Yes. In fact, the CMU's Mach/386 code base became the direct start for OSF/1 both the full (RI) and embedded uK (aka monolithic or mK) versions as well. The later would seed DEC Tru64 after being ported to the Alpha, but the 386 version of the mK would become Apple's Darwin. The RI (uK) version is what we used for the Intel Paragon. Anything called OSF/1 version 4 or later is based on the RI. Before that's probably mK, but you should check the readme to see which base.

The joke, of course, was that microKernel, was not that micro (it was greater than 1-1.5M and used to run these on 4M 386 systems). It was cool and the research version (pure uK) is very slick and has a lot of interesting ideas. I think it's interesting to note that we did all of the core TNC development for the Paragon which was on i860 processor, on desktop 386 systems with ethernets to simulate the fabric in the supercomputer.

OSF/1 uK technology worked very well, in fact; it worked so well AT&T's replacement for SVR4 was announced to be based on Chorus, which was a European rewrite using a different uKernel technology specifically to counter OSF/1.

Anyway, if you do a little hunting around the archives, it is quite available. Note it will want to boot from either a floppy for a hard drive, as USB had yet to be created, so bootstrapping on more modern hardware might be take a little work. But it should work. A number of us that worked with it, are still findable and few lurk on this list.

As a side note, during the OSF/UI wars, I made a plea with the late Roger Gourd (then VP of Eng at OSF) and some of the folks management team at OSF to make the OSF/1 generally available for the 386. At time, Linux was still in the .9 stages booting & installing from a 20-40 floppy disks, but still lacked networking and window system. 386BSD/FreeBSD was coming along but not quite reached its stride. The AT&T/BSDi case had just been completed so the UNIX IP question has been settled. I could not convince them it was of any value and to an extent it would have been competing with their members (HP, DEC et al).

I've something thought that was a real opportunity lost.

On Fri, Feb 17, 2017 at 6:30 AM, <jsteve@superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:

While testing a crazy project I wanted to get working I came across this ancient link:

http://altavista.superglobalmegacorp.com/usenet/b182/comp/os/mach/542.txt

--------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<

Newsgroups: comp.os.mach
Subject: Mach for i386 - want to beta?
Message-ID: <1364@mtxinu.UUCP>
Date: 2 Oct 90 17:12:19 GMT
Reply-To: scherrer@mtxinu.COM (Deborah Scherrer)
Organization: mt Xinu, Berkeley
Lines: 24

Mt Xinu is currently finishing up its release of 2.6 MSD for the i386.
2.6 MSD is a CMU-funded standard distribution of the Mach kernel,
release-engineered with the following:
                2.5 Mach kernel, with NFS & BSD-tahoe enhancements
                Transarc's AFS
                X11R4
                most of the 4.3-tahoe BSD release
                Andrew Tool Kit
                Camelot transaction processing system
                Cornell's ISIS distributed programming environment
                most of the FSF utilities
                a few other nifty things

--------8<--------8<--------8<--------8<

Was any of this stuff ever saved? I know on the CSRG CD there is some buried source for Mach 2.5 although I haven’t seen anything on where to even start to compile it, how or even how to boot it... I know Mach is certainly not fast, nor all that ‘small’ but it’d be interesting to see a 4.3BSD on a PC!