I worked at Apple in 1992 - 1994 on the original Macintosh Application Environment (MAE), code name "Cat in the Hat". Most of the team were from the Apple A/UX team working in the De Anza 3 building. I was responsible for designing the toolbar and color management. It was a great time. We all received "Cat in the Hat" watches when MAE 1.0 shipped!
What I love about this retro computing channel which most others don't cover is also the professional and enterprise side of computing. Most tend to focus more on home computing which is incredibly nostalgic but many of us worked with these systems and others as daily drivers once upon a time. They were far too expensive to own at home but we get to play with them now, although they're getting expensive again :-)
I picked up an Alpha a little while ago, its really jice gettong to try stuff on it I got to run while it was current, and some stuff I did not get to try. I have also just given away a DEC video is in the works
@@RetroBytesUK Fantastic. I had an Alpha based DEC PWS for a while running Tru64 which I rescued many years ago. Like so many things I regret giving it away or selling it or something. I was particularly fond of SGIs (proper IRIX ones) too, because they looked so cool compared to beige boxes but also they did a damn good job of making UNIX "easy" for the average joe. And of course Sun, until, well Larry spolied it :-) Would be interesting to see Windows 2000 running on the Alpha also - for pure novelty.
@@digitalarchaeologist5102 So far I've got tru64 and VMS installed and working on it. I need to add an extra disk to install NT, which I probably will I've got some NT 4.0 workstation and server disks somewhere for Alpha, I think I may have exchange and SybaseNT for Alpha somewhere as well.
@@RetroBytesUK Looking forward to the video. I've played a bit with VMS but only under emulation. I have several versions of Win 2000 for Alpha so ping me if you're interested. The final version was never released but there were beta and release candidates for Alpha.
I thought during the intro you were going to unveil an Apple Interactive Television Box, the early early tv box that Apple tried out but never went to mass market.
MAE is a odd one, as normal Apple customers where not its target market. Rather institutions with Solaris/HP-UX who also had an installed base of Mac applications.
Thanks! I always found fascinating being able to run or access software from a platform where it's not "supposed to". I still remember the astonishment of my young self when I found a software on my Amiga 500 that allowed me to read 720k PC formatted floppies. That "wait, you can do THAT?" feeling...
Surprised that Apple figured the market/volume was big enough to justify the development/maintenance of such a complex (thus expensive in terms of R&D) product. Never heard of it, so thanx! (most obscure Apple product I ever used? The flat-panel LCD display that attached to an Apple //c. It was simply horrific. Even back then, when everything "computing" was exciting).
I've been long meaning to play with that. Unfortunately it only leaked onto the internet after I stuck my last sun box into storage :( One day I'll drag some out and get it going too
I got to use at Uni back in the day, it was fun getting to play with it again. Like me you will probably end up installing a new nvram module like I did, when you get your sun out of storage.
Never used the MAE but makes sense on how they got the PPC gear to work with older code. I did cut my teeth on Sun gear and loved the Sparc10 systems. I recall downloading the NeXT openstep environment (1995?) for Sun which I assume translated to some form of the Sun desktop at some point.
For a breif period Next stopped producing hardware and just started selling nextstep built for lots of different systems. Then it became part of Apple.
@@RetroBytesUK We had lots of equipment that were run by macs, so everyone was just too used to it. We were a bunch of nerdy Apple fan boys and girls 😝 🤓
I have this for my Sun Ultra 5! I also have the SunPCi card that embeds a whole PC (an AMD K6-2) on a PCI card. The PC environment is displayed within an X11 window in Solaris or via the card's VGA port. Great video and thanks for sharing this with others!
Reminds me a bit about how (older) Android's runtime caches compiled Java code and then stores it as machine code cache so apps will feel like they run smoother as time went on.
Well I never knew that existed! I’d also forgotten that the sparcstations had multi CPU support before the ultra series went back to single cpus. I remember the sun machines having quite odd combinations of H and V rates on their cute 13W3 connections - maybe that was messing up your capture?
Ah the memories! I had an Ultra 10 in the late 90s for work and tried to use MAE on it... I had quite a number of issues though. At the time I had been using Mac OS for many yearsand having both Solaris AND MacOS was like a dream. Sadly it wasn't what I had hoped but just showing it to people or rather them seeing me running it on my Solaris workstation was always a good conversation starter and I would talk about NeXT, A/UX... was fun to digress into total geekdom for a few hours. When Jobs came back and OSX was announced my dream of a Mac interface on UNIX had fallen away to focus more on Linux as work was dominated by Windows & x86 and until Apple released their M1 in 2020 I didn't have a Mac from about 97 until 2020. Since then I have thoroughly been enjoying the MacOS, it's everything I wanted 25 years ago and more. Yea I wish they would change a few things that are frustrating coming from Linux but it's so much better than Windows. I've been binge watching your channel since I found it... I LOVED the SGI video... dreamed of an SGI station in the 90s but couldn't ever justify a graphics workstation for network and client server design, lol. This definitely made me miss my old Ultra 10 as well... maybe I can find one somewhere!
Yes, I remember this! Polaroid ran this on a few Suns. Wow, thanks for the memories! I still have a few Sparqs at home. They still work, but there's no room to set them up. Amazing hardware which sadly Oracle killed off.
Great video and what a nice SS10 you have. I remember playing around with MAE on my SparcStation ELC in the 90s, worked fairly well. There was also WABI which allowed you to run 16-bit Windows applications. Another even more obscure product if you want to dig deeper is MacX25 which allows users in an AppleTalk network to share a gateway to access the public X.25 network. 😁
An x.25 gw for appletalk is obscure, I have a x.25 gw for econet (a network system for the BBC micro and other acorn systems), its based on a similar tech to apple talk.
I remember going with my older brother to a computer camp at Pitt University and we used what looked like an extremely similar setup to this, if not rh same. That was many many years ago though and I was only 11 or 12ish.
At first I expected to see the OSX Server! Which Apple decided to kill pretty quickly. Second guess was Apple NAS (rack mount with funny LEDs). Also Apple discontinued pretty quickly and then quit the server business forever.
