Mike Wuerthele
Ex-Apple engineer Terry Lambert responsible for a large portion of the OS X kernel took to Quora to answer a question about the genesis of the iPhone, and surrounding secrecy.
In the Quora post asking about the original iPhone, Lambert claims that he wrote 6% of the MacOS Kernel as measured by lines of code, or about 100,000 lines a year, much of which was repurposed for the iOS kernel.
Calling the original effort "Project Purple," Lambert said that he was brought in "late in the game" and mostly for debugging purposes. The engineer discussed not even seeing the product he was working on initially.
"I got taken into areas where there were black cloths everywhere," said Lambert. "I only got to see the machine doing the remote debugging, not the target — but it was obviously an ARM based system."
Lambert confirmed the suspicion that Apple uses multiple names for the same project, probably as an effort to suss out leakers.
"Another thing that Apple does is they give different code names to different groups," recalled Lambert. "In other words you may be working on the same project as someone else, and not actually know it. Or be allowed to discuss it."
Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously had tiers of access to the building that the iPhone was being developed in. In a form of compartmentalized security, engineers working on the least secret aspects of the program were limited to just that aspect, with workers involved on the core of the hardware, including the material design, had many tiers of security to pass thorough.
"You may have access to the regular lab, but not the 'secret lab,'" said Lambert. "You didn't really get to see the form factor, because when you are doing the initial work, it's all prototypes on plexiglass."
Lambert worked for IBM for several years in the '90s before joining Apple in 2003. The coder left Apple in Oct. 2010 to spend about two years at Google.
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28 Comments
Then they let Google on the Board to steal the iPhone. Oh well.
As a reminder to most of the commenters that previously remarked on this article, we have a commenter's code of conduct to follow.
Watching Steve Jobs introduce the IPhone and 3 things struck me:
1) This was NOT about him or anything he had done. It was about the product and what it would do for US! Total humility.
But more relevant to today:
2) It ported OSX (MacOS) to the IPhone
3) It put "Desktop Class" power on the IPhone.
So obviously Steve Jobs saw the connection between what would become MacOS and IOS -- that they were just different versions of the same thing.
So, Why does today's Apple insist that they will forever remain separate and different? That they will never be merged -- even though IOS started as a variation of MacOS?
Have they lost the vision and common sense that Jobs nutured?
p.s. Watch the video starting at the 29 minute mark where Jobs equates the mouse and touch as just different UI's -- variations on a theme. Then he introduces that OSX was ported to the IPhone and provides it with "Desktop Class" applications.
Watching that video made me feel something I haven't felt in quite sometime with apple - INSPIRED! To think that after this came the iPad? WOW! Man to I miss Steve and his visions!