Portal Player had also provided the lower levels of the iPod OS, including power management, disk drivers, and the realtime kernel (which Portal Player had licensed from another company called Quadros). The original iPod hardware was based on a reference platform Apple bought from a company called Portal Player. The iPod operating system wasn’t based on another Apple operating system like Classic Mac OS or Darwin, the underlying Unix core of macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS. When a new engineer started, we typically gave them a week to learn all this before we assigned them any actual tasks. The only reason I didn’t lose all my money was that one of them enjoyed his vodka.)Ĭompiling the iPod operating system from source code, loading it onto an iPod, and testing and debugging it was a fairly complex process. They had an occasional poker game I played in. You would no more let a regular engineer mess with code like that than you’d let a bike mechanic rebuild the transmission in a Porsche. When they weren’t teasing each other about which school was better, they were writing mathematical audio code that I was scared to touch. (Those audio codecs were written by two engineers with advanced degrees from Berkeley and Stanford. Over time, I worked on almost every part of the iPod software, except the audio codecs that converted MP3 and AAC files into audio. I wrote the iPod’s file system and later the SQLite database that tracked all the songs. The first software engineer later became the director of iPod Software, the guy who gave me this special assignment. Apple Marketing hadn’t yet come up with the name iPod the product was known by the code name P68. I was the second software engineer hired for the iPod project when it started in 2001. My boss was told I was working on a special project and not to ask questions. The senior VP passed the request down to the vice president of the iPod Division, who delegated it to the director of iPod Software, who came to see me. I learned that an official at the Department of Energy had contacted Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware, requesting the company’s help in making custom modified iPods. My job was to provide any help they needed from Apple. But it still had to look and work like a normal iPod. They wanted to add some custom hardware to an iPod and record data from this custom hardware to the iPod’s disk in a way that couldn’t be easily detected. They didn’t actually work for the Department of Energy they worked for a division of Bechtel, a large US defense contractor to the Department of Energy. I signed them in, and we went to a conference room to talk. I’d love to say they wore dark glasses and trench coats and were glancing in window reflections to make sure they hadn’t been tailed, but they were perfectly normal thirty-something engineers. I went downstairs to meet Paul and Matthew, the engineers who would actually build this custom iPod. The next day, the receptionist called to tell me that two men were waiting in the lobby. You’ll help two engineers from the US Department of Energy build a special iPod. Without knocking, the director of iPod Software-my boss’s boss-abruptly entered and closed the door behind him. I was sitting at my desk, writing code for the next year’s iPod.
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