A / UX

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A / UX
developer Apple Computer, Inc.
License (s) Proprietary
First publ. February 1988
Current  version 3.1.1 (1995)
ancestry UNIX
↳ UNIX System V
↳ A / UX
Architecture (s) 68k
Others Development stopped

A / UX ( A pple U ni x ) is a commercial Unix - Operating system of the company Apple and was designed under the Macintosh produce user interface a user-friendly access to the Unix world.

history

Based on System V Release 2 (partly 4.2BSD ), A / UX was developed in the late 1980s and first launched in 1988. Later the code base was changed to more recent versions of UNIX System V and parts of BSD flowed into the system.

Designed as a POSIX- compatible operating system, A / UX achieved full Unix functionality, but the main feature was the combination of these capabilities with the Macintosh operating system of that time, System 6 and later System 7 . This made it possible to run Macintosh and Unix applications on one computer at the same time . The Unix processes ran with preemptive multitasking , while the Macintosh applications continued to use cooperative multitasking . In order to be able to use Macintosh applications on other computer architectures, a virtual System 7 environment was created with the Macintosh Application Environment (MAE), which was also ported to other Unix operating systems and from which the Blue Box (for Mac OS 8 under Rhapsody ) and from that the Classic environment (for Mac OS 9 under Mac OS X) was created.

Since A / UX could not achieve any market significance, the further development was stopped in 1995. With Mac OS X , Apple has been following the tradition of Unix derivatives again since 2000.

features

Supported computers are based on the Motorola 68000 family with an extended PMMU ( 68020 or newer) and thus on Macintosh models since the Macintosh II . The graphical user interface X11 and Mac OS , which was required as the operating system for the bootloader , were part of the scope of delivery.

A major advantage of A / UX over other Unix systems was a very simplified installation process, the so-called one-click installation.

Version overview

version Release date Description / change
1.0 February 1, 1988 Compatibility with system 6
2.0 June 1, 1990 Implementation of TCP / IP
3.0 April 16, 1992 System 7 compatibility
3.1.1 August 25, 1995 Update from 3.1, last release from A / UX