MkLinux and the pimped-out Apple Workgroup Server 9150

As is typical here in the Floodgap lab, it all started so innocently: rebuilding a flaky Apple Workgroup Server 9150, the odd duck of the Workgroup Server line and older cousin to our beloved Apple Network Server. And then I just had to pimp it out for MkLinux.

Before the sui generis IBM AIX-based Apple Network Server, one of our favourite machines here at Floodgap, there were the WGSes, the Workgroup Servers, Apple's well-intentioned but conflictingly received line of Macintosh rebadges hopped up with high-spec options and special server software. While certain users had long repurposed desktop Macs as ad-hoc servers, these computers were the first Apple systems explicitly positioned and sold as such, and the first generation was even advertised with A/UX, Apple's own hybrid System V UNIX implementation.

A/UX ultimately didn't survive the 1994 68K transition to PowerPC, but in 1996 Apple publicly offered another option: run Linux, using the Mach microkernel. Although MkLinux emerged after the 9150's discontinuation, it's still just an overgrown NuBus Power Mac, so between more RAM, a beefier CPU upgrade and various video cards, by the end of this article we ought to have a configuration that gives us the best of two worlds — classic MacOS and MkLinux — in one server.

But first we're going to have to rebuild it. And these plastics definitely don't want to stay in one piece.

Testing MacOS on the Apple Network Server 2.0 ROMs

It's time for another save point in the continuing saga of the various ROMs for the Apple Network Server, Apple's first through-and-through Unix server (previously, previously). The Apple Network Server was only ever officially able to boot AIX, IBM's proprietary Power ISA-specific Unix, though it was originally intended to run Novell NetWare and was demonstrated booting Mac OS with early pre-production ROMs. However, much to industry surprise, late in its life cycle then-CTO Ellen Hancock announced that the ANS would be able to boot Mac OS and even Windows NT as well using ROM upgrades. Neither ROM was officially released before Steve Jobs convinced Gil Amelio to cancel the line, and for many years they were believed to be vapourware.

But they've started to surface, first with an ex-Apple employee who had both the preproduction ROM and the Mac OS ROM on a flash ROM SIMM, and later another employee turned up with the NT ROM, though sadly more is needed to make it actually run NT. It turned out that I also had the preproduction ROM in a box gathering dust, and a couple months ago we put both the preproduction ROMs and NT ROMs through their paces.

Well, thanks to Jeff Walther who generously built a few replica ROM DIMMs for me to test, we can now try the "2.0" MacOS ROMs on holmstock, our hard-working Apple Network Server 700 test rig (stockholm, my original ANS 500, is still officially a production unit). And there are some interesting things to report, especially when we pit the preproduction ROMs and this set head-to-head in MacBench, and even try booting Rhapsody on it.

Mini-review: David Pogue's Apple: The First 50 Years

I almost never buy e-books, but I decided to spring for an electronic copy of David Pogue's Apple: The First 50 Years to see if I even wanted to bother with the hardcover. Previously the essential tome on Apple (and especially Mac) history was Owen Linzmeyer's Apple Confidential, still on my shelf in the well-thumbed 2.0 paperback. I was prepared to find this book lightweight on the technical side and I expected that it would concentrate far more on Apple the electronics company than Apple the computer company (after all, the cover's a big flippin' clickwheel). I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong. While I'm much less interested in the history of Apple after, say, the Intel transition (because I'm still bitter), over half the book's 540-odd content pages are dedicated to Apple prior to Jobs' 1997 return.

For example, relevant to our recent article, Pogue provides a solid discussion of the Apple-1 (including the little-known Computer Conversor 4000) and a lot of nice period photographs of Jobs and Woz working on it. The Apple III segment is extremely well-written, with even a thermal photo of just how hot that darn thing ran, plus a complex discussion of the Lisa and of course many pages on Jef Raskin and the early Macintosh. Later on, there's a decent section on Copland and its technical aspects that isn't just a rehash of the Wikipedia article, whereas Linzmeyer mostly considers it from the perspective of the events leading to Jobs' return, and Pogue also gives a small but pithy ELI5 on OpenDoc as well. Pogue even has a picture of the iguana iguana powersurgius image embedded in the PowerSurge and Apple Network Server ROMs, and some interesting photographs of early design prototypes of Spartacus, or what would become the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh. While Pogue doesn't speak much about the Apple Network Server, our favourite Apple system here at Floodgap (because one of them used to serve Floodgap), he at least namedrops it along with the cancelled Power Mac 9700, though oddly he completely omits any mention of the Workgroup Servers (on the other hand, while Linzmeyer provides the codenames for these systems, neither the 9700 nor "Power Express" appear in the earlier text).

