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

http://www.tuaw.com/2012/06/10/how-marklar-os-x-on-intel-owes-its-start-to-a-one-year-old-boy/

by srikar • 14 years ago

59 32 14 years ago

rosebush2012• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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.

batista3• 14 years 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.

patrickgzill4• 14 years 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

batista3• 14 years 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.

patrickgzill4• 14 years 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?

carmen• 14 years ago

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)

protomyth3• 14 years ago

Technically, all of the display code (Quartz) was not part of NeXTSTEP. NeXTSTEP used Adobe Display Postscript which cost too much and had too many licensing restrictions to be used on OS X. Also, all the code imported from Mac OS would beed to be converted.

patrickgzill4• 14 years ago

These are all layers on top of the lower-level OS, which is the only part that would need to be ported; and it was already ported.

Quartz is basically "Display PDF" instead of "Display PostScript" with the architectural difference being that DPS was client-server, with bits of PostScript being interpreted on the fly; while Quartz got rid of the round trips between client and server, merging everything into one faster, monolithic layer. I recommend you look at the PS and then the PDF specs, they are about 90% identical.

The code imported from MacOS also ran in a separate "box" on top of the lower-level details.

Really the best case I can make for my argument is to point out the similarity between NeXTStep's IOKit drivers and the OSX IOKit drivers. That is the part, that really DOES interface with the guts of the system.

e28eta• 14 years ago

How about the part where the team scaled up to a dozen people? Do you disbelieve there was enough work achieving feature parity to keep a team of engineers busy?

The article doesn't report it took JK 18 months to be able to boot into OS X, simply that that's when it got greater visibility. I think it's highly plausible that 1.5 years was enough time to get somewhere between "won't boot" and "everything works great".

Edit: re-read, and realized I made an assumption that wasn't explicit. I'm assuming that OS X diverged in significant ways from Next, and did not maintain compatibility for non-PPC architectures. I think that's highly likely. I'd also wonder how much of JK's time was spent dealing with device drivers.

flatline32• 14 years ago

Speaking as someone that had Marklar running on a beige box under my desk at Apple, this story is close enough to the reality of things. As people noted, there was half a decade between NeXTStep and OS X, and a lot of room for bitrot and divergence in that time.

The NeXT base made the project much easier, but there was still a lot of work involved with what was added later, and legacy Apple bits.

mapgrep• 14 years ago

I'm very curious about what sort of work was involved in such a project. Presumably there was some sort of relatively low level compatibility layer involved, since Marklar was kept updated to run 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4, apparently with a small team (Quora post said the guy needed a project he could do alone).

There were at least two other successful ports of MacOS to x86 back in the pre-Steve days, both described in Jim Carlton's book "Apple." Presumably those ports were trickier since they were porting code originally developed specifically for 680x0 chips rather than originally developed on a portable Unix-like operating system. Still, they were able to get things up and running remarkably quickly. Performance and bug fixing and third party compatibility were another matter.

rimantas• 14 years ago

IIRC when introducing switch to Intel processors Jobs told that each version OS X was running on Intel since day one.

X-Istence• 14 years ago

I love how polar opposite HN can be regarding Steve Jobs/Apple. When it comes to Steve saying something is revolutionary and fantastic everyone trots out examples saying he is wrong or that it was already done, but when something he says can be used to break an argument it is used as gospel.

How about we chalk that up to marketing. I don't think the original Mac OS X ran on X86 nor would I be inclined to believe it.

wmf2• 14 years 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.

sjwright2• 14 years 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.

wmf2• 14 years 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.

cpeterso• 14 years 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

Brashman• 14 years ago

Direct link to the original Quora answer: http://www.quora.com/Apple-Inc-2/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets...

kinofcain• 14 years 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...)

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

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