Ondrej Holzman On the server Quora.com appeared an interesting post by Kim Scheinberg, who found the courage years later to share the story of her husband, a former Apple employee who apparently played an important role in Apple's switch to Intel processors.
Fear? I have wanted to share this story for some time.
The year is 2000. My husband John Kulmann (JK) has been working for Apple for 13 years. Our son is one year old and we want to move back to the east coast to be closer to our parents. But in order for us to move, my husband had to request to work from home as well, which meant he couldn't work on any team projects and had to find something to work on independently.
We planned the move well in advance, so JK gradually divided his work between the Apple office and his home office. By 2002, he was already working full-time from his home office in California.
He emailed his boss, Joe Sokol, who coincidentally was the first person JK hired when he joined Apple in 1987:
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2000 10:31:04 (PDT)
From: John Kulmann (jk@apple.com)
To: Joe Sokol
Subject: intelI would like to discuss the possibility of becoming the Intel lead for Mac OS X.
Whether just as an engineer or as a project/technical leader with another colleague.
I've been working consistently on the Intel platform for the last week and I really like it. If this (Intel version) is something that could be important for us, I would like to start working on it full time.
jk
***
18 months have passed. In December 2001, Joe told John: “I need to justify your salary in my budget. Show me what you're working on right now.”
At the time, JK had three PCs in his office at Apple and another three in his home office. All of them were sold to him by a friend who built his own computer assemblies, which could not be bought anywhere. They all ran Mac OS.
Joe watched in amazement as JK turned on the Intel PC and the familiar 'Welcome to Macintosh' appeared on the screen.
Joe paused for a moment, then said: "I'll be right back."
After a while, he returned together with Bertrand Serlet (senior vice president for software engineering from 1997 to 2001 - editor's note).
At that moment, I was in the office with our one-year-old son, Max, because I was picking John up from work. Bertrand walked in, watched the PC boot up, and said to John: "How long before you can get this up and running on a Sony Vaio?" JK replied: "Not for a long time." "In two weeks? In three?” asked Bertrand.
John said it would take him more like two hours, three at the most.
Bertrand told John to go to Fry (a well-known West Coast computer retailer) and buy the best and most expensive Vaio they had. So John and Max and I went to Fry and were back at Apple in less than an hour. It was still running on Vaia Mac OS at 8:30 that evening.
The very next morning, Steve Jobs was already sitting on a plane headed to Japan, where the head of Apple wanted to meet with the president of Sony.
***
In January 2002, they put two more engineers on the project. In August 2002, another dozen workers started working on it. That was when the first speculations began to appear. But during those 18 months, there were only six people who had any idea that such a project existed.
And the best part? After Steve's trip to Japan, Bertrand meets with John to tell him that no one must know about this matter. No one at all. His home office had to be immediately rebuilt to meet Apple's security requirements.
JK objected that I knew about the project. And not only that I know about him, but that I even named him.
Bertrand told him to forget everything and that he would not be able to talk to me about it again until everything was made public.
***
I've missed a lot of reasons why Apple switched to Intel, but I know this for sure: no one reported it to anyone for 18 months. The Marklar project was only created because one engineer, who voluntarily let himself be demoted from a higher position because he loved programming, wanted his son Max to live closer to his grandparents.
Editor's note: The author notes in the comments that there may be some inaccuracies in her story (for example, that Steve Jobs may not have flown to Japan, but to Hawaii), because it already happened many years ago, and Kim Scheinberg drew mainly from her husband's e-mails from his own memory.
I love to learn such information…. Thanks for the nice article….