The first version of A/UX was produced in 1988, and supported the Mac II (with a PMMU upgrade), the IIx, and the IIcx. The product was available in three forms: 55 Floppies, a single 150MB Tape, and pre-installed on an 80MB hard drive. There was an Apple-Internal release of A/UX 1.1.1 that was distributed on CDROM, but this was not released to the general public. This is probably why the early versions of A/UX are not available for download on the internet... Who wants to image fifty-five floppies?

The information presented here was gathered from a variety of sources, including the Apple Knowledge Base Archive, the comp.unix.aux newsgroup, and The A/UX Handbook by Jan Harrington. I was fortunate enough to obtain a copy of Harrington's original A/UX Handbook, which covers version 1.1 of the operating system. See the images at the bottom of this page for ISBN information.

Before we get started, I would like to offer some background information on A/UX 1.x. As stated above, the product required a Mac II, IIx, or IIcx with an 80MB hard drive, and a minimum of 2MB of RAM. More RAM was recommended if the system would function in a multi-user, or network environment. Unlike many Unices of it's time (think Xenix), TCP/IP, Streams, and a C-compiler were included in the package for no additional cost.

The first version of A/UX did not look much like the product we've come to know and love... There was no friendly Macintosh Finder environment hiding Unix from the user. When A/UX 1.x starts up, the user is presented with a command-line interface inside a terminal-window. Until you launch one of the graphical programs within the operating system, the mouse is non-functional. The X-Window system was sold separately from the operating system, as shown in this August 15th, 1989 price list obtained from the comp.unix.aux newsgroup archives:

A/UX Version 1.1 added support for the 030-direct slot of the SE/30, but this compact Mac was not officially supported until version 1.1.1. Version 1.1.1 was released specifically to add support for the SE/30, and the IIci. The AppleCD SC was supported, but the superdrive (1.4MB floppy) was not. At least, not quite. An A/UX 1.x system could use the superdrive as an 800k floppy drive.

Nearly a year ago now, a copy of the Apple-Internal release of A/UX 1.1.1 appeared on Ebay. Unfortunately, I did not win it. In fact, I didn't even come close. However, I do know the individual who won the item, and had the opportunity to assist him with the installation process. The remainder of this page documents the procedure we used to install the Apple-Internal release of A/UX 1.1.1

Please note: I entered into a "gentleman's agreement" with the owner of the software. I was able to assist with the installation procedure, and share the information on my website, on the stipulation that I not request a copy of the software itself. This release was internal to Apple, and not for distribution to the general public. Distributing this version would be a very bad idea, and tracing any distribution would be trivial. If you have any questions on this matter, please visit the owner of the A/UX 1.1.1 CD at http://slagheap.net/.

Also, please note that the screenshots presented here have been generated using Adobe Photoshop. A/UX 1.x does not have the capacity to capture screenshots. Each screen capture you see here was painstakingly measured and recreated with near pixel-accuracy, using screenshots from other versions of A/UX. If you are not interested in the installation process, and simply want to see what Unix-on-Mac looked like in 1989, click here to jump to the screenshots.

We started with the perfectly logical assumption that the A/UX 1.1.1 installation routine was similar to that of A/UX 2.0, with several floppies containing the actual installer. This assumption put us at a decided disadvantage, because the auction included the CD alone - No floppies. The first thing we tried was using the installation floppies from A/UX 2.0. Good idea... Too bad it didn't work. So, we tried a different approach, and bypassed the installation routine entirely.

A typical A/UX system contains a Mac partition, a Root filesystem, a swap partition, and an autorecovery (eschatology) partition. This same partition scheme exists on the installation CD itself (regardless of the A/UX version). Therefore, in theory, you could use the Root partition of the A/UX installation CD as the root filesystem for an A/UX system. The only catch being that the filesystem is, by definition, read only. The image below shows the partition scheme of a typical A/UX 1.x system.

The eschatology partition (later renamed "autorecovery") was used to recover the root filesystem in the event of a hard drive crash. A/UX 1.x includes two eschatology partitions, one at either end of the drive... The theory being that a physical head crash would leave at least one of them intact.

The installation target was a Mac IIci with 24MB of RAM and a 160MB internal drive set to SCSI ID 0... Probably not the best choice of system, since the IIci was not supported until A/UX 1.1.1. This raises the possibility that the internal release of A/UX 1.1.1 did not yet fully support the IIci, or at least contained incomplete beta versions of certain drivers.

