🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <11136@castle.ed.ac.uk>, tjc@castle.ed.ac.uk (A J Cunningham) writes:
> 
> I've just received a flyer about MachTen (from Tenon Intersystems) and I'm wondering about
> getting  a copy. Does anyone have any experience of this product they can share
> with me?
> Thanks in advance
> Tony

I've had a copy for a couple of weeks now.  It seems a solid port of BSD4.3
to the Mac.  It is rich in comms software (uucp, TCP/IP, SMTP, Telnet, FTP,
etc), and also has a large number of utilities.  Running it on an SE/30
with 8Megs on a single benchmark of my own (150 lines of sed through a
45,000 chara document in 10 pipes) revelaed that it was the same speed as
an Apollo DN3500 and faster than a Pyramid 90x:

SE/30 with MachTen	138.0 sec
DN3500 with BSD4.3	127   sec
RS6000 with AIX3.1	79    sec
Pyramid 90x with SV2.2	168.0 sec
DN4500 with SV2.2	69.8  sec

The big lack in the "Kernel System Software" is that it doesn't include
a C compiler -- for that you need the Development System Software.
The thought occurred to me that I might be able to run NeXT binaries
(it's Mach on a 68030), but attempts to run downloaded NeXT binaries
have been unsuccessful, foiling my plans to bootstrap a GNU developer's
environment with GNUCC.

One big plus is that the entire Mac file space is available and it
is possible to launch Mac applns from MachTen -- in my case Microphone II
was successful, so you have a shell for the Mac OS (bsh and csh).

A happy customer, eagerly awaiting the Developer's upgrade,
Bob Marks
bobm@mummy.agsm.unsw.oz.au