The secret was well secured (about SJ switch)

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powerdocpowerdoc
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Since the last 5 years, Apple secretly made mac os X for both platform : PPC and Intel, and no rumor sites was aware of that. Some people from here and there, claimed that there was a great chance that somewhere in the underfloor of Cupertino a intel based machine runned mac os X, but nobody suspected that such many people where involved in this project.



Unlike Star Trek, who was only an experimental project, all the mac os X code developped in the last 5 years, was tested both for PC and mac. This is huge amount of work, and the secret was well kept.



The last rumor certainly come with the agreement of SJ : there was no best way, to have a good advertisement for this last keynote.

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  • Reply 1 of 5
    pyr3pyr3 Posts: 946member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Powerdoc

    Since the last 5 years, Apple secretly made mac os X for both platform : PPC and Intel, and no rumor sites was aware of that. Some people from here and there, claimed that there was a great chance that somewhere in the underfloor of Cupertino a intel based machine runned mac os X, but nobody suspected that such many people where involved in this project.



    Unlike Star Trek, who was only an experimental project, all the mac os X code developped in the last 5 years, was tested both for PC and mac. This is huge amount of work, and the secret was well kept.



    The last rumor certainly come with the agreement of SJ : there was no best way, to have a good advertisement for this last keynote.



    I don't think it was that much of a surprise to people that OS X was cross-platform. The BSD libraries and Linux/Unix programs that are packaged with OS run on many platforms aside from PPC and x86. Especially with all the stuff that was coming through the grapevine lately about 'cross-platform initiative' and making the libraries and such so they would run on Linux x86 and iTunes for Linux. By building on top of Next/BSD hybrid, they made the core OS cross-platform. I don't think that it really would take much from that point on to make sure you were writing code that was easily compatible either way.



    To summarize all that, I'm not that surprised. I expected that Apple was making sure that OS X ran on Intel, even if it was just a last resort in case the PPC platform started to collapse around them.
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  • Reply 2 of 5
    powerdocpowerdoc Posts: 8,123member
    I was not surprised by the fact that it was cross platform, but that the X86 platform was so advanced. Of course, it was wise to have a replacement wheel in case of the PPC chips where a failure, but it looks like that Apple predicted from the start that the PPC chips should be a failure. Now the more we think of it, the more logical this move is, but one time again, SJ is in advance upon other peoples.



    The BSD core of mac os X is certainly one of the strong point of this OS. With Gershwin such a transition would have been nearly impossible.
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  • Reply 3 of 5
    nowayout11nowayout11 Posts: 326member
    Really? I've read about project Maklar a couple of years ago on eWeek and other sources (Maklar is the x86 OSX). Apple didn't credibly deny its existance. But this has definitely been in the circle of credible reporters for a few years.
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  • Reply 4 of 5
    giantgiant Posts: 6,041member
    I seem to remember folks talking about finding references to intel cpus somewhere in the os a few years ago
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  • Reply 5 of 5
    mikerallymikerally Posts: 12member
    Oh we almost guessed it, check out this post:



    http://forums.appleinsider.com/showt...er=2#post57107



    It was made in December 2002:



    Quote:

    Jobes wrote:

    I know Rosetta was a codename for Inkwell (which seems like a public beta in terms of functionality in 10.2 but mebbe good things will come of it). I was thinking Rosetta in this context was more akin to a transparent on-the=fly translation for x86 or Linux, possibly using Cocoa. This may raise the vexed issue of Marklar. The codename Marklar is interesting, if it stems from the Southpark episode I'm thinking of. The concept seemed to be that you could exchange different words or languages for one universal work, and still be understood.



    And if I remember correctly, it was a member called Belle that tipped us off on something refering to the Rosetta Stone that had to do with some sort of translation - but this was way back in 1999/2000 - I think all posts from then have been deleted, because I can't find any by her that are that old.
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