[mistrial9]

I was there at that time, there are manuals in white binders down the hall from me now. The Mac was made to never, ever, use the command line. That is what I chose to develop for at that time, including exposure to "high end" machines at University.

fun fact - there were no undergraduate courses in computer science at that time; master's level and up .. you have to be trained to use those workstations, even for five minutes, AND the oversight of an admin with security.

Mac? get one, fire it up, make Mac Paint pictures. The network IS NOT the computer, thankyouverymuch

[Taniwha]

I actually wrote a large chunk of the A/UX unix port (late 80s) - a decade before (mid 70s) I'd obtained an undergraduate degree in Comp Sci (in New Zealand) - undergraduate Comp Sci was very much a thing at the time

[scruffyherder]

Have you ever played with this:

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/aux-apple-unix-68k-version-...

I found it interesting that it mentions both ‘Milwaukee‘, and Cayman "brac" ... Here on the Jasmine 80.

Seems like lots of weird codenames.

It looks like UniSoft had done a lot of work on the code (you?) to make it super portable. Although everything not directly related to the Milwaukee was cut. It'd be interesting to see if the kernel could be built without MMU support.. I tried to remove PAGING but that didn't work. Oh yeah the kernel source is on that image and other than one damaged file, it not only builds, but works on a special Shoebill.

cd /sys/psn

rm *.o

cd io

mv screen-data.c screen_data.c

cd ..

make unix

Pretty neat, none the less!

[Taniwha]

(here's probably too much information)

yup I wrote a lot of that, I did all the console stuff (font renderer, vt100, mouse, keyboard, fdb/adb, ui event queue etc).

Missing is all the auto config support (ability to add 3rd party drivers to the kernel in the field, something that at the time you usually couldn't do without source), fixes for large screen support, all my appletalk code is missing too. However I can see the latish floppy bug fix (there was a hardware bug found in the FDB/ADB chip where if we accessed the floppy on only some systems the keyboard froze, turned out we were spinning reading the timer while reading the disk, doing it so fast the clock to the FDB chip sped up) and the older pre-fix code in "sony.c.~8A" - that sort of places the release in time.

Given all that I'd guess that this is one of the early releases we gave to Apple that has somehow escaped - we used to fly to Oregon and copy disks to do releases to avoid California's sales taxes - UniSoft actually had an online modem based system where customers could log in and download the latest software - at the time CA tax law didn't explicitly cover electronic delivery of software, we were sued by the state and they lost setting a precedent

It's been a long time but "psn" probably stands for "Pigs in Space" - our internal code name for the project (Apple's code name "Eagle" leaked, but ours never did).

The "Cayman/brac" looks like what someone named their box, "Jasmine" was a type of hard drive, I've no idea about Milwaukee - I think Cayman used to be a company that made mac ethernet hardware, my guess would be that someone at Apple slipped them this pre-release, and then an update with some bug fixes, along with source (very naughty! AT&T would likely have sued us, ie UniSoft if they found out)

The assembly font renderer uses the 68020 only bfins bit field insert instructions, it can under certain circumstances generate a 24-bit bus write, nubus doesn't support such a thing, we got half of the first big run of mac 2 boards, they came with a schematic and PAL equations, I got to send fixed PAL equations back to Ron at Apple to make it work.

As far as "making it portable" a large part of that is just system 5 (SVR2 in this case) not so much us, though porting this code was our bread and butter - we supported a number of MMUs - 2 paging MMUs for 68020s, and a whole lot of swapping MMUs for 68010/68000s (plus 29k 88k etc) - it was never really designed to work without some form of MMU

[scruffyherder]

Cayman must be Cayman Systems (Cambridge, MA).

I'd seen this zip file floating around for well over a decade, maybe quite a bit longer. It was amazing to see someone write enough glue for an emulator to actually boot it. It's even more crazy to get 3.0.1 to mount it under Qemu and do a full build in 17 seconds... I can't even imagine how long it took to build this back in the day!

Apparently above Milwaukee has something to do with Gasse and the BigMac Jr.

I wonder what ever happened to Unisoft's unix business. I've always wanted a SYSV but they seem impossible to buy. Best I have is a non commercial SYSIII from SCO before they 'gave 32v' and lower away but it's all so murkey if they could give anything away but I think they could sublicense for a fee (best $100 ever!)

[Taniwha]

After I left the Unix biz changed, we'd made money doing lots of ports for small companies, as Sun/SGI/etc got successful there were fewer of them, then we did the 88k and 29k ports but those guys didn't really take off. Doing A/UX also kind of screwed the company, I think it made us ignore our smaller customers, we expanded a bit too much, moved into a nicer building. We also didn't do an x86 port, which was a mistake - we actually helped SCO with the MMU portion of the SysV 286 port, there was some deal where we were supposed to get a copy but somehow that didn't happen (no love lost there).

UniSoft still exists, these days they sell digital video stuff (which was very weird when I became a cable/sat protocol engineer for a while a decade or so ago).

Reading what other people have been saying "Milwaukee" might have been a Mac2 code name.

[mistrial9]

not at Berkeley ! but proper respect to you Taniwha, many paths

[Taniwha]

Well I did the A/UX port IN Berkeley (the city, not the university).

The thing is that as a discipline Comp Sci is a late comer, university Comp Sci departments came from lots of places, some grew out of Engineering depts, others from Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Commerce, others from the computing infrastructure groups withing universities - they ended up being called all sorts of things - early on places offered Comp Sci by a whole lot of names

[cjsplat]

Yes, Berkeley had undergrad CS degrees in the 80's (and late 70's). One in the College of Engineering and one in the College of Letters and Science. Also, an undergrad EECS in Engineering.

The Bay Area school that didn't have an undergrad CS program was Stanfurd.

[gumby]

Back then MIT had one but Harvard did not. I felt sorry for my friends who opted to go there.

H recently started an engineering school. Years ago they tried to buy MIT but were rebuffed.

[mistrial9]

evidence welcome - I do not recall that as the case

[cjsplat]

Surprisingly tricky to prove. It looks like Berkeley overhauled its student body statistics about 15 years ago, and data from before seems to have vanished.

Is it argument from authority if I cite Karp?

https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/bears/CS_Anniversary/karp-tal...

The two undergraduate degree programs at Berkeley seem to date from 1968 or so. (Karp is fuzzy about his citations).

It was certainly well established when I went there in the early 80's.

[reaperducer]

fun fact - there were no undergraduate courses in computer science at that time

Perhaps this was regional. I was enrolled in undergraduate Computer Science courses at this time, and it was at a pretty low-end state university.

[msh]

I assume it can't have been that common not to have undergrad courses in cs?

I know my (non US) University have had undergrad courses since 1970.