[Taniwha]

Not really (I wrote the mouse/display drivers and kernel event queue driver for A/UX 1.x) - A/UX has it's own kernel ADB (and mouse/kbd on top of that) and display drivers, it will happily boot from hard drive, and throw up a non-mac terminal on a Mac display card without executing anything from the Mac ROMs.

The later MacOS running on A/UX ran in a single A/UX (system V) process

[ramijames]

So what am I remembering that A/UX needed to boot from ROM?

[Taniwha]

I'm pretty sure the ROMs loaded a boot sector booter and jumped into that, it's been a long time but I'm pretty sure that's what we handed over to Apple

[ramijames]

I guess that makes sense. Thanks for the answer and the trip down memory lane.

[Taniwha]

It's possible that later A/UXs required booting MacOS - but when we started we got 1/2 the initial prototype production run of Mac 2s (no cases, bugs in pals, probably no standard ROMs yet)

Our standard agreement for porting Unix to new hardware (we did something like 150 different boxes, not just macs) required a minimal ROM monitor that could download code from a serial port (we could provide source), we'd take it from there, write S/A code to store data on the harddrive, download a file system, start downloading kernels into ram debugging the disk and serial drivers until we got a shell prompt ... then moving development onto the box