The Case of the Top Secret iPod

Thanks for the links, @MMTalker. We’ve been watching them too, and it’s fascinating to see how they put different (often unwarranted) spins on the story).

I’m very familiar with MPW. I used MPW from 1.0 beta 1 through the last version. According to wikipedia the last version of MPW came out in 2001. The events in this article take place in 2005. MPW ran in classic Mac OS, but by 2005 everyone was using Mac OS X. Also, iPod used newer ARM cores than those supported by the Newton ARM compiler.

Yup. I was part of the team the turned out the lights on MPW in 2001. With Greg Branche, Cheryl Ewy, Colin McMaster, Chaz Spillar, (I hope I’m not forgetting anyone).

MPW was fully carbonized, running natively on Mac OS X, but an edict from on-high said that ProjectBuilder was the future, and MPW was the past, and the team was disbanded and everyone was assigned to other projects.

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Thank you for an interesting story! These days it is much easier to hide radiation detection in plain sight (if that is what they were doing). We (Image Insight Inc.) develop video analytic software (GammaPix™) that enables digital cameras to measure ionizing radiation that interacts with the image sensor (typically a CMOS). Comparable in sensitivity to the smallest dedicated detectors, it has the advantage of running on completely unmodified hardware.

Thank you again for an interesting Mac/engineering story!