We have run servers on Macs since 1992

Enfour makes FrontierStack. Apple asked us to start the company in 1992; we have run public services on Apple hardware ever since.

Created at Apple's request

Apple asked us to establish Enfour in 1992 and initially outsourced Developer Technical Support to our team. That work put us beside Mac developers from the start; it also taught us to explain system behavior clearly when something goes wrong.

It started before the web

Enfour began in the bulletin-board era; running BBS services from 1992 for communities of users back when "online" meant a modem and a phone line. We ran them on Macs. That was the first of many times we'd bet a production service on Apple hardware, and it paid off.

Onto the web; without ever switching platforms

We began serving HTTP in 1995. Since then we have run mail, websites and databases on Mac OS, OS X and macOS. Linux and cloud hosting are often the right answer; we kept Macs in the mix because they continued to do the work reliably for us.

A fleet of Xserves at the turn of the century

By the turn of the century we were serving commercial mobile web apps from a fleet of Apple Xserve servers; running a real, paid mobile service on Apple's rack-mount Macs years before the smartphone made "mobile web" a household phrase. Managing a rack of Macs as production servers is not new to us; it is what we have always done.

Mobile work came early too

In 1993, Enfour wrote the first third-party app for the Apple Newton and created its official Japanese release. We later worked on Sony and Nokia mobile devices. Enfour also created about half of today's emoji set in 1996. The FrontierStack iPhone and iPad app is a continuation of that work, not a side project added for the launch.

Working with AI since 2014

We have worked with AI since 2014. FrontierStack uses it where a model can help interpret logs or plan a repair; ordinary code still enforces permissions, redacts credentials and records changes.

Why we built FrontierStack

FrontierStack is that experience, made into an app. Every pane; web servers, TLS, the firewall, fleet management, the Malware Audit, the AI Administrator; comes from decades of actually operating these things on Macs in production. When Apple wound down macOS Server, the know-how did not disappear; we put it here, so you can run your own servers the way we always have.

FrontierStack is the tool we wanted while running those systems: one place to see what is up, what changed and what needs attention.