Talk:MacMach

MacMach origins

Hi, I was the original manager for the MacMach project at CMU. The project was a proof of concept to get Mach running on Macintosh II hardware leveraging the development of Mach on Sun 68020 based hardware and a previous project of my team to port Mach to the 68020 version of HP 9000 hardware.

A unique goal of the project was to be able to boot the ROM based MacOS system as a Mach based OS “personality”. We were able to accomplish getting MacOS to boot and run, but it needed a separate disk partition and was unable share resources such as the display with other Mach OS personalities.

The project was funded in part by Apple, which gave us access to the Apple Unix software team who developed drivers and hardware abstraction level software for the Macintosh hardware. The Apple team had don’t work to integrate the Apple Unix with MacOS, but required implementing some of the MacOS ROM code within the Unix OS. This level of integration was not possible with the small team of developers on the MacMach project. The project also included a port of the Andrew system (UI, apps, and file system) to the MacMach Unix OS personality. It did not include integration of the Unix and MacOS personalities.

The primary developer of MacMach was David Bohman, who was a master developer with knowledge of Unix, Mach, tcp/ip, the Andrew project, and hardware.

The dream of the IT group (Academic Services) at CMU was to deploy MacMach systems as one of the Andrew workstations available to students, faculty, and staff. While we were able to get an stable working prototype of MacMach Unix and MacOS, the lack of tight integration made the system difficult to use.

Gregg Lebovitz

38.42.107.74 (talk) 17:28, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Reference to infoworld Macitosh News article. June 27, 1988

https://books.google.com/books?id=4j4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA29&lpg=PA29&dq=macmach+Gregg+Lebovitz&source=bl&ots=znhl6Js61f&sig=ACfU3U01awVVRyQPFwvKRJFQ_fYiMA3R0A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiq-bjW4ZD-AhUbEFkFHShOBg84HhDoAXoECAcQAg#v=onepage&q=macmach%20Gregg%20Lebovitz&f=true Glebovitz (talk) 17:43, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

I was one of the two(?) students who worked on this with Dave. Quite a few of the details in the article were wrong, so I made edits.

The demos of this system were as underwhelming as could be. You booted up the Mac II and (when all went well) the result was identical to booting up any other Mac II. You were dropped into the System 7 Finder. The computer ran MacWrite and MacPaint just like any other Mac. We must have had a Mac OS program that displayed a command line, but the point was to run MacOS and I spent all of my time running MacOS programs that used the network. My job was to rewrite the MacOS network drivers to use the underlying Mach system calls, i.e. BSD sockets, DNS lookups, etc.

IT's dream might have been to roll out MacMach Mach II's, but in 1988 every room but one on the CMU campus had a network connection. That included every dorm room. So from my dorm on my personal Mac II I could open up a terminal window, telnet to any of the thousands of computers on campus running Andrew, and run unix processes remotely. Lunarmobiscuit (talk) 18:22, 24 August 2026 (UTC)