The Apple Network Server's all-too-secret weapon (featuring PPC Toolbox)

The history section is depressing: a whole conga line of promised collaborations and technologies that Apple seems to have promised, and then completely dropped the ball on. (Even apart from the famous crash-and-burns of Copland and OpenDoc, don&#x27;t forget A&#x2F;UX 4.0! A&#x2F;UX and AIX on PowerOpen! Mac OS 7 on DR-DOS! Netware on PPC Macs! Mac OS on the ANS! Okay, wait, MAE on AIX on the ANS! Whoops, no SMP on the ANS! Okay, now we&#x27;re shipping Mac OS, A&#x2F;UX, <i>and</i> NT on ANS!)<p>It puts contemporary Apple&#x27;s NIH complex in context.

This is a great and accurate historical history of the Network Server and its software.<p>I worked at Apple, in the same building with the Apple’s Shiner team and AIX teams, and had a Network Server in my office because I was on the team at Apple porting NetWare to the machine—I still have a bootable CD. The project was cancelled just as it was entering Beta when disks were to get into customers hands.

Interesting to think about a world where Apple was able to embed AIX with PPCToolbox running on the same machine with classic MacOS essentially as the window server. Assuming they could get around licensing cost issues, this might have been a viable path forward for a modern OS in an alternate future.

I had one of these and ran Yellow Dog Linux on it. Linux supported all of the hardware very well including hotswap SCSI and the 20x4 LCD with a nice multi page mini &#x27;top&#x27;.<p>Physically, it was amazing. No tools required, and the processor board rolled out on rails.<p>Had no idea about all this craziness!

&gt; A&#x2F;UX, Apple&#x27;s own Unix with a bolted-on Mac compatibility layer<p>I used a Mac running A&#x2F;UX circa 1990-91. It worked rather well for the period. I was really surprised when Apple dropped it because it solved a lot of what I saw as problems in MacOS.<p>The article also mentions Apple talk. There was some free software called UAB, Unix-to-AppleTalk Bridge around that same timeframe.