Tenon Intersystems : Press Release

Tenon Unveils New MachTen Architecture

Dramatic Memory Savings and Hybrid Development Tools Highlight Release 4.0 for Power Macintosh

Santa Barbara, CA, August 8, 1995. Tenon Intersystems announced the latest release of MachTen for Power Macintosh, its highly regarded UNIX system for Apple computers. Architectural improvements include dynamically linked shared libraries, memory mapped file access and integrated UNIX and Macintosh development tools. MachTen is being demonstrated this week at Macworld/Boston on Apple's new 9500 Power Macintosh.

MachTen Power UNIX, Release 4.0, accelerated for Power PC, is the only UNIX available for Power Macintosh and Power Macintosh clones. MachTen is based on BSD 4.4 and conforms to the Federal Information Processing Standard 151-2 (the POSIX FIPS). The package provides pre-emptive multitasking for UNIX applications and includes a full featured high-performance TCP/IP protocol stack that supports multi-homing and multi-casting, features not yet available even with Apple's new Open Transport.

The native PowerPC (PPC) package contains a complete UNIX software development environment with a source-level debugger and C, C++, and Fortran compilers all generating native PPC code. Also included is a high-performance X server and complete X11R5 X client development environment with a Motif toolkit.

A powerful feature for software developers is the MachTen 4.0 ability to create binary PowerPC Executable Format (PEF) files that can integrate directly with other Macintosh development tools. UNIX software development tools, therefore, can be used in conjunction with Macintosh development tools to build hybrid applications - UNIX applications with Macintosh interfaces. This flexible and creative interaction between the systems can greatly expand the scope of software development.

MachTen is an enabling technology that is letting schools and small offices provide Internet and Web services with workstation-class strength on inexpensive Macintosh platforms. MachTen Power UNIX includes the NCSA httpd daemon Web server with multi-domain extensions and the premier Macintosh text editor, BBEdit 3.5, with HTML extensions for creating Web pages. Also included are domain name service (DNS), POP mail service, and IP forwarding.

MachTen is also a vehicle for UNIX applications vendors to easily port their applications to Macintosh platforms; support for UNIX hard links in Release 4.0 will now make porting UNIX applications to Power Macintosh even easier. In addition, MachTen enables corporations to easily integrate Macs with their client-server UNIX environment. MachTen's high-performance NFS file sharing lets users mount Apple Share volumes on MachTen platforms and export those volumes using NFS.

In Release 4.0, an impressive reduction in system memory requirements, as well as the disk footprint, has been achieved through the process of dynamic linkage to shared libraries. When an application is executed, the system assesses whether or not the runtime library required has been already loaded into memory by a previous application. If this is the case, then access to the library will be achieved through a dynamic linkage process. The fact that each software component is loaded into memory only once achieves a substantial memory reduction of 50% for the full-function MachTen footprint. Furthermore, when the last client of a shared library has completed processing, the library allocation is withdrawn and the memory reclaimed.

Memory mapped file access offers improved system efficiency by deferring the allocation of application instruction memory until reference to a specific 'page' of instruction is made. This feature offers a significant benefit when only small components of large libraries are being used.

Customers who purchased MachTen since Power Macs began shipping are entitled to a free upgrade to this new native PowerPC version. The software comes on CD with BSD UNIX source code and on-line documentation using Adobe Acrobat.

Tenon has been shipping UNIX/Mach software for the Macintosh since 1991. In 1994 MachTen was selected by UNIX World's Open Computing magazine as "A Best Product of the Year".