How 'Marklar' OS X on Intel owes its start to a one-year-old boy It's among the most famous skunkworks projects in personal computer history. Marklar was a secret Apple development program to put Mac OS X on the Intel x86 microprocessor -- or in some sense put it back on Intel, as the underlying NeXT OpenStep OS did work on x86 chips. Ten years ago this August, the first whispered rumors of Marklar emerged.
Considered a fallback plan in case the PowerPC architecture couldn't keep up its performance curve, the Marklar team worked off campus to prevent further leaks while maintaining a feature-identical version of OS X on Intel for four years -- all the way through Jaguar and Panther. Even though some of us didn't believe it possible, Apple eventually demoed the Intel version of the Mac's OS in 2005 and released it in 2006 as Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.4.
The secret history of Marklar is the stuff of legend, but the story of the original idea for an Intel version of OS X hasn't ever been told, until now. In a Quora thread about how Apple is so effective at keeping products and projects under wraps, Kim Scheinberg explains how her husband John, a veteran Apple engineer, wanted to find a project that would allow him to telecommute from the East Coast -- the couple had a one-year-old son, and they wanted to be closer to family.
John (or JK), who had actually risen to the rank of Director within Apple before "self-demoting" to Engineer so he could do more coding and less managing, sent an email to his boss in June of 2000 suggesting that he be given leeway to work on an Intel build of OS X. Permission in hand, he proceeded to work on the Intel build for eighteen months and had it running on a total of six PCs before his boss asked to check in on his labors.
John showed his boss Joe the bootable, functional OS X on Intel -- that's where things got interesting. As Scheinberg writes:
Joe pauses, silent for a moment, then says, "I'll be right back."
He comes back a few minutes later with [former SVP of software] Bertrand Serlet.
[Our son] and I were in the office when this happened because I was picking JK up from work. Bertrand walks in, watches the PC boot up, and says to JK, "How long would it take you to get this running on a (Sony) Vaio?" JK replies, "Not long" and Bertrand says, "Two weeks? Three?"
JK said more like two *hours*. Three hours, tops.
Serlet had them buy a Vaio, and sure enough it was ready to run OS X within hours. That was the start of the skunkworks project; the development effort kicked off in earnest after that demo in December of 2001. When you read the full story, take a moment to consider what the Mac might be like today if not for John and Kim's family values. John's long retired from Apple, so Kim felt comfortable finally sharing the tale -- and for that, we thank her.
If you're wondering how Marklar got named Marklar, Scheinberg has an answer for that too: she named it. The development machines had South Park names, and when there was one more to be assigned she grasped at straws and came up with Marklar.
[via Harry Marks/Curious Rat & Ian Betteridge, hat tip MacRumors]How 'Marklar' OS X on Intel owes its start to a one-year-old boy originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 10 Jun 2012 10:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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