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From: nickel@prz.tu-berlin.de (Juergen Nickelsen)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: BSD for PowerPC?
Date: 13 Jan 1995 15:44:04 GMT
Organization: Technical University of Berlin, Germany
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References: <CYOUNG.95Jan10144237@zinfandel.harvard.edu>
<jsm9153-1101951515190001@mac.visio.com>
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In-reply-to: jsm9153@visio.com's message of Wed, 11 Jan 1995 15:15:19 -0700
In article <jsm9153-1101951515190001@mac.visio.com> jsm9153@visio.com
(Jeremy Malli) writes:
> I was just paging through the most recent issue of MacMall and noticed a
> Berkeley BSD UNIX port to the Macintosh called Professional Mach Ten and
> it's accelerated for the PowerMac. It also states that it will run on
> Classic as well ( there's a heck of marketing strategy ). MacMalls Phone
> number is 800-222-2808. The price quoted was $579.99. It sounds like an
> excellent way to do UNIX.
I once asked the company distributing MachTen (Tenon Intersystems)
about it. It turned out that a complete ("professional") system
including X and shipping charges would have been over US$ 1000 (as of
May '94), not counting the 50% academic discount. Although I'd have
been qualified for the discount, I considered it more appealing to buy
a cheap '486 and get BSD for free.
MachTen at that time being based on Mach 2.5 and 4.3 BSD, they were
not shipping sources, but they expected the transition to 3.0/4.4Lite
to happen soon for which they would distribute sources then.
It may be a fine product though; it has a Mach kernel, which runs as a
MacOS process. It uses the Mac file system; integration with MacOS is
thus (said to be) fine. It is also said to be comparatively slow, but
I think this was about the 68K variant. Due to the Mac file system it
does not support hard links.
[Disclaimer: This is all from Tenon propaganda and some news articles
I've read, both of May/June '94 and only about the 68K variant. I am
neither experienced with MachTen nor affiliated with Tenon
Intersystems.]
--
Juergen Nickelsen