Item — HN Reader

Hi. Original blog post author here.

Not really, no.

I was there and used and supported these machines throughout.

There was a CDEV available at the time. I can't find it any more. It placed an "indicator light" in your menu bar, which glowed red when the OS was executing 68K code and green for PowerPC code. I installed it on all the machines I could.

It sat there red 99% of the time. Occasionally it flashed green briefly. Only a very few very-CPU-intensive apps made it stay green: applying large Photoshop filters, for example.

Even by MacOS 9.2.2 in my normal usage, browsing the web, doing email and spreadsheets and chat, and writing, it stayed red most of the time. PowerPC-native browsers such as WAMCOM call OS code all the time, and the OS code mostly stayed 68K.

As for it being the low-effort move, I specifically addressed this point.

I don't know what CDEV you're referring to, but what it's observing sounds like a distortion. Every UPP call into the OS looks like 68K code. This enables 68K apps to "just do it." There was always some sort of thunk to handle registers and calling convention, but by 8.5 and certainly by 9 the code on the other side was usually native.

Certainly some calls were still 68K. That's why almost every OS call still needed to go through that song and dance. If all the CDEV did was see the border at the Mixed Mode Manager switch, the machine would indeed appear to be running 68K code most of the time except for those few generally non-UI PPC-specific APIs, even though it isn't (and I challenge you to spend a little time in MacsBug and see that this is true).