I Appear on Stage with Steve Jobs at WWDC 2005

This was my last, and my best, appearance on stage with Steve Jobs. The event was the announcement that Macintosh computers would be switching from Motorola to Intel processors. This was a pretty big deal: All Macintosh software would eventually have to be converted to run on the new chips, and Apple was understandably worried that developers would be afraid of how difficult this might be. I was there to tell the story of how my colleague Rob Schofield ported Mathematica to the new Intel hardware in complete secrecy and in about two hours. (Actually closer to four hours: I said two on stage because I had slightly misunderstood his explanation. It took two hours until it fully compiled the first time, four hours until it launched and ran for the first time.)

Mathematica was a good choice to demonstrate how hard Apple had worked on the compiler and other tools to make the porting process smooth, because everyone knows it's a huge, complicated piece of software.

Watch the video here: