Miscellaneous

Mac OSX 10.7: First @ Retro?

We recently noticed that our AWStats statistics page listed a user running Mac OS X 10.7. As most of you are aware, the current version of Mac OS X is 10.6, so we decided to take a closer look. Upon closer inspection of the HTTP logs, we found this entry:

17.x.x.x – – [16/Feb/2010:17:13:28 -0600] “GET /SNASM68K HTTP/1.1” 200 8447 “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=snasm68k&aq=0&aqi=g1&oq=snasm” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_7; en-us) AppleWebKit/533 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.1 Safari/533” (In:-) (Out:-:-pct.)

The IP range 17.x.x.x/8 is owned by none other than Apple, Inc. It seems that an Apple employee was researching the SNASM68k assembler for some reason. It may have something to do with compatibility with older Macintosh models, since the Macintosh line used the original Motorola 68000 CPU series up until the PowerPC CPU was created in 1991. (Compatibility with 68000 CPUs was dropped starting wtih Mac OS 8.5, and compatibility with 68000 applications was dropped entirely with Mac OS X 10.0.)

Incidentally, as of this writing, Sonic Retro’s SNASM68K page is currently the #1 hit on Google for “SNASM”.

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9 Comments

  • Reply

    haha! I know Sonic Retro is very versatile in its portfolio of projects but I never imagined it would be the first port of call for a systems developer researching processors. Let’s hope he/she found what they wanted!

  • Reply

    Hah, I now hope this update will be a big one that improves the speed a lil more! ^^
    I wonder when Apple will start supporting 64Bit only….!? :/

    Good that this site doesn´t only post Sonic news and also has some random stuff from time to time! 🙂

  • Reply

    Lol, this isn’t “First @ Retro”. It’s been known that Apple is testing Mac OS 10.7 for months now.

    • Reply

      You missed the point of the story entirely, didn’t you?

  • Reply

    nice, Apple programmers turning to hackers for help =D

  • Reply

    Umm… do you really think Apple cares this much about compatibility? More likely, their legal dept. is checking to see if SNASM68K uses any reverse engineered Apple code. That would be more profitable, and thus more like the corporate entity that Apple is. Otherwise, it’s probably just an employee who happens to be curious about SNASM68K.

    • Reply

      SNASM68K has been around for over two decades. Why would Apple just now be checking to see if it contains reverse-engineered Apple code? That, and I’m pretty sure Apple never wrote any 68000 assemblers themselves.

      Incidentally, SNASM68K was the *only* page the Apple employee went to. They didn’t even download it. I’m thinking they did this to randomly throw everyone off.

  • Reply

    Can we just say that it’s pretty awesome that a employee of Apple was on Sonic Retro for a little bit? xP 

  • Reply

    Maybe the next generation of Macs will have BLAST PROCESSING

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