The MACH micro-kernel is likely to be the basis of the operating systems of the future (it is already the basis of the OSF and NeXT systems). It provides a common interface for the operating systems independent of underlying hardware. In other words, if one can get the MACH micro-kernel running on one's favourite hardware (this has already been done for many of the popular platforms) then any software which is written within the MACH framework will run on it. One of the features of this design is that Parallel/Distributed computing can be largely made transparent to the the end-user. The Carnegie Mellon University is coordinating the MACH project.