Interesting top behaviour, summarising all CPUs such that load avg of ~1.0 is 25%. On my systems in top, a full utilisation of 4 CPUs would be 400% (and a load avg of ~4.0). I’ve always really liked how the Platinum theme (and its system 7 predecessor) looked in high resolutions.
From the thumbnail I thought you were going to talk about the TV STB they were working on for a while. This was a little more interesting though. There were a bunch of ports around this time to get System 7 on different architectures, in addition to a few attempts at getting Mac software to run on new third-party OSes as they looked at replacing the aging Classic Mac OS, and these are always neat experiments.
The trap instructions aren’t illegal at all. This feature was clearly documented in the 68000 manuals, as being available for this purpose. It’s roughly comparable to the x86’s INT instruction.
So the trap instruction its self is not illegal, however it is triggered by an illegal op code. So in that regard its different to hitting int 11 in x86. MacOS uses illegal op codes, which effectively calls trap. Dcache and Icache gets flushed then cpu enters supervisor mode, stores some registeres then runs the trap vector code. There are some general purpose trap instructions you can call 33-47 however apple used the illegal op code trigger. I assume 16 instructions did not yield what they wanted. In Linux of x86 for example you put your primary parameters in the registers, eax sets the function number to call for example, and one param is typically a pointer to the memory block containing the other parameters that don't fit in the registers. You then call init 11 which triggers the kernel. In x86-64 there is now a syscall instruction (like in arm) that's explicitly for this purpose rather than using the software interrupt system.
@@RetroBytesUK From the MC68010 data sheet (page 5-11): “Word patterns with bits 12-15 equaling 1010 or 1111 are distinguished as unimplemented instructions and separate exception vectors are given to these patterns to permit efficient emulation. This facility allows the operating system to detect program errors, or to emulate unimplemented instructions, such as the MC68881 Floating-Point Coprocessor instructions, in software.” The system call mechanism on classic Macs used the unimplemented instruction mechanism, not the illegal instruction mechanism. They’re similar in the actual chip; but (at the time) were semantically different: future processors from Motorola could define a previously illegal opcode, and it would then no longer trigger an illegal instruction trap. Future processors were guaranteed by Motorola not to redefine the unimplemented instructions. Now, of course, with the 68000 architecture essentially retired; never to have any new chips produced; it’s a distinction without a difference; but back then it did matter. 🤔
I've messed with MAE a few times over the last couple months but was never able to get it to do much. Actually getting software into the emulated Mac was trickier than I think it should be and certain apps just didn't want to run. Still others would run but if they relied on OpenTransport for networking you are out of luck. I do wonder if some of my issues were that I was using it under Solaris 8 instead of an older version like it was probably meant to be run.
There is the odd kernel module it installs, they may not be compatible with a later kernel. My memories of solaris 8 was it was fairly backwards compatible, I think 9 is where stuff started to break.
That SS10 is LOADED! I've never seen an SS10 or SS20 with that kind of config, and I've seen a lot of them in University environments etc. A friend has the most loaded SS20 I knew of until this and it's a dual hyperSPARC not a quad, didn't even know you could do a quad from heat and power perspective. My most "meaty" SPARC was a Sparc Server 1000E with 8x60MHz and 1.5Gb RAM, but it was a boat anchor and took forever to boot. Surprisingly it wasn't that loud, not like a SGI ONYX which is obnoxiously loud.
@@RetroBytesUK I definitely did, though that was based purely on the silhouette in the thumbnail :) I thought the feet might’ve been the rack mount ears from a slightly odd angle.
I'm glad other people have found it interesting, I was amazed when I first saw it running, but given I've not seen anyone really talking about it I did start to wonder how many people knew it existed.
@@RetroBytesUK I certainly never heard of MAE -- but then I was in grade school and middle school when it was a thing. Back then, the only Unix workstations I saw were in movies or TV or magazines. By the time I was in college/university in the 2000s, those dedicated workstations were giving way to PCs anyway. Though my dad did use a Unix workstation at work sometimes, as a prototyping engineer. (He helped invent those little walk-behind bulldozers that landscapers use.) Interesting stuff -- thanks for sharing it with us! 😎
Was somewhat aware of the emu. Was very puzzled at the thumb, recognizing a Sun pizza box. As the original Mac ran a 68000 with no cache, and came out the same year when the 68020 with cache was released, 1984, and System 1 was basically a brilliant but limited kludge operating with a less than originally planned amount of RAM (think remember was supposed to be 256K, but RAM prices spiked and it was cut in half to 128K), the having to flush cache when trapping illegal opcodes would have just been an unintended flaw that even if fixed would have done nothing but further bloat the OS and slow the Mac down even more, right?
The original apple watch, Nothing comes up when searching it, It has something to do with the „jorg gray collection” I couldnt find anything on it about the year, but yeah pretty obscure.
Mac OS that had no command line. It was ahead of its time. Now Windows 11 dumbed down from Windows 10 with its simpler Start Menu and has rounded window corners like modern Mac OS.
The most obscure Apple product I actually used in a production environment was Rhapsody and Mac OS X Server, the OpenStep port to the PPC platform. We ran Rhapsody and OS X server in K12 computer labs as a replacement for AppleShare IP Server. On top of the Rhapsody server we ran Macintosh Manager Server with AFP server to centralize the document storage for students to the Rhapsody server and mange / lock down the user environment on the original Bondi Blue CRT iMacs. The client / computer lab computers still ran Mac OS 9. The locked down student user environment on the client machines was called "Panels" I believe. It was like a client server version of the Launcher application included with Mac OS since version 7. The student computers had a vertical split screen with a launcher looking screen on the left half and a Finder looking window on the right. The applications students could see and launch were controlled by the admin and the files they saw were tied to their specific user account on the Rhapsody server. None of the student files were stored locally on the iMac clients, they were all centralized on the server. Students could not exit the Panels environment to get to Mac OS.
Thanks for the subscription. I'm not surprised that not many people have heard of MAE, as Apple never marketed it towards Apple users but mostly to academic institutions.
Thank you for giving me a heart attack and making me think my hard drive was dying... Again. Until I realized and remembered that I'm running an m.2 SSD
Highly informative as always but I do wonder why that illegal instruction hack was used in mainstream software. Demos yes but an operating system? I wonder how many other OSs used that feature!
