Since 2001 and the release of MacOSX, the operating system of Apple Macintosh computers has been Unix based but this was not the first time Apple developed and released a Unix for the Mac.
In 1988 Apple released A/UX which was based on Unix System, it came with a version of the Apple Mac graphical user interface and ran on select Motorola 68K Macs. It was able to run Mac and X-Windows applications. Unix commands could be run via a dialog box which also allowed the user to select command line options in a user friendly way. The initial version of A/UX included the System 6 Finder with the Finder switching to System 7's with A/UX version 3.0.
Despite the positive reaction to A/UX from some quarters, A/UX was never a great success for Apple and today remains in obscurity. Apple thought A/UX could help them get the Mac into big business and the growing enterprise market. Apple finally dropped A/UX in 1995, the already announced v4.0 never seeing the light of day.
This wasn't the end of Apple's pre-MacOSX Unix efforts though. In 1994 they released the Macintosh Application Environment for Solaris and HP/UX. It could allow Macintosh applications to be run on Unix computers from Sun and HP. It again used a version of the Mac OS 7 Finder and special tools for importing and exporting to and from the Mac and X environments. MAE was discontinued in 1998. Thus ending Apple's involvement with Unix... well for the time being...
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| Screenshot from WinWorld https://winworldpc.com/product/a-ux/3x |
