[TUHS] Cadmus CadMac Toolbox

[TUHS] Cadmus CadMac Toolbox

[Jonathan Gray]

I found mention of Cadmus CadMac Toolbox/PCSMac when reading more
about the RT PC.  It is interesting that this would later be sold to
Apple.  Something not often mentioned in histories of PCS,
Cadmus Computer Systems or Apple.

"Cadmus Computer Systems had created the CadMac Toolbox, a Macintosh
Toolbox implemented in C on a UNIX base), and under a special agreement
with Cadmus, we received a license to port the CadMac code from their
hardware base to the RT"
Norman Meyrowitz - Intermedia: The Architecture and Construction of an
Object-Oriented Hypermedia System and Applications Framework
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/28697.28716

A video presentation of Intermedia and CadMac running on
IBM ACIS' port of 4.2BSD for the RT PC, with kernel changes
https://vimeo.com/20578352

they later moved to A/UX on the Macintosh II
InfoWorld 13 Jun 1988
https://books.google.com/books?id=-T4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT11

'Meyrowitz: It was before Apple Unix. There was a workstation company
called Cadmus that was producing workstations largely for CAD and
Tom Stambaugh took the Macintosh APIs and reprogrammed them to run
on Unix workstations. We went up to Cadmus and convinced them to
license that to us for the university. We were using Mac APIs on
Unix systems because we wanted systems that supported the network
file system, that had virtual memory, that had bigger disks. So we
did that and it was a beautiful system. Eventually, convinced Apple
to create a A/UX [Apple Unix] which was a Unix system and we ran
on that. Cadmus went out of business, and we had the only license
to CadMac, and Apple wasn't that happy to have it around. We had
actually convinced them that they should release it to universities,
because having that API around, especially if they could sell it
to other companies to put it on their workstations, could actually
be lucrative. We almost convinced them to do that. We were actually
having a celebratory dinner at McArthur Park in Palo Alto to celebrate
this and then Jean-Louis Gassée walked in and said, "The deal is
off."'
Oral History of Norman Meyrowitz
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2015/05/102658326-05-01-acc.pdf

"we chose the Apple Macintosh front-end, or rather our local version
thereof (CadMac, now PCSMac) which was available on the
Cadmus 9000 computers."
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/development-of-an-intelligent-composers-assistant.pdf?c=icmc;idno=bbp2372.1986.029;format=pdf

"Apple Workstation Efforts Get Boost from Cadmus

Although Apple Computer Inc, won't say so, industry analysts believe the
company's acquisition of software technology from Unix workstation maker
Cadmus Computer Systems may speed up the introduction of high-end Unix
workstations from Apple.
...
At Apple's analysts' meeting April 23, chairman John Sculley said Apple
had acquired the rights to the technology from Cadmus of Lowell,
Massachusetts, to use in long-term advanced product development
efforts for the Macintosh.  He said the Cadmus software would help the
company develop a workstation for the engineering community and federal
government markets, which use Unix-based systems, according to Apple's
transcripts.

Although Sculley has not detailed what Apple will do with the Cadmus
technology, Cadmus introduced last summer a graphics workstation
equipped with Cadmac, a graphics environment that is compatible with
Apple's Macintosh graphics routines."
InfoWorld 19 May 1986
https://books.google.com/books?id=SS8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA3