Old Vintage Computing Research

The 1996 Apple Network Server was Apple's first true Unix-through-and-through server (the Apple Workgroup Server 95, actually a Quadra 950 with a special PDS card limited to A/UX, doesn't really count) and through a complex history came to run IBM's AIX as its native operating system. I actually had an ANS 500 when it was almost new, in 1998, and it ran Floodgap until 2012. It is still in my collection and still runs, along with an ANS 700 I later acquired and a (sadly battery bombed) "Shiner ESB" prototype that used to be at Netscape. AIX was your only choice -- no other operating system was supported.

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:

Although an old nerds' tale circulated at the time saying you could pull 9500 ROMs, put in a video card and boot from an external hard disk (because the video chip and internal SCSI controller are unique to the ANS and weren't supported by the 9500 or MacOS), this couldn't possibly have worked because among other things the Bandits in the ANS are mapped differently. Lots of people, including yours truly, had certainly tried. Still, I was used to AIX as an AIX administrator since the 3.2.5 days on real RS/6000 hardware and the ANS ran it splendidly, so today mine still runs it (4.1.5 is the last AIX release supported). But to me the best thing about the ANS was that I got a big beefy RISC server for a summer's work, so I didn't have to plump down a credit card. For everyone else, the ANS was expensive (starting at $10,000+ in 1996, a cool $20 grand in 2025 dollars) and Apple wasn't moving many. CEO Gil Amelio had lured Ellen Hancock away from National Semiconductor as Apple's new CTO and tasked her with finding a new path for the MacOS, though in the meantime Apple had this big hulking midrange server that wasn't selling. So, as an attempt to juice sales, Hancock announced at Comdex 1996 that the ANS would be able to run other operating system choices, not just AIX. MacOS was an obvious one because it already had before, but Hancock also proposed Windows NT to the great surprise of attendees. While Windows NT was built to be system-agnostic and versions already ran on PowerPC hardware, and people have since hacked it to run on Power Macs, this would have been the first time it could officially ever run on an Apple machine.

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.

Recently a former employee who was on the business development team for Apple's server products posted on the Tinker Different boards: not only did he have the mythical MacOS ROM, he had it installed in a Deep Dish booting the MacOS. Deep Dish was the code name for the planned but unreleased ANS 300, a small rackmountable version (as opposed to the rackmount plates Apple sold for the 500 and 700 which take up a whopping 19U), so here was a prototype machine running development ROMs booting an operating system it was never actually sold with. More to the point, he confirmed the Windows NT ROMs actually did exist and worked as well.

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).

Of course you can run Doom on a $10,000+ Apple server running IBM AIX. Of course you can. Well, you can now.

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.

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Most of my systems are microcomputers (and commensurately sized), though I do have some moderately larger beasts: you've met homer, my 1987 HP 9000/350 rack system, and Floodgap is powered by uppsala, a 2U-in-a-tower IBM POWER6 520 running AIX. But my first "large" machine, and indeed the first Unix server I ever personally owned, was this Apple Network Server 500. Its name is stockholm. A mini-fridge-sized server with its famous translucent blinkenlight-friendly front sliding door and oodles of drive trays, this $11,000+ box (almost $22,000 in 2023 dollars) sat forlorn and unused at the University I was employed with as an IT working stiff in 1997. The bookstore had bought it at a substantial academic discount for their UniVerse-based (a Pick descendant, now Rocket U2) point-of-sale system, but the vendor wouldn't support the hardware anymore after then-CEO Gil Amelio cancelled the ANS line, so it got dumped off as surplus in the service bay where it lurked in a corner. As it was just sitting around, I got to use it as my personal server, shown here circa 1998 in my old office on a bad scan from a bad Polaroid. In this picture it's acting as a terminal server for my Commodore SX-64 with a CMD SwiftLink 6551 ACIA serial cartridge (the SX-64 is sitting on a parallel port switchbox because its handle got busted).

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.

That's because the POWER6 runs everything the ANS did -- because the ANS also runs AIX. The ANS 500 and 700 were not Apple's first Unix-specific servers (that would be the Apple Workgroup Server 95, a Quadra 950 using a special PDS card that only worked with A/UX, Apple's own Unix with a bolted-on Mac compatibility layer), but they were Apple's first Mac derivatives that could not boot classic Mac OS at all and natively ran a non-Apple operating system. Indeed, most people treated it as exactly that, a big Unix server from Apple, and at the time I did too.