Another notable chapter is "Moonshots" (chapter 21). This is aggravatingly brief, but if you ever wanted to see the Cray that John Sculley bought to design the Aquarius RISC chip, you can see it there (love the purple), along with a nice picture of the Jaguar mockup. Kaleida and Taligent get short perfunctory mentions, but they didn't get a lot of print in Owen's text either, and of course Star Trek gets a decent sidebar. The prototype photographs, in fact, are probably the best reason to buy the book. There's a nice photo of the TIM mockup (a corruption of "Time To Market") which used a Macintosh Portable to run the show, but was in fact the design prototype for the PowerBook 100. On the other hand, Pogue calls Gary Davidian's early 68K emulator Cognac, but I don't think this is correct: the emulator was part of the RLC ("RISC LC") project, and that was codenamed Cognac, the renegade group in Apple led by Jack McHenry. Pogue also doesn't mention McHenry nor the RLC's architecture (originally the doomed Motorola 88100, the "other white meat"), nor that there were other RLC-like systems based on MIPS and ARM, though I don't know if Davidian's emulator actually ever ran on those. For his part Linzmeyer has a single mention of Cognac, which he lists as the codename for the "Power Mac project."

Other landmarks abound. There is an entire chapter on Newton as well, including a picture of the Cadillac prototype (hi Greg!) with its diffuse infrared system for room-wide data transfer, and which the earlier book doesn't even mention. Pogue also includes the Interactive Television Box, albeit briefly, and a longer bit on the PenLite, two oddball projects similarly missing from Owen's text. In fact, the book even talks about the Swatch project, reportedly based on the Sony PTC-300 PDA and effectively a Mac in a Newton-sized form factor, with colour pictures. The Apple clone manufacturers get their own special section; while Linzmeyer has a more detailed chapter "The Clone Quandary," Pogue's "Clones" is pithier and easier to follow. Apple 1990's gadget hounds will like the QuickTake section and pictures of the PowerCD, AppleDesign Powered Speakers (I still use a set with my 7300) and even the Apple combo Mac/fax. There's a nice colour screenshot of eWorld, though Owen's coverage is better, a sidebar on Magic Cap, though I also favour Owen's, and a portion on the Pippin.

When Jobs came back, the book got less interesting for me, and I sort of idly paged my way to the end. I don't think there's a lot there people haven't seen, and I was surprised that the famous picture of the Yosemite G3 acting as an iPhone prototype wasn't in the book. He has so many other great pictures you'd think he could manage that one (there is an interesting picture of the creeptastic Face Lab, though). The last couple chapters of the book are so speculative as to be almost useless, which Linzmeyer to his credit didn't even try to address, knowing that the company's history was far from settled.

Still, having gone over it electronically, I think I want this in my bookshelf too and I'm going to pick up the hardcover after all. I see some names in the back who have been good friends of this blog in the past and I think that in general is a good testimony of its accuracy and relevance (my brief quibbles above notwithstanding), and as far as the writing style goes, Pogue has always been able to spin a good tech yarn. If he ever decides to do a more detailed dive into it, I'd probably pay decent money since he knows the right people to talk to — I don't know if it would sell but if it's on the order of the quality here, he'd get my bread in a minute. Until that happens, check this one out and see if you agree.

Hands-on with two Apple Network Server prototype ROMs

Grateful acknowledgement made to the several former Apple employees who materially contributed to this entry. This article wouldn't have been possible without you!

Here's why I need to do inventory more often.