I know the Amiga avoided it, it's also why MAC emulators on the Amiga ran faster than an actual mac with the same CPU. I do wonder if when the started writing in they where a bit inexperienced with the 68k its not like there where loads of m68k based machine in 83 when there started working on it.
The Zilog Z80 CPU had some buggy instructions that weren't documented and were not supposed to be used. But there was some business software that used those instructions and was written to work with the bugs. At some point Zilog "debugged" the Z80 and started making the CPU without the undocumented instructions. Oops! Software that relied on them wouldn't run on the new Z80. So Zilog put the bugs back into the Z80 so that expensive business software would work.
So why MAE and not MAS? I remember them being (quietly) advertised and tech articles being written about them at the same time. "Macintosh Application Services (MAS), supported by Apple, allows PowerOpen-compliant OS's to run Mac applications. MAS includes a 68040 emulator and a PowerPC port of the Mac toolbox, so it will run both 68k and PowerPC Mac binaries. It is unknown when (or if) MAS will be available. Apple, in cooperation with Sun and HP, has released the Macintosh Application Environment (MAE). MAE allows Mac applications to run under X Windows on Sun SPARCstations and HP 9000 series 700 workstations. MAE emulates a 68LC040, but critical parts of the Toolbox run natively. MAE is similar to MAS, but only runs 68k binaries. For more information, see the MAE WWW site. A demo version is available by ftp."
Probably because it ran on power PC, so is was basically a VM running the regular mac os of the time (also I think more Mac poeple knew about it). MAE I also found far more interesting as its more of a technical achievement, and that it runs on Sun Solaris and HP-UX two things I've always been fond of.
Apple may have pioneered JIT (Just In Time) compiling with this. Used widely today, even the Javascript running on this TH-cam page is likely JIT compiled in Chrome/Firefox/whatever. I wonder if there are earlier examples of this technique?
Nice job - thanks for showing it - pretty cool. I guess we don't know about this because, what they forgot was, those of us running Solaris on SPARC or HP-UX on PA-RISC, you probably didn't care much about Macs and Mac applications... least not at the time. Really nice though; reminds me of A/UX (although it worked quite differently), which I liked quite a bit. The compilation of 68k code, just-in-time, then cached for subsequent runs, It reminds me of the Inline::C module in perl, that undoubtedly came later. It allows embedding C code in perl scripts, and when the C portion is encountered at run-time, it compiles and drops the result to a dynamically-loaded object library, remembering a checksum for the source. Next time you run the perl script, with portions written in C, it runs lots faster - only recompiling when the C portion of the source changes.
Interestingly enough it's not the 1st time classic mac os would run on top of Unix and not the 1st time it would run on something else than a 68k. Classic Mac OS would also run on top of Apple's A/UX on 68k macs, they also had the Star Trek project back in 91, a never released port of Mac OS running on top of DR-DOS on intel platforms.
I really wished star trek had been released. I must admit I've never played with A/UX but I would really like to. The only 68k unix I've used are SunOS, Amiga Unix, and ICL's drs unix, oh and Linux.
@@RetroBytesUK To run A/UX you need very specific 68k based mac with plenty of RAM and large hard drives. It's slow, clunky but it offered something classic mac os never could: proper multi user support with each user having their own system folder with extensions and all.
I'd say A/UX better qualifies for this designation, since it's a whole native Apple system, running on a Workgroup Server (usually), so it's both Apple hardware and Apple software.
It's interesting how Apple has got CPU emulation pretty much down for decades now, and everyone else still cannot figure it out. Rosetta 1 & 2 were / are both extremely performant as well, especially when you compare it for example with Microsofts x86 to ARM emulator for its current Qualcomm based laptops. Virtually the same task as Rosetta 2, but aweful in comparison. And forget universal binaries anywhere else but Mac. The best you can get is a multi arch manifest docker image for Linux servers which have also started to significantly move to ARM as well as getting the odd POWER & System z support when IBM does things, but building those images requires either multiple physical systems and a lot of CI pipelines to glue it back together, or abysmally slow emulation with buildx & qemu.
I am certain a good portion of UNIX guys (like me) knew about A/UX but of course there are a lot of "nerds" who don't even know what UNIX or even just Linux are.
They definitely had a card you could fit on a ppc mac with a pentium cpu on it. You could the run window on it. There was even a bit of software that let you copy and paste from mac os to windows and vice versa.
@@RetroBytesUK yes, owned a mac 6100/66 ppc it had dos compatible on the front of it and had a 486 aio system on a card that you could run dos and win 95 on and copy, move files between both oses... worked pretty well because it was in effect a pc on a card....
@@nix123ism some other companies also made PC cards for various Macintosh computers. The biggest was Orange PC. Their later products weren't as good because they switched to running much of the PC hardware aside from the CPU in emulation, unlike their older products that had 100% real hardware on the PC card. Then Apple switched to Intel CPUs and there was suddenly zero market for Orange PC's PC cards. Orange sold some other products and peripherals for Macintosh and held on for a little while after Apple's Intel switch. Back when OS9 was still what most Mac users were using, I tried to get Orange PC to write USB 2.0 drivers for OS9, explaining how if they sold them for $5 they'd have a huge amount of sales. But like 100% of the other vendors selling USB cards to plug into Macintosh computers, Orange PC seemed very hostile to the idea of *making better stuff* for OS9, like USB 2.0 support. Did Apple secretly threaten them all with some sort of reprisal if they dared to do what Apple wouldn't? I never saw such apathy towards making such an improvement, when there has always been a huge market for both paid and free software that adds to and improves Windows. Perhaps they didn't want to get the same treatment Apple gave Jump Development's RAM Charger? RAM Charger blew away Apple's horrible memory management. It could dynamically allocate memory to each application and it pooled all free blocks into one space so memory fragmentation was eliminated. For some reason, unlike how Apple licensed versions of 3rd party software like Super Clock, Control Strip, Extensions Manager and others to include with their OS, Apple tried to ge rid of RAM Charger by deliberately making changes to every System and Mac OS version and update from around 7.5 through 9.1. With every new version and update, Jump Dev had to update RAM Charger to work around whatever new anti-RAM Charger alterations Apple had made. With Mac OS 9.1 the core function of the latest RAM Charger still worked. Apple had failed to completely break it. So Jump Dev didn't release an update to get it all working again. Apple made no more RAM Charger breaking changes in the remaining updated to OS 9. What would have been nice is if Jump Dev had put out one final update after Apple released 9.2.2, to make RAM Charger's features fully functional again. I could see Apple being that petty VS anyone writing USB 2.0 drivers for OS 8.1 and 9.x.x. Imagine you had a USB 2.0 device with your OS 9 drivers from Orange PC. You install the new 9.1 update and *pewf*, none of your USB devices work or they're running at 1.1 speed.
