Macintosh Application Environment for Unix

[elbaroni]

Hi all.

I found the attached in an old MacWorld magazine from 1994, the archive of which my uni helpfully provides access to. Does anybody know of this and, more importantly, whether it would run on modern unix? Is it related to A/UX at all?

Copyright MacWorld Communications, Inc. May 1994

Macintosh Application Environment 1.0 (MAE), Apple Computer has for the first time ported the Macintosh Operating System and interface to another hardware platform. Expected to ship in May, the $549 MAE will run on Hewlett-Packard Unix workstations running the HP-UX operating system with the Motif interface, and on Sun Microsystems Unix workstations running the Solaris operating system with the OpenLook interface.

MAE comes out of Apple's Business Systems division, whose mandate it is to bring the Mac into the corporate MIS and engineering market with such products as the Apple Workgroup Servers and MAE. This foray into Unix should help Apple show that it has not ceded this market to ever-lower-cost Unix workstations or high-end PCs, as several makers of Mac science and engineering software have charged.

Apple estimates MAE's performance on a midrange Sun Sparc-2 workstation to be comparable to a Mac LC II, while performance on a high-end Sparc-10 will be comparable to a Centris 650. That's middling performance given the power of those workstations, but it does give Unix users access to the thousands of Macintosh business productivity tools. At least four companies now offer Windows emulators for the same reason. The Unix market is not huge --about 10 percent the size of the Mac market and 1 percent the size of the PC market--but Unix dominates the large corporations that Apple is pursuing aggressively.

Macintosh Application Environment uses System 7.1, with a few modifications to make it work in a Unix environment. For example, there's a Keyboard control panel to map Unix control keys to their Mac equivalents, as well as an additional option in the Monitors control panel to create the Mac's window size. There's also a tool bar at the bottom of the Mac window that lets you mount 1.4MB Mac floppies, cut and paste graphics and text between Unix and Mac windows, and constrain the mouse to the Mac window. The tool bar can be hidden and its function replaced with commands.

MAE supports TCP/IE and the Unix NFS file structure, so Unix networking and file access is supported through the standard Mac interface. But the few applications that call the Mac OS's SCSI or NuBus managers will not work, since IAE does not support the Mac's external hardware standards. Also, MAE does not support QuickTime (movies play, but there's no sound support), and system extensions (INITs) are not supported, although some may work. Native PowerPC software also is not supported.

 

[porter]

Is it related to A/UX at all?

In a word, no.

 

[slomacuser]

http://www.aux-penelope.com/mae/index.htm

 

[Charlieman]

The probability that the libraries on a 2008 HP or Sun Unix bx support MAE is close to zero. I'm not familiar with HP/UX, but on the Sun side, I guess that you'd be looking for Sun OS 4.1 or 4.2 with appropriate hardware. The system box will be easy to find but monitor, keyboard and mouse are trickier.

Remember too that MAE is about running Mac applications and does not emulate hardware completely. The target market was scientist and engineers who needed Word, Excel, PageMaker etc.

A few years later Sun offered WABI (Windows 3.1 apps running in X-Windows) and Insignia already offered SoftPC.

 

[zydeco]

It installs ok on SunOS 5.10 (Generic_120011-14 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-250), then it segfaults after launching it, before displaying anything. I am not surprised

(gdb) bt
#0  
#1  0xff1b8f88 in open () from /usr/lib/libc.so.1
#2  0x0033a8ac in docall ()
#3  0x0033af54 in C_aux_trap ()
#4  0x0012bec8 in aux_syscalls_stack ()
#5  0x0012bec8 in aux_syscalls_stack ()
Previous frame identical to this frame (corrupt stack?)
(gdb)

 

[scott]

It works fine under Solaris 8, but chokes under 10:

SunOS sf420r 5.8 Generic_117350-55 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-80

SunOS sf280r 5.10 Generic_120011-14 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-280R

I don't have the gui installed on my Solaris 9 box, so I can't test it there... but I strongly suspect it would work. Sun did a lot of "innovative" things with Solaris 10, and it tends to break some really old software.

As for the MAE's relation to A/UX... There is some lineage there, as much of the R&D that went into A/UX was used to develop the MAE.

 

[ChristTrekker]

Sun did a lot of "innovative" things with Solaris 10, and it tends to break some really old software.

I'm planning on downgrading from 10 to 9 so that I can use my SunPCi card. 10 adds a lot of overhead that I'm not really seeing any benefit from, given the age and low RAM of my machine. I'm just waiting to locate a larger drive for cheap.

 

[MacSE/30]

It works on OpenSolaris 2008.05. Look at this thread and let me know if you find MAE v3

}

 

[LCGuy]

This is completely off topic, but...ElBaroni, your uni has archives of old MacWorlds? Sweet!

 

[elbaroni]

Weird, isn't it? It's amongst the electronic access to various academic journals.

 

[LCGuy]

Very nice...*goes onto my uni's library website, on the off-chance that they might also offer this, but seriously doubts it*

 

[zydeco]

I found MAE 3 for solaris here, but the archive is damaged:

ftp://ftp.uni-duisburg.de/Sun/SunOS/Solaris/MAE/solaris_tar.gz

I could extract it with

gunzip < solaris_tar.gz > solaris.tar

and then modify the install script to bypass verification so it installs.

Diff patch for SOLARIS/E1_MAE.INS

--- solaris/SOLARIS/E1_MAE.INS  Wed Jan 29 04:36:55 1997
+++ solaris_p/SOLARIS/E1_MAE.INS        Mon Nov 10 17:39:16 2008
@@ -216,7 +216,11 @@
        ;;

    verify)
-        echo "$verifying_in_msg"
+        echo "FAKE $verifying_in_msg"
+        exit 0;
+               ;;
+       berify)
+               echo "$verifying_in_msg"
        if [ ! -d "$dest" -o ! -x "$dest" ]; then
            echo "$cannot_access_dir_msg    [ $dest ]" > "$msgs"
            exit 1                                # Error

Now it refuses to run because it needs a license file.

Also, the first file that fails the checksum is lib/data, so I suppose it would break at some point even if it did run.

 

[ChristTrekker]

Well, if we can't get MAE 3 to run without a license, is it possible at least to reset the timer of the 1.0 Trial so it can be re-used?

 

[protocol7]

I'm trying to install the trial on a SS5 running Solaris 2.6. I'm logged-in as root and in the same directory as the extracted files. Running "./INSTALL.SH" or just double-clicking it in the file manager gets me the first (welcome) page but when I hit enter to continue it gives me an error "The installer cannot find any installation packages".

I'm new to Solaris so I haven't the faintest idea what I'm supposed to do to get this installed.

 

[protocol7]

Problem solved, it was just a bad extraction.