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by dev_tty01 1730 days ago
As the author mentions, Apple's internal work with A/UX and the associated Mac toolbox led to a product known as the Macintosh Application Environment, MAE. I used it on a PA-RISC HPUX workstation in the 90s. Actually worked really well. We were using CAD tools on HPUX workstations but it didn't have much in the way of productivity apps. Running the MAE layer allowed one to fill that gap. It was a surprisingly lightweight layer and performed better than the Mac I had at home.
3 comments

> As the author mentions, Apple's internal work with A/UX and the associated Mac toolbox led to a product known as the Macintosh Application Environment, MAE

I can't find any solid info on it but have to imagine their experience reimplementing Toolbox was tied into "Star Trek" somehow as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

https://web.archive.org/web/19980613012744/http://www.mae.ap...

MAE is 68k macintosh emulator with some OS/toolbox parts handled with native code.

My first year at Columbia in 1994, the university set up a single computer lab in the engineering building (<https://cuit.columbia.edu/computer-lab-technologies/location...>) with them. Although they booted into HP-UX and its Motif window manager, MAE provided Mac emulation and, in practice, was usually used because most students were unfamiliar with X Window, of course.

MAE was slow and unstable in my experience unlike yours, and by the time I graduated Macs, I believe, replaced them, which made the lab consistent with what most of the other computer labs had.

Has anyone here ever run into a copy of MAE 3.0?

I’ve been searching for over a decade now.

Oh, wow — thanks!
Yep -- looks like you got the pointer you needed, but I have it running on a SPARCstation 20 under Solaris 2.6 and it works well!

The SPARCstation also has a SunPC card in it, so I have Windows 3.11, Mac System 7.5, and Solaris 2.6 all running on the same desktop: https://i.imgur.com/ctvlzCX.gif

I really gotta get MAE working on HP-UX. I have a PrecisionBook here which would be perfect for it.
If you are interested in setting it up on Solaris, you can send me a message on Telegram or Email.