Even an expert like you is clicking the control menu on windows and then clicking on close. Nobody under 40 seems to know the quick way to close a window. It's the same on CDE and mwm as it was on Windows 3.x. (And I don't mean use the keyboard, though that's even faster) I hide all close buttons from my window controls, because that's the correct, old fashioned way.
Normally I only ever use the keyboards shortcut, but the odd way I had todo the video capture messed up my keyboard mapping. So what you cant see off camera is me doing the keyboard short cut and looking confused when nothing happens 🤣
There is nothing on the drive I wanted to keep, it was just a basic Solaris 2.6 install. It just the time it takes to replace the disk and reinstall the OS just to get back to where I was before the disk failed.
This one they did not overhype at all, as for overpriced I could not say. Given most the customers where academic instatutions they would have being doing volume licensing deals I would have thought, so we will never know what they paid, but it was probably not alot.
During this period, I was product marketing manager for HP 68K based workstations. We were very interested in this work, because our strategic direction was the PA-RISC architecture, and we considered licensing this technology so that legacy HP-UX and Apollo Domain applications could be run in emulation. We also shared strategies with Apple (and vise-versa) in our evaluations and negotiations with Motorola regarding the possibility of a final family of the HP 9000 Series 400 based on the 68050 chipset. In the end we decided that we, including Apple’s market requirements, would neither see sufficient economies of scale in chipset costs, nor move our customers quickly enough to PA-RISC where we were making enormous investments. Also I feel I must add that I believe there is a linguistic kink in stories about HP, Apollo, Sun Microsystems, and SGI and it is this: the terms “desktops” and “workstations” get sloppily intermixed. All these companies, as well as software partners, industry analysts, resellers, etc. all used the term workstations to refer to the high/very high-end systems used for primarily engineering related tasks like mechanical, electrical, chemical, and other compute and graphics related work. Desktops were a market superset, but usually referred to PCs at lower price/performance points (in that period INTEL was making great strides in gaining cost advantages through economies of scale, but they weren’t even in the ballpark on performance).
It's interesting to know HP where thinking of adopting 68k emulation, to help bridge the transition. I think SGI where the ones who really started to blur the desktop/workstation terminology referring to their desktop and deskside workstations. I can see why you would for marketing terms at the least they would want to distinguish between a hugely powerful unix workstation and a regular intel based PC. It's a shame the form factor desktop became so linked with the PC that it's somthing the Unix workstation vendors would need to avoid.
@@marcmckenzie5110 I must admit I liked the pizza box form sun went for (as you saw in the video), they could get a bit too warm when they had a few add-ons.
I worked at Apple in 1992 - 1994 on the original Macintosh Application Environment (MAE), code name "Cat in the Hat". Most of the team were from the Apple A/UX team working in the De Anza 3 building. I was responsible for designing the toolbar and color management. It was a great time. We all received "Cat in the Hat" watches when MAE 1.0 shipped!
What I love about this retro computing channel which most others don't cover is also the professional and enterprise side of computing. Most tend to focus more on home computing which is incredibly nostalgic but many of us worked with these systems and others as daily drivers once upon a time. They were far too expensive to own at home but we get to play with them now, although they're getting expensive again :-)
I picked up an Alpha a little while ago, its really jice gettong to try stuff on it I got to run while it was current, and some stuff I did not get to try. I have also just given away a DEC video is in the works
@@RetroBytesUK Fantastic. I had an Alpha based DEC PWS for a while running Tru64 which I rescued many years ago. Like so many things I regret giving it away or selling it or something. I was particularly fond of SGIs (proper IRIX ones) too, because they looked so cool compared to beige boxes but also they did a damn good job of making UNIX "easy" for the average joe. And of course Sun, until, well Larry spolied it :-) Would be interesting to see Windows 2000 running on the Alpha also - for pure novelty.
@@digitalarchaeologist5102 So far I've got tru64 and VMS installed and working on it. I need to add an extra disk to install NT, which I probably will I've got some NT 4.0 workstation and server disks somewhere for Alpha, I think I may have exchange and SybaseNT for Alpha somewhere as well.
@@RetroBytesUK Looking forward to the video. I've played a bit with VMS but only under emulation. I have several versions of Win 2000 for Alpha so ping me if you're interested. The final version was never released but there were beta and release candidates for Alpha.
IIRC all of the SparcStations with 13W3 connectors use Sync On Green for the video output, which is probably why your capture device wasn't happy.
I thought during the intro you were going to unveil an Apple Interactive Television Box, the early early tv box that Apple tried out but never went to mass market.
After years of ingesting almost all retro mac content on TH-cam I assumed I'd come across everything by now. Nice to be proven wrong!
MAE is a odd one, as normal Apple customers where not its target market. Rather institutions with Solaris/HP-UX who also had an installed base of Mac applications.
Thanks! I always found fascinating being able to run or access software from a platform where it's not "supposed to". I still remember the astonishment of my young self when I found a software on my Amiga 500 that allowed me to read 720k PC formatted floppies. That "wait, you can do THAT?" feeling...
I had that moment with my A500 too, the wait we can do this !!
Surprised that Apple figured the market/volume was big enough to justify the development/maintenance of such a complex (thus expensive in terms of R&D) product. Never heard of it, so thanx! (most obscure Apple product I ever used? The flat-panel LCD display that attached to an Apple //c. It was simply horrific. Even back then, when everything "computing" was exciting).
