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.
Still, it was a relatively open secret that the ANS was heavily derived from existing Power Macintosh hardware, most closely the Power Macintosh 9500, and early "Shiner" prototype systems were even demonstrated with MacOS. This was apparently the underpinning of Apple's brief flirtation with NetWare as a server OS, variously codenamed Wormhole, Deep Space Nine and most famously Cyberpunk. Then-CEO Michael Spindler made public statements supporting NetWare on Apple hardware; Wormhole was reportedly demonstrated on an early prototype likely of the Workgroup Server 9150 and Cyberpunk was explicitly meant for Shiner. Cyberpunk will no longer run on an ANS with production ROMs, but reportedly did run on ANSes with pre-production ROMs that could still boot MacOS, and does run on early NuBus Power Macs like the Power Macintosh 6100, which is how we demonstrated it. However, potential customers strongly preferred a Unix option and Apple had an arrangement with IBM around AIX, and so as the last operating system still standing that's what the ANS ended up running. Production ANSes as sold with the standard Open Firmware 1.1.22 ROMs lock MacOS out entirely and you get a message like this:
Hancock's assertion was a simple ROM change would do it, and as it happens the ROMs on the ANS are conveniently on a small daughtercard that can be replaced. However, it seems that the market was sceptical this could work — heck, I was sceptical while doing the story research, since I knew no such ROMs were ever publicly sold — and the recently-returned Steve Jobs talked Amelio into cancelling the ANS line and OpenDoc both on the same day in 1997. Nothing more ever turned up about either option.
Though he didn't have the NT ROMs, he did dump the two development ROMs he had (a third is in progress) which included the MacOS ROM — and now we have them for analysis. What's interesting is that both the explicit MacOS ROM and the Open Firmware 2.26b6 ROM he dumped seem capable of booting MacOS, though the 2.2 ROM has strings saying MacOS is unsupported, use at your own risk. and MacOS requires PCI video card and external SCSI boot disk. (which may lend credence to that old nerds' tale, assuming you had the right ROMs, not the 9500's). However, the full MacOS ROM reportedly "just works," all the way to Mac OS 9; one wonders if with XPostFacto you could drag it into OS X that way, giving it another Unix option besides AIX, Linux and NetBSD, the driver issue notwithstanding. Though the MacOS ROM does not use the ANS's front-mounted LCD, which is one of its best features, it wouldn't seem difficult to come up with an INIT extension for it. A particularly tantalizing thought is this might also get Cyberpunk running on a Shiner for the first time since 1996, the very machine it was intended for.
To make all that happen, of course, we next need to get the MacOS ROM on an actual ROM card. The ROMs this individual had were flashable and I need to do some looking at mine, and the connectors aren't common. Nevertheless, the first step is to actually have the ROM and now we do. I'm hopeful that this breakthrough might encourage further exploration of my favourite Apple server and that someone out there has the NT ROMs and steps forward. The Apple Network Server was always a cult favourite as one of Apple's more notorious white elephants and now almost 30 years after its introduction there may be even more fun things to do on it. If you know where to find them, post in the comments or drop me a line at ckaiser at floodgap dawt com (happy to keep you anonymous if you prefer which I have done for other former Apple engineers in the past).
Now, let's go ahead and get the grumbling out of the way. No, the ANS is not running Linux or NetBSD. No, this is not a backport of NCommander's AIX Doom, because that runs on AIX 4.3. The Apple Network Server could run no version of AIX later than 4.1.5 and there are substantial technical differences. (As it happens, the very fact it won't run on an ANS was what prompted me to embark on this port in the first place.) And no, this is not merely an exercise in flogging a geriatric compiler into building Doom Generic, though we'll necessarily do that as part of the conversion. There's no AIX sound driver for ANS audio, so this port is mute, but at the end we'll have a Doom executable that runs well on the ANS console under CDE and has no other system prerequisites. We'll even test it on one of IBM's PowerPC AIX laptops as well. Because we should.
