[vox-tech] Mac OS X on intel?

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 01:48:54PM -0800, ME wrote:
> The rumor I heard, is that Apple has an in-house copy of MacOSX running on
> x86 that they use for debugging cross platform problems and to illuminate
> bugs that exist on the PPC side of things, but that don't show up
> immediately. This rumor came about when they were asked a question like:
> "Do you have a copy of MacOSX running on x86?"
> "No comment"
> 
> And some sort of later clarification that there is one running in-house,
> but it nothing close to full-fledged with full comparable support with
> PPC... They only wrote drivers for the devices they use and everything
> else is dropped. They had no plans to develop this for marketing to
> consumers, it was just a tool used during the development process.
> 
> Of course these are just rumors. At the time, many of the sources (web
> pages, USENET posts) had inconsistent quotes and descriptions. It has many
> of the earmarks of an urban legend. Searches on google may provide these
> original posts, or better yet, may show something from Apple that is
> official.
> 
> -ME

In introductory documentation of Mac OS X architecture, in discussion
of the Application and Library hierarchical representations (an
"Application" in OS X is really a folder hierarcy), they mention that
the application is divided into folders for each CPU architecture, and
they specifically cite x86 as an example...

-Micah