Say goodbye to Power MachTen — a Mac only, POSIX compliant product that combines Unix and Mac OS functionality — and MachTen CodeBuilder. Tenon Intersystems is offering them on CD at closeout prices as long as supplies last.
MachTen was first introduced in 1990 and was Tenon’s flagship product for almost a decade. The concept behind MachTen was to strengthen Apple’s operating system by enabling Unix to live alongside the Mac OS, according to Anita Holmgren, Tenon’s vice president. Now that Mac OS X, is shipping and has been widely endorsed by the press and users alike, Tenon is retiring their Unix for Mac OS, she said.
If you have a Macintosh that can run Mac OS X 10.1, Tenon “strongly recommends” Apple’s new operating system. However, if you’re not ready to jump to Mac OS X, or if you have hardware that’s not Mac OS X capable, then Tenon’s MachTen can “put new life into an older Mac,” Holmgren said. Over the years, customers have used MachTen as a DNS server, an FTP server, a mailing list server, an NFS server, an AppleTalk gateway, a back-up system for Xerox Docutech files and a development platform, she added.
Holmgren said that MachTen was the only Mac product that combines Unix and Mac OS functionality. It includes an industry-standard Unix application programming interface (API). Applications that run on MachTen should be able to run on other platforms with a simple recompile. MachTen is implemented as a hyper-portable “UNIX virtual machine” for Mac OS and runs on all Mac platforms (PowerPC and M68K).
The product enables you to develop applications in a Unix development environment, replete with the GNU development toolset. You can also program in Ada, C, C++, Objective C, Fortran and more. MachTen also lets you run Xwindows applications from remote workstations or on your Mac; compile and run OpenGL applications; run lots of Unix applications; and run a high speed Internet server.
Also, Apache, PHP and MySQL, with management and configuration tools, is available in a commercial package from Tenon iTools (not to be confused with Apple’s Internet services of the same name). Tenon’s iTools is a Web server that takes advantage of the preemptive multitasking and memory protection of Mac OS X.
Both Power MachTen and MachTen CodeBuilder come on CD with BSD Unix source code and online documentation. Power MachTen is US$99 and MachTen CodeBuilder (a subset of MachTen) is $49.