OS 9 on Intel, Jobs would rather have a heart attack.

Do your homework; Jobs ordered secret parallel Intel development of MacOS since System 7 (ceasing with OS X Jaguar). It wouldn't run Mac apps compiled for Motorola/PPC, but he needed a continuing proof of concept so that the future of Macintosh wasn't slaved to a particular microprocessor.

Part of this came out of his days in the wilderness developing NeXTstep for as many CPUs as he could get it to run on. When the prodigal son returned to Apple, he reintegrated NeXTstep as "Rhapsody/Yellow Box" into the future of mainstream MacOS. It's called Cocoa now and an open-source version of it for other platforms is available under the name OpenStep.

If memory serves, Yellow Box was a fully working x86 OS when Linus Torvalds was still writing that USENET post asking for help with his mostly-theoretical MINIX clone project.

Atari spiritually died when Jack Tramiel came in and tried to make it "Commodore II: Electric Boogaloo." Building PC clones was the final nail in their coffin; 386s as I recall. Atari stopped being a company sometime in the 90s and is now merely a trademark owned by Infogrames -- I don't think Infogrames even owns all the Atari games (these things get messy: 80s developers often asked for right of first refusal or automatic reversion in their contracts with game makers). Message edited on: 12/26/2004 12:28

Message edited on: 12/26/2004 12:30