I've been long meaning to play with that. Unfortunately it only leaked onto the internet after I stuck my last sun box into storage :( One day I'll drag some out and get it going too
I got to use at Uni back in the day, it was fun getting to play with it again. Like me you will probably end up installing a new nvram module like I did, when you get your sun out of storage.
The SPARCstation pizza box is my most case favorite design, following in close second by the SPARCstation IPX case design.
Never used the MAE but makes sense on how they got the PPC gear to work with older code. I did cut my teeth on Sun gear and loved the Sparc10 systems. I recall downloading the NeXT openstep environment (1995?) for Sun which I assume translated to some form of the Sun desktop at some point.
For a breif period Next stopped producing hardware and just started selling nextstep built for lots of different systems. Then it became part of Apple.
It's definitely something i've never heard about before, great video!
I have totally forgotten that! We had that back in the 90s on our molecular modeling workstations by the time I got my PhD in biophysics!
My Wife's lab only used SGI kit so saddly no MAE, it did have a windows emulator.
@@RetroBytesUK We had lots of equipment that were run by macs, so everyone was just too used to it. We were a bunch of nerdy Apple fan boys and girls 😝 🤓
I have this for my Sun Ultra 5! I also have the SunPCi card that embeds a whole PC (an AMD K6-2) on a PCI card. The PC environment is displayed within an X11 window in Solaris or via the card's VGA port. Great video and thanks for sharing this with others!
I've always wanted to get hold of one of those cards, or one the earlier 486 cards for the SS10. I would love to make a video on it and Wabi.
Reminds me a bit about how (older) Android's runtime caches compiled Java code and then stores it as machine code cache so apps will feel like they run smoother as time went on.
Well I never knew that existed! I’d also forgotten that the sparcstations had multi CPU support before the ultra series went back to single cpus.
I remember the sun machines having quite odd combinations of H and V rates on their cute 13W3 connections - maybe that was messing up your capture?
You're probably right, it will only sync properly on 2 of my CRTs, my flat panel just goes into standby with itm
Ah the memories! I had an Ultra 10 in the late 90s for work and tried to use MAE on it... I had quite a number of issues though. At the time I had been using Mac OS for many yearsand having both Solaris AND MacOS was like a dream. Sadly it wasn't what I had hoped but just showing it to people or rather them seeing me running it on my Solaris workstation was always a good conversation starter and I would talk about NeXT, A/UX... was fun to digress into total geekdom for a few hours.
When Jobs came back and OSX was announced my dream of a Mac interface on UNIX had fallen away to focus more on Linux as work was dominated by Windows & x86 and until Apple released their M1 in 2020 I didn't have a Mac from about 97 until 2020. Since then I have thoroughly been enjoying the MacOS, it's everything I wanted 25 years ago and more. Yea I wish they would change a few things that are frustrating coming from Linux but it's so much better than Windows.
I've been binge watching your channel since I found it... I LOVED the SGI video... dreamed of an SGI station in the 90s but couldn't ever justify a graphics workstation for network and client server design, lol. This definitely made me miss my old Ultra 10 as well... maybe I can find one somewhere!
Fun journey into obscurity. Loving the #marchintosh series. Finding a lot of new channels I can follow 😄
Nice of you to say.
Ah, I thought the thumbnail was an Xserve Cluster Node. But I like your answer, too.
It was a really nice product shame Apple killed it realy.
Pagemaker for classic on powerpc ran SO FAST it was scary
Some stuff really did fly when they moved to PPC. I suspect apps that made lots of OS calls benefited the most from the shift.
Little late to this. The answer is obviously right to repair.
its amazing you heard me ask that question exactly a year later, man you are spot on
Excellent vid, thanks! Have just realised I saw this in action back in '94 when I was working with IPX workstations in NL.
This later became "Yellow Box" and then Rhapsody, which later became macOS/iOS. Surprise, surprise.
The Sun machine seems like a SparcServer 20, the same used to render Toy Store 1.
I have one here
So where you one of the animators ?
@@RetroBytesUK :) unfortunately not
Yes, I remember this! Polaroid ran this on a few Suns. Wow, thanks for the memories!
I still have a few Sparqs at home. They still work, but there's no room to set them up. Amazing hardware which sadly Oracle killed off.
Great video and what a nice SS10 you have. I remember playing around with MAE on my SparcStation ELC in the 90s, worked fairly well. There was also WABI which allowed you to run 16-bit Windows applications.
Another even more obscure product if you want to dig deeper is MacX25 which allows users in an AppleTalk network to share a gateway to access the public X.25 network. 😁
An x.25 gw for appletalk is obscure, I have a x.25 gw for econet (a network system for the BBC micro and other acorn systems), its based on a similar tech to apple talk.
I remember going with my older brother to a computer camp at Pitt University and we used what looked like an extremely similar setup to this, if not rh same. That was many many years ago though and I was only 11 or 12ish.
Great video. I love the sense of humor! Keep pumping them out please.
Thanks Mike, I'm really enjoying making them. So I think its safe to say there will be more.
Other things that run essentially virtual code compiled to be optimized:
AS/400 when it ran code
Tribes 2 for its VM
At first I expected to see the OSX Server! Which Apple decided to kill pretty quickly. Second guess was Apple NAS (rack mount with funny LEDs). Also Apple discontinued pretty quickly and then quit the server business forever.
Awesome video!
Your videos are fantastic! Thank you for the work you put into them!
I want a spark station so bad
Sprac stations are very cool
@@RetroBytesUK I’ve always had a thing for Sun computers, those and the MIPS/RISC workstations,
Interesting top behaviour, summarising all CPUs such that load avg of ~1.0 is 25%. On my systems in top, a full utilisation of 4 CPUs would be 400% (and a load avg of ~4.0).
I’ve always really liked how the Platinum theme (and its system 7 predecessor) looked in high resolutions.
From the thumbnail I thought you were going to talk about the TV STB they were working on for a while. This was a little more interesting though. There were a bunch of ports around this time to get System 7 on different architectures, in addition to a few attempts at getting Mac software to run on new third-party OSes as they looked at replacing the aging Classic Mac OS, and these are always neat experiments.
