While Apple Computer Inc ponders putting A/UX Unix on its desktop machines, Tenon Intersystems Inc of Santa Barbara, California is expecting to ship its Mach Ten Unix for the Power Macintoshes at the end of April. The new version of Tenon’s Berkeley Unix BSD 4.3-based MachTen was demonstrated as a beta test implementation at UniForum and will run in emulation mode. A native PowerPC implementation should follow in the fourth quarter according to company president Steve Holmgren. He says the emulated version should enable the Power Macintosh 6100 to replicate the performance of a Mac IIci, while the performance of the 7100 will approximate the performance of a Quadra 800 running the current implementation of Mach Ten. On a Power Macintosh 8100/80 it should run faster than on the fastest Quadra. The native PowerPC version of Mach 10, based on BSD 4.4, should follow in the fourth quarter offering very significant performance gains and Posix compliance. Don’t expect compliance with the PowerOpen application binary interface just yet however – the company is waiting until it falls in line with X/Open Co Ltd’s Spec 1170 Common Unix application programming interface. Tenon is also working on improved compilers, based on its existing RS/6000 offerings. These, say Holmgren, will enable developers to produce applications mixing calls to the Macintosh Toolkit and Mach Ten Unix. June should see the release of a new, native X Window client-end server that, Holmgren claims, will produce X-mark price-performance ratings an order of magnitude better than those already on the market.
