What was it like working on the iPhone original? The question has surely been on the mind of every technology enthusiast: after all, we are talking about one of the greatest advances in technological consumption of the 21st century. And it is one that has an answer. It was given by Terry LambertApple engineer, a few years ago on Quora.
Lambert was part of ‘Project Purple’, a top secret project in which it was only possible to work if one accepted not only endless days, but also an environment in which secrecy was absolute. So much so that Lambert had to sign a confidentiality agreement (NDA) not only to guarantee that he would not tell anything about that project: he signed it to be able to know the name of the key project.
That was just the first of obsessive security measures who managed to protect that secret until the end.
Lambert was responsible for about 6% (in number of lines) of the core code of OS The first thing he said is that when he was offered to work on that project, they took him to an area of the headquarters where everyone dressed in black: that in itself was an unmistakable sign that something top secret was being worked on.
Working blind, almost literally
In fact, Lambert joked that if you wanted to create a cute Apple Halloween costume, all you had to do was put on a black sheet, cut out a couple of holes for the eyes, and go “secret project“. During that project he never saw the iPhone for which he was programming and debugging code:
“I could only see the machine that did the remote debugging, not the actual device, but it was obviously a system based on ARM architecture.”
After signing the NDA that allowed him to know the code name of the project – and of course he couldn’t discuss anything with anyone, including his family – he would end up working on something that he wasn’t even sure what it was, especially since Apple maintained completely independent groups in which they worked on small objectives that They did not allow us to know what they were working on on the whole.
Another thing Apple does is give different code names for different groups. Or what is the same: you could be working on the same project as another person or group without knowing it. Neither debate it nor comment on it.
Another engineer named Jerry Wang who also answered that question on Quora indicated how in fact he, who also worked on the documentation of that device and worked with the operators that launched the iPhone in the United States, did not know the project as ‘Project Purple’, but as ‘M68’.
From that moment on he had access to a “secret laboratory” that was inside the main laboratory. Only a select few had access to that secret lab, but “you never got to see the design of the product, because when you’re doing that initial work, it’s all Plexiglas prototypes.” A curious detail: Lambert confessed how the cables used to “talk” to those pre-production units were, indeed, purple.
Image | Xataka
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