This is an Apple prototype ROM I am ashamed to admit I found in my own box of junk from various Apple Network Server parts someone at Apple Austin sent me in 2003. The 1996 Apple Network Server is one of Apple's more noteworthy white elephants and, to date, the last non-Macintosh computer (iOS devices notwithstanding) to come from Cupertino. Best known for being about the size of a generous dorm fridge and officially only running AIX 4.1, IBM's proprietary Unix for Power ISA, its complicated history is a microcosm of some of Apple's strangest days during the mid-1990s. At $10,000+ a pop (in 2026 dollars over $20,700), not counting the AIX license, they sold poorly and were among the first products on the chopping block when Steve Jobs returned in 1997.

stockholm, my own Apple Network Server 500, was a castoff I got in 1998 — practically new — when the University bookstore's vendor wouldn't support the hardware and it got surplused. It was the first Unix server I ever owned personally, over the years I ended up installing nearly every available upgrade, and it ran Floodgap.com just about nonstop until I replaced it with a POWER6 in 2012 (for which it still functions as an emergency reserve). Plus, as the University was still running RS/6000 systems back then, I had ready access to tons of AIX software which the ANS ran flawlessly. It remains one of the jewels of my collection.

So when the mythical ANS MacOS ROM finally surfaced, I was very interested. There had always been interest in getting the ANS to run MacOS back in the day (I remember wasting an afternoon trying with a Mac OS 8 CD) and it was a poorly-kept secret that at various points in its development it could, given its hardware basis as a heavily modified Power Macintosh 9500. Apple itself perceived this interest, even demonstrating it with Mac OS prior to its release, and leading then-CTO Ellen Hancock to later announce that the ANS would get ROM upgrades to allow it to run both regular Mac OS and, in a shock to the industry, Windows NT. This would have made the ANS the first and only Apple machine ever sold to support it.

Well, guess what. This is that pre-production ROM Apple originally used to demonstrate Mac OS, and another individual has stepped up with the NT ROMs which are also now in my possession. However, at that time it wasn't clear what the prototype ROM stick was — just a whole bunch of flash chips on a Power Mac ROM DIMM which my Apple contacts tell me was used to develop many other machines at the time — and there was no way I was sticking it into my beloved production 500. But we have a solution for that. Network Servers came in three sizes: the rackmount ANS 300 ("Deep Dish") which was never released except for a small number of prototypes, the baseline ANS 500 ("Shiner LE"), and the highest tier ANS 700 ("Shiner HE") which added more drive bays and redundant, hot-swappable power supplies.

Which brings us to this machine.

Meet holmstock, my Network Server 700, and the second ANS in my collection (the third is my non-functional Shiner ESB prototype). This was a ship of Theseus that my friend CB and I assembled out of two partially working but rather thrashed 700s we got for "come and get them" in August 2003. It served as stockholm's body double for a number of years until stockholm was retired and holmstock went into cold storage as a holding bay for spare parts. This makes it the perfect system to try a dodgy ROM in.

I'll give you a spoiler now: it turns out the NT ROM isn't enough to install Windows NT by itself, even though it has some interesting attributes. Sadly this was not unexpected. But the pre-production ROM does work to boot Mac OS, albeit with apparent bugs and an injection of extra hardware. Let's get the 700 running again (call it a Refurb Weekend) and show the process.

A Christmas 2007 video present from Old VCR with Jack Tramiel et al

A very happy holiday season and Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it (timezone may vary). Also, I don't think I nearly say thanks enough to my regular patrons through Ko-fi, and I want to also thank them on behalf of the geriatric systems their generosity — and all of you who have chipped in at one time or another — helps keep running. I've got more projects to finish in 2026 and I hope you enjoy them.

Anyway, here's a gift for you which I forgot I still had kicking around. This is a raw cut from the 2007 Computer History Museum 25th anniversary symposium of the Commodore 64, with Jack Tramiel himself, plus Steve Wozniak, William Lowe and others (like Lee Felsenstein and Al Alcorn from the audience). I was fortunate enough to get into what was a sell-out standing-room only crowd with my trusty JVC DV camera and tape the whole thing, then dash back to So Cal and quickly dump and title it on the Power Mac Quad G5. Any camera glitches, plus a couple dropouts where I had to quickly change DV tapes, and bad titles are of course totally my fault. (In fact, there are indeed at least two errors. Can you find them?) This video is so old that it was actually originally uploaded to Google Video — some of you may remember it — and had been quietly transferred automatically to YouTube, which I had forgotten even happened. So here it is in its original strictly standard definition format. If you want to use clips from it in your own video, please give me a holler first in the comments. Enjoy.