[Info-vax] OT: IBM Offering $9-10 Per Share for Sun

[JF Mezei]

Neil Rieck wrote:

> p.s. For years Steve Jobs denied rumors that Apple products would be
> based upon Intel chips. Then in 2005 we learned that he had been
> running a Skunk Works for more than 5 years to do just this. Job's
> peers at HP should take note.


Not quite like that. OS-X is based on freeBSD which has been available
on the 8086 for ages. So when Apple decided to go 8086, it already had
the core of its OS on the 8086 and just had to port the  software
layered over the core unix.

Once you have the kernel and compilers done, the rest is fairly easy.

So, yes, there would have been skunk works to do that, but I don't think
it was 5 years. It is more likely to have been 1 or perhaps 2 years,
depending on when Apple started to negotiate with IBM and Intel for the
chips.


Consider that if VMS were ported to the 8086, they probably could reuse
much of the EFI stuff that is already written on VMS and that would save
them much time. And while they would have to write a Macro compiler for
the 8086 and perhaps another compiler, the rest of the compilers already
exist for it. So the port is not as involved as it would be if they were
to port to a brand new architecture where no compilers exist yert (like
VAX to Alpha port).