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Comment by gok | Hacker News Reader

Tickles me that right as Microsoft was buying Macs to revive the NT PowerPC port, Apple was buying PCs to revive the OS X x86 port.

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Apple had maintained an internal port of Mac OS X on x86 hardware for as long as it had existed as OS X. They came quite prepared for the eventuality of a CPU architecture change.

This is absolutely not true. JK and Kim Schienberg are personal friends and can attest to the veracity of this story through other channels. https://qr.ae/TUfeNI

I seem to recall Steve Jobs himself saying this at WWDC, so are you saying that he was lying during the presentation?

Further to this, I recall Darwin (the BSDish system running under OS X) x86 images being available to download from Apple up until Intel Mac's became available.

Apple had always maintained (and publicly released!) Darwin on x86 dating back to OPENSTEP and the Rhapsody DRs, but much of the “Mac OS X” frameworks and pieces on top were definitely not running on x86 without more work. Think Carbon, QuickDraw, etc. Pieces critical to running the Finder and most 3rd party apps.

ISTR blog posts by an Apple engineer describing how little of the graphical system actually worked (basically just WindowServer and small Cocoa apps) without a lot more work to fix endian issues

It actually wasn’t NT. It followed the NT/Win32 APIs but a very cut down special purpose OS.

Interesting, so they implemented a new scheduler, VM etc?

The 360 had a hypervisor. Its kernel was based on the original Xbox's kernel, which in turn was based on the windows 2000 one. Trimmed down would be an understatement here; the ogxbox kernel fit into 256kb, including the bootup animation.

One day while working on the Xbox 360 Fall 2010 and Spring 2011 updates to redesign the UI for Kinect, we ran into an error “out of memory”. Everyone ran around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to figure out the problem. Turns out, we were just straight up out of memory! Thus began a “fun” 48 hours of converting all PNG assets into vectors, and png crushing what we could.

Not to say that was the sole solution - OS UI assets were eating up a ton of resources, but there was a bunch of longer term work around OS memory optimization.

I tell that sorry, just because it’s an amusing illustration to me of the twists and turns a project takes from inception to maturity

Eh so I'm not a Windows expert but wasn't W2K in turn NT-derived?

Windows 2000 is literally NT 5.0 (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_ve... for a mapping of the widely used names to internal NT versions).

Edit to clarify: all versions of Windows, server and consumer, are NT, they just stopped using that branding.

The PPC970 derived processor in the Xbox 360 was also big endian only; the PowerPC port required CPUs that could be switched to (and run in) little endian mode.

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