Although there’s little evidence of them today, Apple made a long succession of Mac servers and servers for Macs from 1988 to 2014, and only discontinued support for the last release of macOS Server in April 2022. Its first entry into the market was a special version of the Macintosh II running Apple’s own port of Unix way back in 1988.

A/UX

Apple itself used Sun servers internally, but with the advent of the Macintosh II in 1987, some of its engineers realised they at last had their own hardware platform capable of running Unix. The result was A/UX, the first of Apple’s server products and an abbreviation for Apple UNIX.

Although the idea to port Unix to the Mac II came from within Apple, at least part of the work was carried out under contract by UniSoft, a specialist Unix porting house who also ported Unix to Motorola’s 68030 and 88100 RISC processors. It was announced in February 1988, and version 1.0 was based on AT&T Unix System V.2.2 with many extensions to support streams, networking, the Fast File System (FFS), and more. It was fully compliant with POSIX and met US Government contract-bidding requirements.

Strategically it seemed important at the time, as without such an operating system, Apple wouldn’t have been able to bid for contracts to supply Macs to US Federal Government and its many funded organisation. On the strength of this, Apple formed a new business division to sell enterprise systems into large businesses, US government, and higher education.

However, A/UX wasn’t the flagship product it should have become, because of a combination of hardware limitations and its vanilla Unix port. At the end of 1991, when System 7 had already been available for six months, Apple released A/UX 3.0, its last major revision and for most users its zenith. By that stage the outgoing high-end Mac was the IIfx, with a Motorola 68030 running at a breakneck 40 MHz and integral MMU, and the first of the new Quadra models with their 68040 CPUs were starting to appear.

Apple enthusiastically pre-announced version 4 to be released in 1993 or 1994. This was to be developed in conjunction with IBM, combining parts of its AIX implementation of Unix, and run on the new PowerPC processors developed by Apple, IBM and Motorola in their AIM Alliance, but those never happened.

Indirection

In 1993, Apple changed course with the release of its first dedicated server models, Workgroup Servers 60, 80, and 95. The latter was based on the Quadra 950 with five SCSI hard drives and a CD-ROM or tape storage, and still ran A/UX 3. Those were in turn replaced by more powerful versions over the following years, and in 1996 Apple went into partnership with IBM to sell the Network Server 500 and 700, a huge system running IBM’s AIX and with hot-swappable hard drives. But they only ever attracted a dedicated following from a tiny number of customers. Apple also released one of its most curious products, Macintosh Application Environment (MAE) to run System 7 apps on Sun hardware.

Apple retreated to tweaked versions of its higher-end Power Macs from 1997, licking its wounds and pondering its next move. The 1999 Mac Server G3 Blue and White, based on the lookalike Power Mac, became the first Mac to run Mac OS X Server 1.0, released six months before the public beta of regular Mac OS X 10.0.

Xserve

Apple found new direction in 2002, with the first of its Xserve systems, running Mac OS X Server 10.1.5. These are distinctive 1U rack-mounted units resembling pizza boxes, initially coming with four front-mounted drive bays, and were over-engineered in some respects, and lacking in others. Bundled with them was an unlimited-user edition of Mac OS X Server.

Again there was a dedicated following. From 2003, special cluster node versions were assembled into supercomputers, which briefly caught the headlines. In 2006, the first Intel-powered Xserves shipped with up to two Intel Woodcrest Xeon 5100 CPUs, and hopes were high for their success.

Mac OS X Server came with its own Server Admin app that wrapped many of the tricky tasks in a familiar GUI, making administration a joy.

Xserves not only ran Mac OS X Server, but had their own Server Monitor app, letting you check on their hardware status from anywhere in the world.

As a server operating system, Mac OS X Server made a big difference to many smaller businesses, who found they could run sophisticated setups without having to employ specialist staff. Although Apple had put a brave new interface on many of its services, key features like DNS were never finished to the standard of competing commercial products. Simple setups were incredibly simple, but as requirements grew more complex, they quickly became just as admin-heavy as traditional Unix servers.

Consumer server

Until July 2011, Mac OS X Server had been a separate product, a complete system installation in itself. Apple then dropped the Xserve, and transformed OS X Server 10.7 by slashing its price to 10% of the previous version, and wrapping it all up in a neat app aimed at small business. For a decade, Server Admin had been the key application for administrators. Although accessible, Apple deemed it too complex for these new consumers.

Lion Server had been something of an unfinished hybrid. It had three different interfaces in the traditional Server Admin app, Terminal’s command line for wizards, and its new and simplified Server.app, left incomplete even in 10.7.4. As with the regular version of Mountain Lion, OS X Server 2.2, as Mountain Lion Server was officially called, continued the trend in Lion Server (OS X Server 1.0) and almost finished the job.

Server.app was designed to be concise but rich in function, and sported the same interface it had in Lion. Select in the left hand pane to manage users and groups, monitor your server, control its services, manage hardware, and control system, network and storage settings. Below that the Next Steps button provides access to help topics and useful suggestions.

The main pane on the right then contains the detailed information for the function selected on the left. From its menus you could launch ancillaries, including Directory Utility to manage Directory Servers, Screen Sharing for remote management, System Image Utility to create and manage NetBoot/NetInstall/NetRestore images, and Xsan Admin if you still had an Xsan. All bar the last of these were accessible separately in the /System/Library/CoreServices folder, as their survivors remain today.

At the end of its installation, OS X Server 2.2 even congratulated you.

Among these new features for consumers came the only one to be brought into mainstream macOS, the Content Caching Server, now just another of the Sharing services.

Server hardware consisted of lightly customised variants of other models, starting with the Mac mini of late 2009, and the Mac mini Server in mid 2010. Mac Pro Servers were offered from mid 2010 until they were discontinued in 2013. macOS Server lived on as version 5.0, released in September 2015, whose last update was in April 2022.

Apple stopped supplying servers a decade ago in 2014, but some of us are wondering whether it will try again with Apple silicon.