This sounds like the tech Apple is using for Rosetta 2, running intel code on the M1.
Still using MAE 3.0 to run apple games on my Workstation.
The trap instructions aren’t illegal at all. This feature was clearly documented in the 68000 manuals, as being available for this purpose. It’s roughly comparable to the x86’s INT instruction.
So the trap instruction its self is not illegal, however it is triggered by an illegal op code. So in that regard its different to hitting int 11 in x86. MacOS uses illegal op codes, which effectively calls trap. Dcache and Icache gets flushed then cpu enters supervisor mode, stores some registeres then runs the trap vector code. There are some general purpose trap instructions you can call 33-47 however apple used the illegal op code trigger. I assume 16 instructions did not yield what they wanted. In Linux of x86 for example you put your primary parameters in the registers, eax sets the function number to call for example, and one param is typically a pointer to the memory block containing the other parameters that don't fit in the registers. You then call init 11 which triggers the kernel. In x86-64 there is now a syscall instruction (like in arm) that's explicitly for this purpose rather than using the software interrupt system.
@@RetroBytesUK From the MC68010 data sheet (page 5-11): “Word patterns with bits 12-15 equaling 1010 or 1111 are distinguished as unimplemented instructions and separate exception vectors are given to these patterns to permit efficient emulation. This facility allows the operating system to detect program errors, or to emulate unimplemented instructions, such as the MC68881 Floating-Point Coprocessor instructions, in software.”
The system call mechanism on classic Macs used the unimplemented instruction mechanism, not the illegal instruction mechanism. They’re similar in the actual chip; but (at the time) were semantically different: future processors from Motorola could define a previously illegal opcode, and it would then no longer trigger an illegal instruction trap. Future processors were guaranteed by Motorola not to redefine the unimplemented instructions. Now, of course, with the 68000 architecture essentially retired; never to have any new chips produced; it’s a distinction without a difference; but back then it did matter.
🤔
Excellent video of a very niche - but interesting - subject. Thanks!
This “emulator” seems to operate very similar to Rosetta 2.
It is incredibly similar, I would not die of shock if the first verison of rosetta contained some of the code from MAE.
I've messed with MAE a few times over the last couple months but was never able to get it to do much. Actually getting software into the emulated Mac was trickier than I think it should be and certain apps just didn't want to run. Still others would run but if they relied on OpenTransport for networking you are out of luck. I do wonder if some of my issues were that I was using it under Solaris 8 instead of an older version like it was probably meant to be run.
There is the odd kernel module it installs, they may not be compatible with a later kernel. My memories of solaris 8 was it was fairly backwards compatible, I think 9 is where stuff started to break.
This was really educational, and entertaining! Loved it.
StuffIt Expander! I haven't heard someone said that in like 20 years. Wild.
That SS10 is LOADED! I've never seen an SS10 or SS20 with that kind of config, and I've seen a lot of them in University environments etc. A friend has the most loaded SS20 I knew of until this and it's a dual hyperSPARC not a quad, didn't even know you could do a quad from heat and power perspective. My most "meaty" SPARC was a Sparc Server 1000E with 8x60MHz and 1.5Gb RAM, but it was a boat anchor and took forever to boot. Surprisingly it wasn't that loud, not like a SGI ONYX which is obnoxiously loud.
I had no idea just how loaded that SS10 was when I bought it, I though it was just a dual cpu version. It does run a little hot in summer sometimes.
I'd never heard of this before. Colour me impressed!
CrApple most obscure product is the honesty of their info at their product launch events.
Thought you were going to say Xserve
I think a fair few people guessed Xserve. I am very tempted todo a video about Xserve. The other one people guessed alot was A/UX.
@@RetroBytesUK I definitely did, though that was based purely on the silhouette in the thumbnail :) I thought the feet might’ve been the rack mount ears from a slightly odd angle.
tfw one of the most interesting #MARCHintosh videos doesn't even have a Mac in it!
I'm glad other people have found it interesting, I was amazed when I first saw it running, but given I've not seen anyone really talking about it I did start to wonder how many people knew it existed.
@@RetroBytesUK I certainly never heard of MAE -- but then I was in grade school and middle school when it was a thing. Back then, the only Unix workstations I saw were in movies or TV or magazines. By the time I was in college/university in the 2000s, those dedicated workstations were giving way to PCs anyway.
Though my dad did use a Unix workstation at work sometimes, as a prototyping engineer. (He helped invent those little walk-behind bulldozers that landscapers use.)
Interesting stuff -- thanks for sharing it with us! 😎
Was somewhat aware of the emu. Was very puzzled at the thumb, recognizing a Sun pizza box.
As the original Mac ran a 68000 with no cache, and came out the same year when the 68020 with cache was released, 1984, and System 1 was basically a brilliant but limited kludge operating with a less than originally planned amount of RAM (think remember was supposed to be 256K, but RAM prices spiked and it was cut in half to 128K), the having to flush cache when trapping illegal opcodes would have just been an unintended flaw that even if fixed would have done nothing but further bloat the OS and slow the Mac down even more, right?
The original apple watch, Nothing comes up when searching it, It has something to do with the „jorg gray collection” I couldnt find anything on it about the year, but yeah pretty obscure.
Mac OS that had no command line. It was ahead of its time. Now Windows 11 dumbed down from Windows 10 with its simpler Start Menu and has rounded window corners like modern Mac OS.
Very interesting. Here I thought Sun only ran their proprietary, Solaris OS on their computers.
The most obscure Apple product I actually used in a production environment was Rhapsody and Mac OS X Server, the OpenStep port to the PPC platform. We ran Rhapsody and OS X server in K12 computer labs as a replacement for AppleShare IP Server. On top of the Rhapsody server we ran Macintosh Manager Server with AFP server to centralize the document storage for students to the Rhapsody server and mange / lock down the user environment on the original Bondi Blue CRT iMacs. The client / computer lab computers still ran Mac OS 9. The locked down student user environment on the client machines was called "Panels" I believe. It was like a client server version of the Launcher application included with Mac OS since version 7. The student computers had a vertical split screen with a launcher looking screen on the left half and a Finder looking window on the right. The applications students could see and launch were controlled by the admin and the files they saw were tied to their specific user account on the Rhapsody server. None of the student files were stored locally on the iMac clients, they were all centralized on the server. Students could not exit the Panels environment to get to Mac OS.
