History
A short timeline. Each line links to a source. For a longer account with more of the people involved, see the history page on kyberos.org.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1975 to 1979 | At the University of Rochester, RIG (Rochester's Intelligent Gateway) and its Aleph kernel organize an operating system around message-passing ports. Aleph |
| 1981 | Richard Rashid and George Robertson publish Accent at Carnegie Mellon. It has kernel-protected ports, network transparency and copy-on-write memory. Paper |
| 1985 | CMU starts Mach as a multiprocessor kernel compatible with 4.3BSD, funded by DARPA. Accetta et al., 1986 |
| 1986 | The USENIX paper "Mach: A New Kernel Foundation for UNIX Development" describes tasks, threads, ports, messages and external pagers. |
| 1988 to 1989 | The Open Software Foundation builds OSF/1 from Mach 2.5 and part of the BSD kernel. NeXT ships NeXTSTEP 1.0, built on Mach, in 1989. OSF/1, NeXTSTEP |
| Early 1990s | Mach 3.0 moves the BSD code out of the kernel into user-space servers. Mach (kernel) |
| 1994 | CMU ends its Mach work. The University of Utah continues with Mach 4. Mach 4 project |
| 1996 | Apple and the OSF Research Institute release MkLinux, which runs Linux as a single server on Mach 3.0. In December Apple announces it will buy NeXT. MkLinux |
| 1999 to 2001 | Mac OS X Server 1.0 ships in 1999, Apple opens the Darwin core in 2000, and Mac OS X 10.0 ships in March 2001. Its kernel is XNU. XNU |
| 2014 | The ACM gives Mach its Software System Award. ACM |
The name comes from a joke. Team members suggested "muck" as a backronym for Multi-User Communication Kernel, and an Italian colleague, Dario Giuse, wrote it down as "Mach". See the Mach article on Wikipedia for the account.