At 5:23 PM +0100 6/11/12, Mark Benson wrote:
On 11 Jun 2012, at 17:00, "Zane H. Healy"
<healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
One thing that I find suspicious about this is
that the first few
Developers releases for Mac OS X ran on Intel-based systems. Apple
had to port it to PPC, they didn't have to port to Intel, as it
already ran on Intel. I'd be more inclined to believe that the PPC
processor was never intended to be the long term target for Mac OS
X, than I am to believe that at some point it didn't run on Intel.
Apple did have to port the original Mach Kernel-based OS to PPC
because it was originally OPENSTEP which ran on PA-RISC, SPARC, 680x0
and Intel.
The had to port more than just the Mach Microkernel. I forget at
which point they changed the UNIX layer to be based on FreeBSD. As
has been pointed out, the unfortunately chose to port the Net Info
abomination.
I *don't* recall developers releases OS X that ran
on Intel, but I
wasn't a registered student developer at the time, I joined ADC in
2000. I have OS X Rhapsody PR1 & 2 and those are both Mac PPC. I don't
have anything earlier but it probably isn't 'in the wild' anywhere I
could have obtained it.
I ceased to be a registered developer around 2001/2002 time frame (I
joined in '95), as I'd gotten married and had more important things
to spend my money on. :-)
Rather than trying to cast my mind back too far, here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_%28operating_system%29
The article seems to fail to mention "Prelude to Rhapsody", which was
sent out to developers, and was basically OPENSTEP 4.2. Many of the
Mac developers of that time, also got ahold of NeXT hardware. I used
a Pentium 133Mhz system I built specifically to run Prelude.
IIRC, while I've owned a copy of every version of Mac OS X except
10.7, I didn't actually start using it until just before 10.3 was
released. At that time I was on an original G4/450AGP (2nd one sold
in this area, and it came with a special version of System 8.6 rather
than Mac OS 9). I had to replace the video card to get Mac OS X to
be usable on that system.
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at
aracnet.com | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| | Photographer |
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