68k predacessor to Mac OS X???

gameguy56gameguy56
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Its was called A/UX and it was probably the coolest os ever created for the 68k macs. I beleive it was apple's first OS to ship on a cd, way back in 1993.

It worked with most 030 and 040 machines and provided an xwindows server along with a 24 bit AND a 32 bit mac os environment. Such a cool os that could have made the Mac OS far superior to anything else.Its too bad that it was killed because apple Didn't want to bother with writing a ppc version.



check here for more info

<a href="http://www.applefritter.com/ui/aux/index.html"; target="_blank">Applefritter's A/UX page</a>

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 9
    spiffsterspiffster Posts: 327member
    Wow, that's extreamly intresting. Great find! Just think if Apple kept this going. Think how great OS X would be now if the original MacOS was dropped in favor of this back then. Now if I could only find a copy for myself!
  • Reply 2 of 9
    reidreid Posts: 190member
    Along similar lines...



    The original NeXT OS ran on an expensive cube-shaped computer, which shipped with no floppy drive, using a Motorola 68K processor. So, NeXT has been ported from 68K to Intel to PowerPC on its road to becoming Mac OS X.



    Steve's vision seems to be rather repetitive, in hindsight.
  • Reply 3 of 9
    brianmacosbrianmacos Posts: 548member
    Nice find. Very interesting. I am happy that the Mac OS has made it this far. Even though they only own 5% of the market doesn't mean they can't have the best OS on the market. It is truly amazing what Apple has gone though to make the Mac what it is today. :eek:
  • Reply 4 of 9
    reidreid Posts: 190member
    Along similar lines...



    The original NeXT OS ran on an expensive cube-shaped computer, which shipped with no floppy drive, using a Motorola 68K processor. So, NeXT has been ported from 68K to Intel to PowerPC on its road to becoming Mac OS X.



    Steve's vision seems to be rather repetitive, in hindsight.
  • Reply 5 of 9
    overhopeoverhope Posts: 1,123member
    It does rather seem that there are key points in Apple's history where one little decision could have made such a difference to the company, and A/UX may well have been one of them. Ho hum...



    There's still a lot of NeXT's OS lying around under the hood of OS X.
  • Reply 6 of 9
    fluffyfluffy Posts: 361member
    And the whole Copland fiasco/NeXT takeover wouldn't have happened at all if the original System 1 had been based on the Lisa kernel. Lisa was preemptively multitasking with protected memory, but when the Mac was being designed it was intended to be the Lisa's little brother, and wasn't given the RAM to handle the Lisa's architecture. If the first Mac had had a few more K of RAM we might have had a modern OS from the very beginning.
  • Reply 7 of 9
    mediamanmediaman Posts: 169member
    [quote]Originally posted by Fluffy:

    <strong>And the whole Copland fiasco/NeXT takeover wouldn't have happened at all if the original System 1 had been based on the Lisa kernel. Lisa was preemptively multitasking with protected memory, but when the Mac was being designed it was intended to be the Lisa's little brother, and wasn't given the RAM to handle the Lisa's architecture. If the first Mac had had a few more K of RAM we might have had a modern OS from the very beginning.</strong><hr></blockquote>



    If were going back that far, If Woz had has a few extra $$ he could have used Intel chips in the Apple 1 instead of the cheaper Motorola's
  • Reply 8 of 9
    spartspart Posts: 2,060member
    Okay enough what-if. It is starting to sound scary...



    Was Copland able to run on a 68k? Mac OS 8.1 was the last official Mac OS release to run on one, but who knows about unreleased stuff.
  • Reply 9 of 9
    fluffyfluffy Posts: 361member
    The Apple series didn't use motorola chips, but the 6502. The 650x was designed by Motorola engineers who had left to form their own company (MOS engineering). The decision to use the 68000 line of processors for the Mac and Lisa was the correct choice: motorola chips were significantly better than the intel chips of the time, and most early high performance computers were based on motorola chips. Workstations from Sun, NeXT, Apollo, Commodore and Atari all used the 68000. In fact, IBM's engineers were committed to the 68000 as well, but the motorola chips were more expensive than the 808x line, and IBM already had the manufacturing rights to the 8086 (traded to intel for IBMs bubble memory technology). There were other reasons behind the selection of intel processors by IBM, but the fact remains: until the 386 the x86 line was a joke.
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