While Tenon Intersystems Inc of Santa Barbara, California, has been shipping its MachTen implementation of Carnegie Mellon University’s Mach operating system for the Macintosh for a year or so now, a separate effort at the Pittsburgh seat of learning itself is now complete and ready to go. The MacMach project, headed by Zonnie Lee Williamson at Carnegie Mellon, is currently in for some last-minute testing at Apple before the distribution goes out. Unlike the Tenon effort, MacMach is not offered as a commercially-supported product, and requires a personal use only agreement. In return you get all the source code. Based on the Mach 3.0 kernel with the Carnegie Mellon BSD/Unix server, it will run on an SE/30 or Macintosh II with at least 8Mb RAM, and from 80Mb to 600Mb disk space, and it works with standard display and Ethernet boards. Some combinations of machine type, RAM and system type may cause problems. MacMach works with the systems I run it on. I can’t assure you that it will work on your machine – it should, but it might not, says Williamson. It boots from MacOS System 6.7 or 7.0, 24 or 32-bit mode. Distribution from Carnegie Mellon will be on CD-ROM, priced $100. And Williamson emphasises that a BSD/AT&T Unix licence is required, and that MacMach, containing BSD 4.3 source code, is not a public-domain product. In contrast, Tenon’s commercial MachTen sits on top of MacOs and runs as an application, eliminating the problems of supporting the various Mac devices, boards and applications. It also supports Quadras and Powerbooks, and works with System 7. A future release, due this autumn, will provide Mach virtual memory and protection beyond that already provided by System 7.
