot of the original functionality that we'd today consider "part of the OS" was actually in ROM on hardware in really old Macs. Mouse functionality, basic windowing, etc. This meant that to get A/UX running you first had to bootstrap into a light version of Mac OS and then boot into A/UX.
    by ramijames
  • > Also, swapping through 26 floppies to install would have been... Something.

    Windows 95 was about that size, and Office was closer to 50?

    At my very first job I remember installing stuff that way...ugh

    by bluedino