5 ms·

How 'Marklar' OS X on Intel owes its start to a one-year-old boy

59 points by srikar 14y ago

rosebush2012 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    If a group of people can hack together a working MacOS Classic environment for BeOS (http://sheepshaver.cebix.net/ 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.
- batista 14y ago
  Yes, take the account from the perspective of actual Apple employee, much more the one responsible for the side-project, and add your internet commenter "bogus" on it. Being based on NeXTStep made it easy. People working ACTIVELY on it made it possible. You seem to have forgotten that on top of NeXTStep tons of stuff had been added in PPC land that weren't at all present: Aqua, for starters, tons of functionality ported from OS 9, the OS 9 filesystem and much more. That NeXT had a x86 port several years BEFORE OS 10 (0.1) was introduced means absolutely nothing. And by the time it did come out publicly, it also had a translation layer, Rosetta, to run PPC apps.
patrickgzill 14y ago
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_88000
- batista 14y ago
  >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.
  - patrickgzill 14y ago
    Carbon sits on top of lower-level pieces - remember, we are talking about the guts of Mach and BSD and IO and drivers, not software that sits on top of it. There was definitely a Dock in NS :-) May I ask, have you ever used a NS3.3 or 4.2 based system for any length of time?
    - protomyth 14y ago
      To get to the welcome to the Macintosh screen (per the original answer), we are talking about the software on top of it. Carbon was probably not an easy port (endian issues to start with) never mind the switch in vector units.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
wmf 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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.
cpeterso 14y ago
"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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
Brashman 14y ago
Direct link to the original Quora answer: http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-well/answer/Kim-Scheinberg?srid=i1 http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets...
TylerBrock 14y ago
I remember nearly shitting my pants when I heard the rumor of Marklar's existence. Yeah it makes sense now but it was amazing that it actually existed at the time. This engineer did an amazing job of porting the laptop version over considering it probably needed power management and most likely support for Sony's proprietary garbage. That is something even linux has trouble with nowadays!
kinofcain 14y ago
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-so-well/answer/Kim-Scheinberg/comment/989850 http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets...)

59 points by srikar 14y ago

rosebush2012 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  If a group of people can hack together a working MacOS Classic environment for BeOS (http://sheepshaver.cebix.net/ 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.
batista 14y ago
Yes, take the account from the perspective of actual Apple employee, much more the one responsible for the side-project, and add your internet commenter "bogus" on it. Being based on NeXTStep made it easy. People working ACTIVELY on it made it possible. You seem to have forgotten that on top of NeXTStep tons of stuff had been added in PPC land that weren't at all present: Aqua, for starters, tons of functionality ported from OS 9, the OS 9 filesystem and much more. That NeXT had a x86 port several years BEFORE OS 10 (0.1) was introduced means absolutely nothing. And by the time it did come out publicly, it also had a translation layer, Rosetta, to run PPC apps.

patrickgzill 14y ago

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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_88000

batista 14y ago
>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.
- patrickgzill 14y ago
  Carbon sits on top of lower-level pieces - remember, we are talking about the guts of Mach and BSD and IO and drivers, not software that sits on top of it. There was definitely a Dock in NS :-) May I ask, have you ever used a NS3.3 or 4.2 based system for any length of time?
  - protomyth 14y ago
    To get to the welcome to the Macintosh screen (per the original answer), we are talking about the software on top of it. Carbon was probably not an easy port (endian issues to start with) never mind the switch in vector units.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

wmf 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.

cpeterso 14y ago

"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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

Brashman 14y ago

Direct link to the original Quora answer: http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-well/answer/Kim-Scheinberg?srid=i1 http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets...

TylerBrock 14y ago

I remember nearly shitting my pants when I heard the rumor of Marklar's existence. Yeah it makes sense now but it was amazing that it actually existed at the time. This engineer did an amazing job of porting the laptop version over considering it probably needed power management and most likely support for Sony's proprietary garbage. That is something even linux has trouble with nowadays!

kinofcain 14y ago

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-so-well/answer/Kim-Scheinberg/comment/989850 http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets...)