The CDROM Hack extension was copied from the A/UX 3.0 startup floppy to the System Folder of a Mac OS 7.0.1 System disk. The IIci was then booted using this System disk. The internal drive of the IIci was partitioned using Apple HD SC Setup, to include a 4MB Mac partition, 32MB swap, and the remainder as a combined Root&USR. The Mac partition on the A/UX 1.1.1 CD was copied to the Mac partition of the internal hard drive, and the IIci was booted from the internal drive.

The Mac partition of the A/UX 1.1.1 CD includes a program called SASH: Stand Alone SHell. This program serves as a "jumping-off" point to launch the system from MacOS 6.0.3 into A/UX. In the default configuration, this program is set to run automatically on boot.

The root filesystem was specified as SCSI ID 3 using the General option under the Preferences menu.

Once the root filesystem was specified, the boot command was issued using COMMAND+B. Instead of booting to A/UX 1.1.1, the system immediately hung with a bomb-error.

All versions of A/UX use a similar technique of booting into Mac OS first, then using a startup utility to launch into A/UX. Gambling that the A/UX 2.0 startup utility might work with A/UX 1.1.1, we copied the "A/UX Install" program from the A/UX 2.0 "floppy lauch" disk to the internal drive of the IIci. Again, the CD was specified as the root filesystem.

The startup routine normally wants to perform an fsck (filesystem check) of the root filesystem. Since the root filesystem is readonly, it was necessary to disable the fsck.

This time, the IIci launched into A/UX 1.1.1, and booted to single-user mode. The operating system requested a hostname and domain name, then dropped to a root prompt.

The next logical step was to format the Root partition on the internal drive, then dump the contents of the CD to the internal drive. However, upon issuing the "mount" command, we realized that A/UX could not update the /etc/mtab file on the (readonly) root filesystem... Therefore, we could not mount the internal drive.

The /etc/mtab file is a list of all mounted filesystems on an A/UX system. When a new volume is mounted, the /etc/mtab file is updated to reflect the change. Therefore, to mount the internal drive, we needed a filesystem with read-write access. Using a RedHat linux system, we imaged the A/UX 1.1.1 CD directly to a 100MB hard drive, thus creating a bootable drive with read-write capabilities.

The external CDROM was removed from the IIci, and replaced with the 100MB external hard drive. The IIci was booted from the external hard drive, and the "A/UX Install" utility was again copied from the A/UX 2.0 "floppy launch" disk. After adjusting the boot parameters to use the root filesystem on the external hard drive, the system booted to single-user mode. Only, this time, it had read-write access to the filesystem.

Before we could mount the root partition of the internal drive, it had to be formatted using mkfs. Jan Harrington's "The A/UX Handbook" contains a wonderful section on creating new filesystems. The partition size is specified in blocks. For example, to format a 20MB partition, the syntax would be: mkfs /dev/dsk/c0d0s0 40000

The external hard drive is 100MB, chosen because it was large enough to store the entire A/UX 1.1.1 installation CD with very little wasted space. Since the internal drive is 160MB, the dd command was not appropriate for copying the root filesystem to the internal drive. Instead, we used the dump.bsd command. After formatting the root partition of the internal drive, this partition was mounted under /mnt.

The dump.bsd command was then used to copy the root filesystem from the external drive to the internal. This procedure took several minutes to complete.

At this point, the external drive was removed, and the IIci was booted from the internal hard drive. Since we chose to bypass the actual A/UX installation routine, and dump the CD to a hard drive, there was a bit of cleanup to be done. For example, the system still booted to single-user mode. To correct this, the default runlevel was set to 2 in the /etc/inittab. The required networking daemons were enabled as well.

Also, the A/UX 1.1.1 Sash utility is still set to launch on boot. This had to be disabled, and the "A/UX Install" utility set to launch in its place.

Under A/UX 2.0 and later, the kernel is rebuilt using the "newconfig" utility. Under A/UX 1.x, the "autoconfig" program is used to perform this task. The image below shows the result of an autoconfig command on the IIci. The system successfully rebuilt the kernel, and added support for the MacCon 3CNB network card.

I won't insult my audience by placing an "Under Construction" sign on this page... All good web pages are constantly being developed, and always under construction. However, I have a great deal of work left to do with A/UX 1.1.1, and more screenshots to produce. Please check back often, as this page will develop.