Tenon Intersystems : Press Release

Machten: A Breakthrough In Unix Workstation Affordability

Santa Barbara, CA, June 17, 1991. Tenon Intersystems' newly released software product, MachTen, transforms Macintosh personal computers into a family of workstations with outstanding cost and performance characteristics. MachTen brings the power of Unix to low cost Macintosh hardware, resulting in as much as an order of magnitude cost reduction in client and server computing.

MachTen is a Berkeley 4.3BSD Unix, built on a Carnegie Mellon Mach foundation - not a Unix "work-alike" or derivative, but licensed AT&T software. MachTen extends the existing Macintosh software, rather than replacing it. With MachTen, there is no need to partition your disk, add new device drivers, or disturb any existing Macintosh operations. MachTen allows you to continue to run off-the-shelf Macintosh programs while simultaneously running Unix programs. In addition, MachTen enhances MacOS with true Unix multitasking, full internet communications, and a distributed file system via NFS.

MachTen is not only a complete Unix execution environment, but also a complete Unix development environment. Developers have already used MachTen to build application-specific devices. Multiaccess Computing Corporation has used MachTen as an embedded system to transform a Macintosh (without keyboard or monitor) into an SMDS (Switched Multimegabit Data Service) Router. The SMDS RouteMAN(tm), developed by Multiaccess Computing Corporation, extends the client/server architecture across a wide-area network.

Planned enhancements for MachTen include server and client X-window support, available fourth quarter '91, and System 7 compatibility, available first quarter '92.

Tenon Intersystems, founded in 1989, is dedicated to integrating client and server workstation system software with "point-and-click" personal computer software and affordable personal computer hardware. With Tenon's distributed system software, PCs will point-and-click directly onto the rest of the computer industry.