Added October 2016

So why is there not a version of A-Shell for the Mac? Since A-Shell is written in C, and there's a C compiler for the Mac, can't it run? Here's the reply from the horse's mouth, as it were.

Yes, there is a C compiler for the Mac, and yes, A-Shell could be made to run on the Macintosh. The obstacles are:

• The flavor of C has a number of quirks that would probably require some time to figure out.

• The Mac environment, although based on Linux (now), has a number of peculiarities that would have to be worked through.

• We don't know anything about the Mac P2P environment, whether Mac workstations can coexist and share files on a Windows LAN, etc. Probably they can.

• The GUI environment is totally different. Since A-Shell's GUI is based on the WIN32 API, that isn't an easy nut to crack. And my guess is that since the Mac is mostly of interest as a workstation, users would likely want some GUI capabilities. Rewriting the GUI to use some higher-level, more portable framework (perhaps more HTML based) might have a lot of benefits, but is obviously a big job.

• In 25 years or so, this is about the fifth time we have been asked about the Mac. So while that may not be a good indicator, my guess is that the total sales would be a tiny sliver of the Windows sales. AMOS-type business applications don't seem to overlap very much with the Apple world, but perhaps that is self-limiting.

In summary, we could probably get a plain text (UNIX-like) A-Shell/ATE working in a hundred hours or so. Networking and coexistence with Windows PCs would probably double that. And GUI would be ten times that.