Wow ancient Rosetta. Wonder if their Rosetta and Rosetta 2 are inspired by their old work
This is awesome! I really thought I knew all the Apple products. Today I Learned!! Oh and I subscribed!
Thanks for the subscription. I'm not surprised that not many people have heard of MAE, as Apple never marketed it towards Apple users but mostly to academic institutions.
Thank you for giving me a heart attack and making me think my hard drive was dying... Again.
Until I realized and remembered that I'm running an m.2 SSD
I kinda wish I hadn't given away my HP9000 and Sparc machines :( This would be fun to try
Highly informative as always but I do wonder why that illegal instruction hack was used in mainstream software. Demos yes but an operating system? I wonder how many other OSs used that feature!
I know the Amiga avoided it, it's also why MAC emulators on the Amiga ran faster than an actual mac with the same CPU. I do wonder if when the started writing in they where a bit inexperienced with the 68k its not like there where loads of m68k based machine in 83 when there started working on it.
The Zilog Z80 CPU had some buggy instructions that weren't documented and were not supposed to be used. But there was some business software that used those instructions and was written to work with the bugs. At some point Zilog "debugged" the Z80 and started making the CPU without the undocumented instructions. Oops! Software that relied on them wouldn't run on the new Z80. So Zilog put the bugs back into the Z80 so that expensive business software would work.
So why MAE and not MAS? I remember them being (quietly) advertised and tech articles being written about them at the same time.
"Macintosh Application Services (MAS), supported by Apple, allows PowerOpen-compliant OS's to run Mac applications. MAS includes a 68040 emulator and a PowerPC port of the Mac toolbox, so it will run both 68k and PowerPC Mac binaries. It is unknown when (or if) MAS will be available.
Apple, in cooperation with Sun and HP, has released the Macintosh Application Environment (MAE). MAE allows Mac applications to run under X Windows on Sun SPARCstations and HP 9000 series 700 workstations. MAE emulates a 68LC040, but critical parts of the Toolbox run natively. MAE is similar to MAS, but only runs 68k binaries. For more information, see the MAE WWW site. A demo version is available by ftp."
Probably because it ran on power PC, so is was basically a VM running the regular mac os of the time (also I think more Mac poeple knew about it). MAE I also found far more interesting as its more of a technical achievement, and that it runs on Sun Solaris and HP-UX two things I've always been fond of.
I love the background music. Is that Django Reinhardt?
It is, It's a recording I have from the 1920s.
For a 100 year old 72 it sounds surprisingly ok, after it was captured an cleaned up some what. The record its self needed psychically cleaning too.
I would have guessed their clothing line.
Apple may have pioneered JIT (Just In Time) compiling with this. Used widely today, even the Javascript running on this TH-cam page is likely JIT compiled in Chrome/Firefox/whatever. I wonder if there are earlier examples of this technique?
sounds like the spirit of MAE is still alive in Rosetta on the ARM-based Macs
wonder if this was sort of a precursor to Rosetta
Launces Microsoft Word in a Mac Environment running on Solaris on a Sun SPARC.... Somewhere a Mac purist had an aneurism.
How about the actual LINUX DISTRIBUTION that Apple created?
interesting video.
How about the computers Apple made for Bell and Howell?
Nice job - thanks for showing it - pretty cool. I guess we don't know about this because, what they forgot was, those of us running Solaris on SPARC or HP-UX on PA-RISC, you probably didn't care much about Macs and Mac applications... least not at the time. Really nice though; reminds me of A/UX (although it worked quite differently), which I liked quite a bit.
The compilation of 68k code, just-in-time, then cached for subsequent runs, It reminds me of the Inline::C module in perl, that undoubtedly came later. It allows embedding C code in perl scripts, and when the C portion is encountered at run-time, it compiles and drops the result to a dynamically-loaded object library, remembering a checksum for the source. Next time you run the perl script, with portions written in C, it runs lots faster - only recompiling when the C portion of the source changes.
Great point of how it likely enabled the move from 68k to PowerPC!
StarTreking, but for Sparc!
It's Marchimedes.
Cabled headphones
HLE
JUST LIKE THE FIRST EVER GOOD N64 EMULATOR Ultra HLE
Interestingly enough it's not the 1st time classic mac os would run on top of Unix and not the 1st time it would run on something else than a 68k.
Classic Mac OS would also run on top of Apple's A/UX on 68k macs, they also had the Star Trek project back in 91, a never released port of Mac OS running on top of DR-DOS on intel platforms.
I really wished star trek had been released. I must admit I've never played with A/UX but I would really like to. The only 68k unix I've used are SunOS, Amiga Unix, and ICL's drs unix, oh and Linux.
@@RetroBytesUK To run A/UX you need very specific 68k based mac with plenty of RAM and large hard drives. It's slow, clunky but it offered something classic mac os never could: proper multi user support with each user having their own system folder with extensions and all.
MAE runs a systen folder per user too unsurprisingly, wonder it A/UX's Mac OS system shares any code with MAE.
I'd say A/UX better qualifies for this designation, since it's a whole native Apple system, running on a Workgroup Server (usually), so it's both Apple hardware and Apple software.
@@user-pz6ph1hj2u but A/UX isn’t obscure at all
Actually, the internet is a two-way medium... if not it the whole concept wouldn't work... 🤔
It's interesting how Apple has got CPU emulation pretty much down for decades now, and everyone else still cannot figure it out. Rosetta 1 & 2 were / are both extremely performant as well, especially when you compare it for example with Microsofts x86 to ARM emulator for its current Qualcomm based laptops. Virtually the same task as Rosetta 2, but aweful in comparison. And forget universal binaries anywhere else but Mac. The best you can get is a multi arch manifest docker image for Linux servers which have also started to significantly move to ARM as well as getting the odd POWER & System z support when IBM does things, but building those images requires either multiple physical systems and a lot of CI pipelines to glue it back together, or abysmally slow emulation with buildx & qemu.
