Fun! A/UX was neat... I was always a big fan of System 7, and this was System 7 running on top of a real Unix environment. Many years ago I picked up an "Apple Workgroup Server 95", which was basically a Quadra 950, to try running A/UX on. It's definitely an old Unix, but it certainly worked. Perhaps the neatest thing Apple did with it was the "commando" interface... in the Unix shell, you could enter a command (say "ls") and hit a hotkey to pop up a Mac-style dialog box that had check marks for all of the flags, text entry boxes for all of the paramaters, etc. Perhaps one of the more usable Unix-derivatives ever! Even MacOS X doesn't have a similar capability. The only system I'm seen like that is IBM's AS/400, with the F4 prompting to help with all system commands. Nice to have a self-documenting command line interface.
One thing I'm curious about- was Commando "pre-baked" with dialogs for all of the pre-installed utility commands, or did it pull from some kind of user-extensible database? Metadata stashed in the resource fork of the commands, maybe?
On standard classic MacOS, Apple's Macintosh Programmer's Workbench (MPW) IDE also had commando, which is where I got familiar with it. I wonder in which direction it was ported.
