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Power Machten 4.1.4

B

boomer3200

6502
I'm looking for the last version of Machten (4.1.4) to run on OS 9.  Tenon's order page errors out, so I tried calling and emailing them over the past few weeks to say I'd buy a copy at the last listed price.

No reply yet and I understand if they no longer have or sell copies, but any leads would be appreciated.  I've seen 4.1.1 online, but it seems limited to OS 8.6 and I'm not sure it's complete.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
I'm still looking for 4.1.4 to run on OS 9 universal, but I wanted to at least give something back in the meantime.

I've been testing the demo version of 4.1.1 (which only seems to work well on 8.x) and found that it requires a 32 bit version of SheepShaver (the display gets corrupted in the 64 bit version).  The display corruption in the 64 bit version happens regardless of the monitor settings (Power MachTen requires at least 8 or 16 bit display depth to be set).

I'll try to see if I can get 4.1.1 running on real hardware in OS 8 under Blue Box and Mac on Linux and report back.  Fun stuff!

 
I was unable to find it on the internet, who owns the copyright, has ownership been transferred. Does anyone know the status of this product?

 
Alex said:
I was unable to find it on the internet, who owns the copyright, has ownership been transferred. Does anyone know the status of this product?
Click to expand...
Hey Alex, sending you a PM and including the details below.

I was able to get a copy of 4.1.4 at the end of June by contacting the webmaster through the site at https://www.tenon.com/products/machten.  I mentioned when I asked to buy a copy that I would be willing to pay the last listed price of around $100.  It took some time to hear back, but I was very grateful that they replied

I see that the site seems to be offline as of the last few weeks.

Tenon's owners still hold the copyright as far as I know.  At least a few people have asked about getting the source and failed in the past.  The legal status is complicated by the use of CMU mach code and bits of BSD that go back to the 4.3 release (pre-USL settlement) used in the 68k version (Professional MachTen) that preceded the Power PC version (Power MachTen).

Incidentally, I'm still testing the software and will post results on the compatibility of different versions with Mac OS 8 and 9 (including in emulation on Blue Box/Classic).

 
Thanks 360 but no one has 4.1.4. The macrepo only has 4.1.1 as does the garden.

Thanks for the reply.

 
Is there any chance you could share the copy of 4.1.4 please? I've been trying to get a copy of that for a very long time

Thanks

 
Many thanks for the sharing this with the community on internet archive! I began downloading it.

 
I'lll begin with the verions of Power MachTen that boot and exit cleanly on different releases of Mac OS.

There are trade offs in functionality between the different versions of MachTen across various releases of Mac OS that will be the topic of a later post.

  • MachTen 4.0 runs on Mac OS 7.5 to 8.6
  • MachTen 4.0.3 runs on Mac OS 7.5 to 9.0
  • MachTen 4.1.1 runs on Mac OS 7.5.5 to 8.6
  • MachTen 4.1.4 runs on Mac OS 8.1 to 9.2

The big change in Mac OS was the addition of pre-emptive multi-tasking as introduced in 8.6 and expanded in 9.0.

 
Hi Boomer3200

Thank you for taking the time to summarize these findings, the knowledge is invaluable for anyone wanting to tinker and explore an old classic. I look forward to the new topic that you plan on posting sometime in the future. Thank you, much obliged.

 
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Great stuff, also looking forward to your topics. Might MachTen be one of the reasons there are, or were so many NuBus Token Ring cards floating around?

 
I don't believe Apple relied on any third party unix as they had their own flavor, intact Apple once sold at least on of their SC drives, one of the 20, 40, 80, or 160 drives with A/UX preinstalled. I have a few things that I really would like to explore knowledge wise, to sort of resurface some of the old knowledge that is out there regarding all this by now ancient tech. Yes I do have a post on some of the old network cards, to be fair it's more or less text taken from Apple's own literature and I popped it on nichrome.us.

Not to throw this discussion off the rails but nichrome's main purpose/goal is to use the waybackmachine downloader to scrape old Apple and 3rd part sites that offered solutions for Macs and Newtons etc and download as many files as I can, the hope is that I can perhaps pull some software that might be thought to be lost.

Here is a one liner example. I don't do it this way because it is overwhelming to do one at a time, instead I use a bash script and feed the downloader a list of sites to scrape. There is some post processing such as removing duplicates and consolidating everything to a collection. I have been uploading to the Macintosh Garden but I don't know if the material is being moved to the site itself but it's accessible from nichrome.us

So the line below will pull all those file types that are listed between pipes. 

wayback_machine_downloader -s -d expressit.com_IA -c3 --only "/\.(hqx|sit|bin|tar|z|gz|uue|dmg|dd|pkg)$/i" expressit.com




Sadly I recently purchased a RAID and I was very careless because I accidentally deleted the downloads I had done since the start but over a few days it can be reconstructed through the bash script. No big deal but goes to show how nice a backup would have been — one of the reasons for the RAID.

—Alex

 
boomer3200 said:
I'lll begin with the verions of Power MachTen that boot and exit cleanly on different releases of Mac OS.

There are trade offs in functionality between the different versions of MachTen across various releases of Mac OS that will be the topic of a later post.

  • MachTen 4.0 runs on Mac OS 7.5 to 8.6
  • MachTen 4.0.3 runs on Mac OS 7.5 to 9.0
  • MachTen 4.1.1 runs on Mac OS 7.5.5 to 8.6
  • MachTen 4.1.4 runs on Mac OS 8.1 to 9.2

The big change in Mac OS was the addition of pre-emptive multi-tasking as introduced in 8.6 and expanded in 9.0.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the info! Any information on licensing? It seems Power MachTen actually requires a license and just has a temporary license upon installation.

 
Trash80toHP_Mini said:
Great stuff, also looking forward to your topics. Might MachTen be one of the reasons there are, or were so many NuBus Token Ring cards floating around?
Click to expand...
I have the impression that people most often used MachTen to connect to corporate/university networks and to run personal mail or web servers from their desktop Macs.  The built-in BSD networking stack and tools on the command line are generally solid.  Connecting to something like an AIX server on token ring sounds logical to me!  The software originally cost around $700 US before dropping to around $100 in 2001 when OSX was released, so I imagine that most people who purchased MachTen already had experience with UNIX.

Alex said:
Hi Boomer3200

Thank you for taking the time to summarize these findings, the knowledge is invaluable for anyone wanting to tinker and explore an old classic. I look forward to the new topic that you plan on posting sometime in the future. Thank you, much obliged.
Click to expand...
Thanks, the next post will be this week talking about differences between the 4.0-4.1 releases.  Afterwards, I'll try to capture gotchas running the releases across different versions of Mac OS.  Then the graphical issues with SheepShaver, running on BlueBox, and finally the build environment with some examples like compiling Window Maker to replace AfterStep.

LarBob said:
Thanks for the info! Any information on licensing? It seems Power MachTen actually requires a license and just has a temporary license upon installation.
Click to expand...
4.1.x requires a serial number to run after the trial period of 2 weeks.  Tenon was still offering to sell copies of 4.1.4 last year with a serial number.  If you are looking to find the serial number on a physical copy, then I can say that mine was 24 characters on 4.1.1 and 25 characters on 4.1.4 (not counting the dashes that appear at various intervals).

 
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