And, well, no. I can't think of a single product from that particular salvo that actually survived, let alone thrived. But we've got one of them here — and, as you might expect, there's a few odd things about it. First off, it's a slate. (We call them tablets now, kids.)
But that's not the really wacky part. Check out the CPU it's running.
What are we going to do with it? Well, what do you think we're gonna do with it? We're going to program it, so that we can finally have some software! And, of course, since this wacky thing was there at the bitter end, we'll talk more about the last days of Data General and what happened next.
Why, the very mention of NetWare almost certainly caused those of you familiar with it to get an instant mental image of MONITOR.NLM, like this as shown in Bochs:
No, I don't mean Macintoshes accessing NetWare servers as clients: we mean Macs as NetWare servers themselves. As proof, we'll take an entire tour of Power Macintosh NetWare on the 6116CD and try to boot it on the Apple Network Server, its actual intended target. NetWare on the Mac really existed as part of the same bizarro universe that ported the Macintosh Finder to Novell DR-DOS — meaning it's time for yet another weird Apple story during Apple's weirdest days.
About a year later the University said they'd throw it in with my consultant compensation because they wanted to get rid of it anyway, so it became officially mine, and I was delighted to have it. That machine, later upgraded to 200MHz and 512MB of parity FPM RAM, variously powered my E-mail and the Floodgap gopher and webservers from 2000 to 2012, and still does backup duty when the POWER6 has to be down for repairs.
However, there was a secret weapon hidden in ANS AIX most of us at the time never knew about. Built-in to the operating system was a fully Unix-native AppleTalk stack and support for receiving and sending Apple Events, surfaced in the form of Apple's disk administration tools and AppleShare. But Apple had a much more expansive vision for this feature: full server-client "symbiotic" applications that could do their number-crunching on the ANS and present the results on a desktop Mac. Using the Program-to-Program Communication Toolbox ("PPCToolbox"), and because AIX's throughput far exceeded anything the classic Mac OS ever could ever handle, an ANS could augment a whole bunch of Macs at once that didn't have to stop to do the work themselves.
Cyberdog's initial release belied some wild changes afoot, for in the world it inhabited, the document told the system what it needed to display, and the parts within the document displayed it. The document ruled all. The document was king.
But being Apple's smallest laptop — even today the Duos are still the fourth smallest, width-height-wise — wasn't the (main) point of the Duos. Arguably, the main point was the Dock. Even Jerry Seinfeld had one.
(How do you pronounce BeOS?)
T1 lines have never been cheap, though back in the day they were prized because at 1.536 Mbit/s each way they were comparatively high capacity. At my first job out of college in 1997 the university had a T1 connected to an AdTran CSU/DSU, adding more T1 lines on and bonding them for additional bandwidth until they upgraded to optical fiber. A friend of mine in the very late 1990s had his own residential T1 (this was when consumer DSL was uncommon and 56K dialup was still frequent) that his employer paid the bill for, reportedly close to a cool grand a month in those days; he would never been able to afford it otherwise. On a cost basis alone (and certainly dollars per megabit) a T1 would have been far from my first choice, but I needed a reliable server-grade connection and I couldn't find any other alternatives at the time, so if I wanted to get my hardware back online from the house I was going to have to pay up and get one. Rather than use the actual telephone company I went with an overlay vendor and was quoted $295 a month on an annual contract for a 16-address netblock plus $199 installation. Now going into my fourth week of downtime, I signed immediately. They called the telco who came out the next week, installed the smartjack (we'll talk about what this is), took over both telephone wire pairs to the house and wired it into the pedestal — conveniently, the local telco pedestal is literally in my backyard. Good thing I'd already moved the house alarm modem to a wireless connection since I could no longer have a landline now. I then ran lines from the smartjack into the server room (thanks to the telephone guys I used to work next to when I was consulting I already had good experience with a punchdown tool), the vendor came out the week after that with the T1 router, and finally Floodgap was back up.
