
How 'Marklar' OS X on Intel owes its start to a one-year-old boy - srikar
http://www.tuaw.com/2012/06/10/how-marklar-os-x-on-intel-owes-its-start-to-a-one-year-old-boy/
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Brashman
Direct link to the original Quora answer: [http://www.quora.com/Apple-
Inc-2/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets...](http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-
does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-well/answer/Kim-Scheinberg?srid=i1)

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kinofcain
The bigger reveal seems to me that Steve then took the Vaio laptop running OS
X to Japan (or Hawaii, see below) to meet with Sony. This is well after Apple
had killed off their clone business, but it seems they were looking at a
possible licensee deal? I can't begin to imagine how different the last 10
years would have been in the tech world if Sony had (finally) licensed Mac OS.

(quora comment mentioning Hawaii meeting: [http://www.quora.com/Apple-
Inc-2/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets...](http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-
does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-well/answer/Kim-Scheinberg/comment/989850))

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cpeterso
"Star Trek" was another Apple skunkworks project for x86, but Star Trek was
running Mac OS on DR DOS in 1992!

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project>

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patrickgzill
I don't believe this story at all, at all... NeXTStep, the precursor to OS X,
was running on a 486DX2/66 I had in about 1995.

NeXTStep ran on PA-RISC, Intel x86, Motorola 68K and SPARC architectures since
well before 2000. Rumors of ports to other platforms such as DEC Alpha, MIPS,
etc. were also around, but I have no idea whether or not this ever happened.

Supposedly Jobs had a "NRW" the NeXT RISC Workstation, which was a Motorola
88K based system running NeXTSTep, on his desk for quite some time. I have no
way of knowing how true this. see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_88000>

~~~
batista
> _I don't believe this story at all, at all... NeXTStep, the precursor to OS
> X, was running on a 486DX2/66 I had in about 1995. NeXTStep ran on PA-RISC,
> Intel x86, Motorola 68K and SPARC architectures since well before 2000._

You missed the part where OS X diverged A LOT from NeXTStep in the years that
followed.

1996's NeXTStep running on x86 and 2001's OS X running on x86 is a different
beast altogether.

You seem to think OS X is just NeXTStep with a new theme -- actually it had
lots of changes and hell of a lot of frameworks that didn't exist in NeXTStep.

From simple stuff (the window compositing manager, wasn't in NeXTStep, the
Dock wasn't in NeXTStep, etc) to heavy additions: Carbon wasn't in NeXTStep,
and it was absolutely crucial to OS X at the time, for easy porting of apps
from OS 9.

~~~
carmen
up until OSX DP1 the x86 builds were regularly shipped to ADC members with a
familiar Mac UI. it seemed like "Classic" aka OS7/8/9 binaries running with
minimal emulation was the main reason x86 builds temporarily disappeared from
the public eye (to a very strange shock & awe in journalistic circles upon its
return)

~~~
msbarnett
Worth noting, though, that those x86 builds used, and that classic theme was
built in, Display Postscript.

The newer Quartz display subsystem only ever shipped for the PowerPC in the
dev previews.

~~~
lukeh
And the kernel changed from Mach 2.5 to Mach 3, see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU>.

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wmf
Rhapsody ran on x86 and PowerPC in 1998. This story says that by 2000 OS X no
longer ran on x86 and required 18 person-months of effort to get it working
again. That's a lot of bitrot.

~~~
sjwright
I could believe it.

The period from 1996 to 2000 had many many hundreds of Mac OS programmers
rewriting and adapting existing technologies over, much of it C++ not ObjC --
classic apis (aka Carbon), Quicktime, Sound Manager, Quartz, font management,
speech, probably lots more I can't think of.

So that's hundreds of programmers over two years or more. And to introduce C++
compatibility into shedloads of new code takes a single person half the time?
Probably while simultaneously teaching himself about the intricacies of a new
hardware platform and hundreds of big libraries he's probably never coded for
before?

I think it sounds impressive.

~~~
wmf
I had the impression that NeXT had very high coding standards[1] including
endian-neutrality and processor portability; I guess that went by the wayside
during OS X development.

[1] Perhaps too high, considering the failure of original NeXT.

~~~
sjwright
What was Apple supposed to do, fire all of their existing PPC C++ programmers
and hire a whole new team? No, they utilised their existing resources very
effectively to finish the Mac OS X project in surprisingly short time. Apple
made the smartest possible move considering commercial realities.

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rosebush2012
Bogus - NeXTStep already ran on a few CPUs architectures: M68K, PA-RISC,
INTEL. It wasn't a stretch for OS X to run on Intel or any other type of CPU
Architecture. OS X owes its start to NeXTStep and nothing else.

~~~
quesera
OSX in 2001 (the time of this story) had evolved significantly from the
NeXTStep of 1996 (when Apple bought NeXT). There was a lot of work to be done
to bring all the Rhapsody and Yellow Box work to a second architecture.

1.5 man-years? Plausible, I think.

This story is fairly content-free, and the source being that man-year worker's
adoring wife, wrapping up a pleasant family history definitely squeaks of
pablum. But the basic premise is believable. :)

~~~
astrodust
If a group of people can hack together a working MacOS Classic environment for
BeOS (<http://sheepshaver.cebix.net/>) without source-code for the all-
important ROM, there's nothing implausible about this story at all.

The task of porting and keeping an OS under active development ported is no
small task but certainly within the capability of a talented, knowledgable
engineer.

