mrt@MRT.MACH.CS.CMU.EDU (Mary Thompson) (10/23/90)
I'm not really an expert on MacMach, but have had an early version running on a machine in my office for about 9 months. First talking about a CMU Machmac "product" is misleading. As was explained at length not long ago on this bb, CMU cannot distribute any form of Mach to sites that do not have BSD source licenses. Mt Xinu is currently considering doing binary releases of both Mach for the i386 and MacMach, but have not yet decided if it is financially feasible for them. Expressions of interest to mtxinu-mach@mtxinu.com might be helpful as one of their concerns is how big the market is for such releases. MacMach was originally designed to run the Mach system on large-end Mac machines. As a result you have a very faithful Mach operating system, gcc compiler and BSD4.3-Tahoe environment. Any machine-independent application that will run on a BSD Unix, should run on MacMach. It currently runs on the SE, IIx, IIcx, and they are working on the ci, fx, and si. The MacOS emulator was done more recently. The version that I am running, which is a couple of months old, is run after Mach boots and takes complete control of the screen. The machine "looks" like it is running MacOS, and runs MacApplications straight off the Mac partition. It runs things like commercial games at the same speed as they run on a bare Mac. Meanwhile, you can telnet into the machine like any other Unix machine and run any Unix application that you want. The work that is still in progress is to run Unix applications from the MacOS emulator. Early applications were a shell window using a dumb terminal emulator and a file transfer program, to transfer files from the Mac disk partition to the Unix filesystem. At last report, the developers have a Nifty Term application (which gives you a smarter terminal emulator) and some of the Mac IP applications working. I belive they are still working on accessing the floppy disk. Currently Mach and Mac have separation disk paritions and do not look at each other's files, except to copy a file from one filesytem to the other. I'm not sure whether this will improve or not. From reading the MachTen bb posts, I would guess that MachTen would give you a more complete MacOS environment, and maybe not so complete a Unix environment, while MacMach is the reverse; the Unix stuff comes for free and we have to work to get all the MacOS capibilites back.