The original idea was to use the T1 until something less expensive came along, but the T1 just plain worked and was always highest priority on service calls, so inertia and inflation eventually turned the $295 a month into $399 and a 12-month contract into 48. Still, it was a tariffed line with a service-level agreement, I had plenty of addresses and my personal bandwidth requirements have always been modest — I don't cloud, I rarely stream and YouTube is worse than television — so I ended up just using the T1 as my personal ISP at the same time and avoiding a second bill. This worked out fine for awhile except, of course, for love. My wife needed her Netflix and her iCloud, and by then the previously intransigent cable provider had been bought by someone else (fiber? hahahaha) who didn't know any of the previous history; they came out and finally pulled an RG-6 cable run five years after the fact, and switched us on. I moved the Wi-Fi to the new cable net and her bandwidth needs were thus met in the manner to which she was accustomed. We joke about the his'n'hers networks: I still had my lab and servers on the T1, and everything else including her devices was on the cable.
Well, it was good we did that because I mentioned in January this year that the vendor (which had changed owners twice over the years) was abruptly getting out of the residential T1 business and I had a month before it was switched off. I may well have been their last customer in the region. So I'd like to publicly thank John who reached out and offered a no-strings VPN arrangement — which I'm routing over the cable — to keep Floodgap online while we consider our housing options in a market as bad as it was good when I first bought the place. We turned the VPN on and the vendor turned the T1 off. They never asked for the router back and the smartjack still sits in the back of the house.
Now it's Memorial Day in the United States and I suppose I'll have to do something about that now superfluous wiring run sometime soon. Before I do, though, let's document the T1 for a generation who may have never seen one ... and figure out something fun to do with the router they left behind other than, you know, routing stuff.
Like every computing story, this one begins with a box.
The ANS, however, was a real honest to goodness server with hotswappable drive bays and fans, and (its most notable feature) an award-winning lockable translucent door so you could keep the unwashed masses out of your drives but still watch the blinkenlights. If you bought the bigger model, you even got dual power supplies and additional rear bays.
Also notable about the ANS was that they weren't supposed to run Mac OS, and were never sold with it, not least of which because the classic Mac OS wasn't really up to the task of being a server. Unfortunately, while A/UX supported larger needs on the 68K-based Workgroup Servers that could run it, A/UX 3 couldn't run on Power Macs even under emulation. The plan with A/UX 4 was to use a new PowerPC-native OSF/1-based kernel and possibly to also integrate portions of IBM's AIX operating system, but this plan (along with Taligent and other doomed projects) stalled out with everything else in Apple around that period. For a time Apple even considered using Novell NetWare on PowerPC; the port actually existed, codenamed Wormhole, but its tepid reception eventually led to the release of the weird Workgroup Server 9150 which just ran Mac OS. Eventually, to get to market Apple reached for what was then the only professional-level Un*x running on the new PowerPC architecture, which was AIX itself. Three Apple Network Server models were developed but only two (the "Low End" 500 and "High End" 700) were released; the 3U rack 300 "Deep Dish" remained solely a prototype, which I'd still love to acquire if its current owner ever gets tired of it. Oddly, even though they were only ever sold as AIX machines, they were initially demonstrated running Mac OS (possibly a custom version), further confusing potential customers who already didn't want to buy Workgroup Servers. Introduced in 1996 at a retail cost starting north of US$10,000, which didn't even include the AIX license, they were very poor sellers and the line was canned by Gil Amelio around a year later.
I got my ANS 500 barely used for the cost of some consulting work after Apple stopped supporting it; you can see some scanned Polaroids of when it was in production way back in 1998. Later, I acquired an ANS 700 which I use as a spare and was briefly in service while I diagnosed a hardware issue with the 500. More recently, however, I managed to land a Shiner HE prototype dated 1995 from a scrapper in San Rafael, California. That is the unit depicted in these pictures.
Also, I was pointed to some additional BeOS PowerPC files, so I deduped and sorted them, and they are on Be-Power. Among other things there are now many more apps and also some of the OS updates. I also heard from someone who claims to have the old ftp.be.com archive completely mirrored, though for obvious reasons I'm mostly just interested in the PowerPC stuff. Haven't heard back from him yet when I asked for more details, but that's very encouraging for having a nearly complete mirror.
