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Answer from Terry Lambert, Apple Core OS Kernel team, technical lead on several projects:
I wrote about 6 percent of the Mac OS X kernel, by lines of code, over a period of eight years. That's about 100,000 lines of code a year.
This is the same kernel for iOS.
I didn't get read in on Purple (the original iPhone project) until late in the game, but I was informally read in before that, because I was a pretty awesome kernel debugger, and the kernel needs to be debugged a lot when you are doing a bring-up.
At some point you just have to wing it, because it's more important to ship product than it is to be overly anal about secrecy.
So I got taken into areas where there were black cloths everywhere. If you've ever worked at Apple, black cloths are how they cover secret projects; you pretend not to see them; it's a kind of willful ignorance. I only got to see the machine doing the remote debugging, not the target — but it was obviously an ARM based system. If you want a clever Halloween costume for Apple, buy a black sheet, cut eye holes, and go as a "secret project."
When you finally got read in, you signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that let you see the NDA that had the code name on it. You couldn't see the code name, until you agreed not to discuss the code name.
Another thing that Apple does is they give different code names to different groups; in other words, you may be working on the same project as someone else, and not actually know it. Or be allowed to discuss it.
After the read in, you get access to the "secret lab.".That's a lab inside the main lab. You may have access to the regular lab, but not the "secret lab." You didn't really get to see the form factor, because when you are doing the initial work, it's all prototypes on plexiglass.
Oh, and the special cables you used to talk to the pre-production units, they were actually Purple.
P.S.: if you care, you can pretty much figure out what any secret project is. And no, I'm not going to disclose how you do it, but really? Trivially easy.
What was it like working on the original iPhone project (codenamed Project Purple)? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:
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