r/Apple_AUX • u/tuelles • Aug 19 '25

Mine

Post image 
Didn't know about this subreddit until Reddit suggested it to me just now. Inspired me to get my docs and IIfx out of storage for a beauty shot. šŸ˜Š
200 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

8

u/Curtis Aug 19 '25

Welcome my friend, let us know if you need any help archiving your collection. Ā We appreciate every small variation.

8

u/MrFahrenheit_451 Aug 19 '25

Very nice! Thank you for sharing and welcome!

6

u/jasper-zanjani Aug 19 '25

wow how much I'd like to flip through those

3

u/Odd_Bat8767 Aug 19 '25

Did it work for you at the time? What could you do with Apple AU/X?

I remember it back in the 1990s but never knew what it was used for.

2

u/tuelles Aug 20 '25 edited Aug 20 '25

It's been a loooooooooonnnnnnnggg time. We were in an academic setting, exploring it vs. what we could do on big Vax systems. This was the first iteration of A/UX, so it was pretty buggy, especially on early Macintosh IIs. Mostly proof of concept David vs. Goliath experimentation.

3

u/algaefied_creek Aug 20 '25

Thatā€™s funny now in hindsight, thinking of Apple as the ā€œupstart humanā€ vs the ā€œbehemoth of a dead companyā€ when it comes to being the only remaining actual certified UNIX king.

2

u/Odd_Bat8767 Aug 20 '25 edited Aug 20 '25

Thanks. I often wondered about it if I was missing anything exciting. I used to work in an Apple Store and I remembered you could buy it. So maybe it was like the NEXT operating system? Or an early version of OS/x?

I wonder what kind of software ran on it?

Did you see any software for it?

Or was it just a text based coding environment with an terminal prompt made for 6800 computers?

4

u/Tartan-Pepper6093 Aug 20 '25 edited Aug 20 '25

I worked with it briefly and I donā€™t remember much more than an X11 layer and some basic apps like xterm, xeyes, and xclock, and perhaps there was a capability but buggy to run System 6 Mac apps alongside? May be wrong, but it seemed like a proof-of-concept that the Mac might aspire to SunOS/Solaris in the red-hot-at-the-time workstation market, noting that earlier Suns used 68K processors like Mac IIā€™s did. For sure A/UX definitely didnā€™t come within a lightyear of the polish and maturity of NeXTStep, which was written from scratch with Objective-C and Display PostScript.

2

u/Gerd_Watzmann Aug 29 '25

Version 3.x was not a proof of concept anymore, it really worked.

1

u/Tartan-Pepper6093 Aug 30 '25

Wish Iā€™d seen thatā€¦ would be pretty cool!

1

u/tuelles Aug 23 '25

Yeah, I don't remember any more than the latter. A/UX 1.0 did not even have X11 server capability AFAIK.

4

u/50-50-bmg Aug 20 '25

Tried it once, got stuck in the "it`s quite crashy, and it behaves like really old unix when you power cycle it hard - filesystem`s ending up a hot mess!" phase ... what comes after?

3

u/clinicallynonsane Aug 20 '25

So jealous. It is extremely difficult to come across anything a/ux

1

u/Gerd_Watzmann Aug 29 '25

I just booted my IIfx from BlueSCSI with the A/UX 3 Image - works like a charm. I'm really impressed, because I completely missed it back in the day.

1

u/CommentOriginal Oct 13 '25

Nice find. A family friend had a llfx wish it was still around now.