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From: thad@cup.portal.com (Thad P Floryan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.emulations
Subject: Re: A/UX on AMAX
Message-ID: <37836@cup.portal.com>
Date: 10 Jan 91 22:04:53 GMT
References: <1991Jan10.060309.28669@cs.dal.ca>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 59

dewolfe@ug.cs.dal.ca (Colin DeWolfe) in <1991Jan10.060309.28669@cs.dal.ca>
writes:

	A strange thought hit me today when I was reading the BYTE article on
	A/UX and about how it's not worth it if you only need UNIX.

True.  Members of Apple's A/UX Development Team have asked me, point blank,
in response to my criticisms of A/UX:

	"If you didn't want the MacOS, why'd you get A/UX?"

Sounds like Apple has been mis-representing A/UX.  We got suckered into
believing they (Apple) would support UNIX on Mac hardware platforms, but such
is not really the case as the January 1991 BYTE article also points out (re:
A/UX being s-o-o-o old (circa 1983)).

	This thought (which is mine, and what it is too (old Monty Python
	joke)), was whether it would be possible to somehow run A\UX on the
	AMAXII emulator.  Granted, I can't figure out why someone would want
	to, but it would be an interesting thing to try.

Other than the fact it doesn't operate well with less than 4MB RAM and makes
a lot of assumptions regarding the hardware (i.e. number of serial ports,
expansion cards installed, etc.) and requires a LOT of disk space, this might
be an interesting (but expen$ive) experiment (and not one that I'm going to
underwrite).

	My first impression is that it would not be possible, sue to my
	assuming that the kernel bangs directly on the Mac hardware, but it
	later occured to me that they could be running UNIX as a layer on top
	of the Mac ROMS (which don't get removed when it is installed).

This seems to be true, but I haven't studied the A/UX architecture all that
much after my initial disappointment (and I've used all versions from 1.0,1.1,
up to 2.0).  At this point I'm just "enduring" it, and I find it best to come
in on a serial or network port just to avoid staring at the brain-damaged
Apple color monitor (glare on screen) and to avoid using the brain-damaged
keyboard (this is the BIG keyboard, with important keys all in wrong places),
and to avoid using a single-button mouse designed for people who cannot walk
and chew gum at the same time.  'Sfunny, I'm using an Amiga as a terminal into
the Mac because I find the Mac user/terminal interface to be so bad!  :-)

	I know that this was done on the C=128 with CP/M (I know, different bag
	of worms), and I don't see why this can't be done with the Mac.  After
	all, finder is still around and is said to "coexist" with X-Windows,
	this implies some sort of access to the Mac ROMS.  Of course, this is
	a BIG performance hit, but remember, this is Apple.

A/UX is NOT known for its speed, and tries to gobble up humongous amounts of
RAM for use as a RAM-disk to hide the brain-damaged hardware architecture of
Macs (no DMA, no hardware support chips, etc (except, finally, for the Max IIfx
which uses a 6502 for SCSI support)).  It very quickly became apparent to me
that a 68020/68881/68851 Mac II running A/UX is a very poor performer compared
to even my 68010/MMU 3B1 systems.

You've obviously read the BYTE article and seen the prices; you'd be MUCH
better off buying a second Amiga with UNIX than to dork-around with A/UX.

Thad Floryan [ thad@cup.portal.com ]