Unknown to Steve Jobs a team at Apple was working on a Unix Macintosh. Former Lisa software manager Ron Johnston recalls:
A friend of mine from college, Steve Smith, also went to HP after graduating and then came to work at Apple. He had finished up on the Apple III operating system (SOS), and we spoke about the Mac's operating system and its shortcomings and agreed that something needed to give. I hired him to come over and work for me in the Mac development tools area and charged him with figuring out how we could get Unix onto the Mac because even though the Macintosh 1 was a toy, we were working on upgrades and new machines that were going to have hard drives, proper floppy drives, networking, and many more capabilities. So the hardware would be there in a few years, but if the O/S wasn't changed, a user would always have to put software into the Mac with a shoehorn. Steve (Smith) worked away and then added a handful of people to figure it all out. After all, the whole Mac user interface was burnt into ROM, it was all there and accessible. Then, we had to work out how to do the Mac user interface with a Unix kernel. We knew what Sun and the other workstation makers were doing and what customers wanted. But we all worked in total secrecy like the Color Mac folks in ERG were.
That lasted a year or so, and then Jobs found out about it and came to my office. And he wasn't happy. He says, ‘Ron, this project is done. ' And I said, ‘No, no, no, no. We have to have a more robust operating system for the Mac and make it a 3M machine. The existing O/S does what it does, but it will never be able to do multitasking, proper security, or reliable networking. Steve, it was great to launch with, but we need a modern operating system to work with the new chips, and Unix is that it is a proven thing. He just looked straight at me and said, ‘No, there will never be a Mac on top of Unix. I forbid that. And he walked out.
Everyone thought that was that. But it wasn't.
Excerpt from https://books.by/john-buck