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.

Well, today we're going to write one of those "symbiotic" applications doing something this little Mystic Color Classic could never efficiently do itself -- accessing and processing a JSON API over TLS 1.3 -- and demonstrate not only how such an client application looked on the Mac side, but also how the server component worked on the AIX side. If you're lucky enough to have an ANS running AIX too, you can even compile and run it yourself. But before we do that, it might be a little instructive to talk about how the Apple Network Server came to run AIX in the first place.

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The Apple Network Server was, with the possible exception of the Apple Workgroup Server 95, Apple's first true server. I have a particular soft spot for the ANS because it was also my first server: an ANS 500 ran Floodgap (even before Floodgap in 1998 as stockholm.ptloma.edu and gopher.ptloma.edu) from 2000 until 2012, and stockholm is still in my collection. While Apple had the Workgroup Server line, these were merely contemporary Mac designs with value-added software or hardware options, and as such ran Mac OS. (The AWS 95 ran A/UX, Apple's SVR2 Unix-System 7 hybrid, though it could also run Mac OS -- being really a rebadged, hopped-up Quadra 950 -- with its custom PDS SCSI card removed.)

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.

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Apple's announcement of the next version of macOS, Monterey, means my 2014 MacBook Air now gets to join my Quad G5 in the "not supported" category (not that I care, it's Mojave Forever). But it's a good reminder of the previous Project Monterey, a multicorporation attempt to make the One Unix To Bind Them All from IBM AIX, SCO (then the putative holders of the True Unix) and DYNIX/ptx that would run on the One Architecture To Bind Them All, IA-64 (a/k/a Itanium). In case you weren't yet with the new hotness, it would run on your old and busted 32-bit x86 hardware, too.

Today you'd laugh your fool head off at the very thought of "Itanic" taking over the world, but when it was announced in October 1998 Monterey was a credible threat. By having IBM, SCO, Sequent (which IBM bought) and Intel as backers its ascent to dominance seemed inevitable, and its ability to run on existing and future hardware along with the jackboots of AIX and the multiprocessing strength of Dynix was thought to be strongly appealing to high-end enterprise IT. (The issue of IBM's then-contemporary POWER server line and Intel's Pentium server offerings potentially in direct competition was handwaved away.) A long list of the usual hangers-on backed it at the time as well, including Acer, Compaq, Groupe Bull, Samsung and Unisys.

The damn thing actually shipped, too, because most of it was based on already extant code. Project Monterey's first release was to essentially repackage AIX on POWER, and UnixWare 7 and DYNIX/ptx on x86; in 2000 the next wave and the "real" Project Monterey was AIX 5L for IA-64, which IBM actually sold on request and apparently had some small number of running systems in the wild.

Oddly, what doomed Project Monterey was Linux on IA-64, the so-called "Trillian Project" that emerged in mid-1999. Intel, always one to hedge its bets, was part of that effort along with Silicon Graphics, VA Linux and Hewlett-Packard, but most of the work was done by Cygnus before their eventual purchase by Red Hat. SGI and HP, of course, made their own Itanium machines; HP, to its current chagrin, still does. As if in response IBM promised Monterey would have strong Linux compatibility, but if you needed Linux compatibility as a primary feature, why not just run Linux? A Caldera executive was quoted in InfoWorld that year saying, "I would expect over the next one to two years [Linux for IA-64] will catch up and in some cases exceed Monterey, for no other reason than the sheer number of people contributing to Linux."

And, well, that's exactly what happened; Itanium outlasted Monterey, and Monterey went down in flames. IBM sold less than 50 licenses by the time Monterey was quietly shot in the head in 2003, though some sources say IBM had already pulled out as early as 2001. Its breakdown directly led to the SCO vs IBM lawsuit in which SCO went bankrupt and in a related case was found never to have had the Unix license to grant to IBM in the first place. Itanium, for its part, will cease shipments a little over a month from now on July 29, 2021.

Somehow I just don't see this Monterey being that interesting.