History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme: the initial (re)bootstrapping of OS X for Intel was done by one person, too.
https://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secr...
History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme: the initial (re)bootstrapping of OS X for Intel was done by one person, too.
https://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secr...
Sometimes (often?), one very dedicated and focused person is better than a team of 20+. In fact companies would do well to recognize these situations and accommodate them better.
Found some gems buried in the comments:
This is really a good take. I can't imagine companies give sabbatical programs nowadays. You still have your vacations so JK took 12 weeks (OP mentioned in the same comment). It was a boon for any system programmer who needs to clear his mind or deepen his thoughts.This is amazing. I wonder what it took to port MacOS from PowerPC to Intel. Every assembly language part must be rewritten, that’s for sure. Anything else?
Didn't Nextstep support x86 long before MacOS X was a thing? I assumed that they always had it compilable on x86 long before the switch (since Rhapsody supported it). I guess the user space stuff might have been trickier but probably not the kernel itself and surrounding components.
Yeah but from what I read from the Quora answer, it sounds like JK did it from scratch? I could be wrong though. I just wonder how much effort is supposed to be put into such a project.
Likely a few foundational technologies that have had significant improvements/reimplementations from Rhapsody like the scheduler/threading infrastructure, memory management, Quartz, Carbon, Quartz.