a/ux look-alikes etc (long)

[Wendy Thrash]

In article <16505 at apple.Apple.COM> phil at apple.com.UUCP (Phil Ronzone) writes:
<about A/UX, an Apple product, part of which was developed by UniSoft>

I don't see a lot of comment by UniSoft folks on this question (except Fred
Fish, of course, my predecessor as UniSoft's overworked compiler person),
perhaps because they/we're all bound by nondisclosure.  I believe I can sneak
in a couple of comments legally, though.

>Such things as autoconfiguration, autorecovery, true BSD 4.x networking . . .
>all are Apple features. We thought of them, and we caused them to happen.

Am I the only one who thinks of Miss Anne Elk while reading this?  Certainly
the presence of these features in A/UX was a decision made by Apple, and in
that sense they're responsible.  There seems, though, to be an implication
that without Apple those things would never have found their way into UniPlus+.
I'm inclined to believe that many of them were destined for inclusion anyway.
Not all the things Phil mentioned are A/UX exclusives.

>From inside UniSoft, perhaps the most impressive piece of work on the Apple
contract(s) was the effort that went into the documentation; Apple certainly
deserves the credit for setting that project in motion.

>UniSoft may have learned a lot from working with us . . .

This is an amusing understatement.  We all learned a great deal.  Perhaps
high-level managers learned about QA; the lessons learned by most of us
were rather more interpersonal in nature.  (I think all you ex-UniSoft
folks out there know what I mean. :-) )

>UniSoft is very very good at getting a UNIX port up quickly on a strange
>machine.

UniSoft was very good at getting a UNIX port up quickly on a strange
68000-family machine.  People there were good at dealing with strange MMUs.

BTW, UniSoft has changed a great deal over just the last eight months; one
should exercise some caution in making observations about how the company IS
based on how it WAS.

>UniSoft was a group of contractors to us, we paid them very well, gave each
>UniSoft programmer who worked on the contract a Mac II, and thanked them.

Would that it were so.  Apple was quite generous with Mac IIs, but not
everyone who worked on the contract ended up with one.