I am certain a good portion of UNIX guys (like me) knew about A/UX but of course there are a lot of "nerds" who don't even know what UNIX or even just Linux are.
Didn't Apple put out a computer (90s?) that also had an Intel chip in it that could run Windows too?
They definitely had a card you could fit on a ppc mac with a pentium cpu on it. You could the run window on it. There was even a bit of software that let you copy and paste from mac os to windows and vice versa.
@@RetroBytesUK yes, owned a mac 6100/66 ppc it had dos compatible on the front of it and had a 486 aio system on a card that you could run dos and win 95 on and copy, move files between both oses... worked pretty well because it was in effect a pc on a card....
@@nix123ism some other companies also made PC cards for various Macintosh computers. The biggest was Orange PC. Their later products weren't as good because they switched to running much of the PC hardware aside from the CPU in emulation, unlike their older products that had 100% real hardware on the PC card.
Then Apple switched to Intel CPUs and there was suddenly zero market for Orange PC's PC cards. Orange sold some other products and peripherals for Macintosh and held on for a little while after Apple's Intel switch. Back when OS9 was still what most Mac users were using, I tried to get Orange PC to write USB 2.0 drivers for OS9, explaining how if they sold them for $5 they'd have a huge amount of sales.
But like 100% of the other vendors selling USB cards to plug into Macintosh computers, Orange PC seemed very hostile to the idea of *making better stuff* for OS9, like USB 2.0 support. Did Apple secretly threaten them all with some sort of reprisal if they dared to do what Apple wouldn't? I never saw such apathy towards making such an improvement, when there has always been a huge market for both paid and free software that adds to and improves Windows.
Perhaps they didn't want to get the same treatment Apple gave Jump Development's RAM Charger? RAM Charger blew away Apple's horrible memory management. It could dynamically allocate memory to each application and it pooled all free blocks into one space so memory fragmentation was eliminated. For some reason, unlike how Apple licensed versions of 3rd party software like Super Clock, Control Strip, Extensions Manager and others to include with their OS, Apple tried to ge rid of RAM Charger by deliberately making changes to every System and Mac OS version and update from around 7.5 through 9.1. With every new version and update, Jump Dev had to update RAM Charger to work around whatever new anti-RAM Charger alterations Apple had made. With Mac OS 9.1 the core function of the latest RAM Charger still worked. Apple had failed to completely break it. So Jump Dev didn't release an update to get it all working again. Apple made no more RAM Charger breaking changes in the remaining updated to OS 9. What would have been nice is if Jump Dev had put out one final update after Apple released 9.2.2, to make RAM Charger's features fully functional again.
I could see Apple being that petty VS anyone writing USB 2.0 drivers for OS 8.1 and 9.x.x. Imagine you had a USB 2.0 device with your OS 9 drivers from Orange PC. You install the new 9.1 update and *pewf*, none of your USB devices work or they're running at 1.1 speed.
Apple Server running AUX.
That is not a particular well know product either.
Even an expert like you is clicking the control menu on windows and then clicking on close. Nobody under 40 seems to know the quick way to close a window. It's the same on CDE and mwm as it was on Windows 3.x. (And I don't mean use the keyboard, though that's even faster) I hide all close buttons from my window controls, because that's the correct, old fashioned way.
Normally I only ever use the keyboards shortcut, but the odd way I had todo the video capture messed up my keyboard mapping. So what you cant see off camera is me doing the keyboard short cut and looking confused when nothing happens 🤣
This must be before Apple purchased Next_Step
Nothing like iOS15.4
Huh, truly weird.
Was the issue the loss of the drive, or the data on it?
There is nothing on the drive I wanted to keep, it was just a basic Solaris 2.6 install. It just the time it takes to replace the disk and reinstall the OS just to get back to where I was before the disk failed.
Wtf print head/extruder setup is that?
Please check your dislike count, it should be one higher than before
it is not that hard since Apple Os was constructed on BSD UNIX System so a Kernel modules is able to do a lot.
You’re thinking of OSX, probably because they renamed it “macOS” (note case and spacing). Mac OS was very very very different from BSD.
Whatever it is, it's probably overpriced and overhyped.
This one they did not overhype at all, as for overpriced I could not say. Given most the customers where academic instatutions they would have being doing volume licensing deals I would have thought, so we will never know what they paid, but it was probably not alot.
During this period, I was product marketing manager for HP 68K based workstations. We were very interested in this work, because our strategic direction was the PA-RISC architecture, and we considered licensing this technology so that legacy HP-UX and Apollo Domain applications could be run in emulation. We also shared strategies with Apple (and vise-versa) in our evaluations and negotiations with Motorola regarding the possibility of a final family of the HP 9000 Series 400 based on the 68050 chipset. In the end we decided that we, including Apple’s market requirements, would neither see sufficient economies of scale in chipset costs, nor move our customers quickly enough to PA-RISC where we were making enormous investments.
Also I feel I must add that I believe there is a linguistic kink in stories about HP, Apollo, Sun Microsystems, and SGI and it is this: the terms “desktops” and “workstations” get sloppily intermixed. All these companies, as well as software partners, industry analysts, resellers, etc. all used the term workstations to refer to the high/very high-end systems used for primarily engineering related tasks like mechanical, electrical, chemical, and other compute and graphics related work. Desktops were a market superset, but usually referred to PCs at lower price/performance points (in that period INTEL was making great strides in gaining cost advantages through economies of scale, but they weren’t even in the ballpark on performance).
It's interesting to know HP where thinking of adopting 68k emulation, to help bridge the transition. I think SGI where the ones who really started to blur the desktop/workstation terminology referring to their desktop and deskside workstations. I can see why you would for marketing terms at the least they would want to distinguish between a hugely powerful unix workstation and a regular intel based PC. It's a shame the form factor desktop became so linked with the PC that it's somthing the Unix workstation vendors would need to avoid.
@@RetroBytesUK Indeed, when Sun came out with the Sparc pizza box, pressure on the form factor really took off!
@@marcmckenzie5110 I must admit I liked the pizza box form sun went for (as you saw in the video), they could get a bit too warm when they had a few add-ons.