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By Mike Wuerthele

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

 

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."

 

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That was interesting about the initial development of the iPhone.  Compartimentilization, and different levels of access, and not seeing the actual product, proved apt in Apple's decision to maintain secrecy early on.

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