what was osx86?

when i first bought the new recording pc back in early 2007, i wanted to cover all of my bases, so i initially intended a four-way boot process: xp-32, vista-64, debian and osx86. i built the machine with this goal in mind, explicitly.

it didn't take long for me to scratch vista off the list. i didn't have drivers for my older hardware, and it just didn't seem worth the effort. xp was faster and more stable and i could nlite it, whereas i was stuck with a buggy vista that i knew wasn't tested right (because i worked vista tech support, at the time). but, i hung on to debian for a while, until i needed the extra hard drive space.

osx86 was the last to get dropped on a machine that still runs an nlited xp-32 and, at this point, probably always will. the logic was that i might run across some music software that was mac only, and i would consequently need some way to get to at least a unix-like environment to run it.

but, it never actually happened, and, by mid-2013, i'd decided that it was never going to happen. so, i wiped the drive to get some extra space.

running the apple os on a pc isn't so strange anymore, since they started shipping on x86 architecture. the problem nowadays is not the processor, but a proprietary bios chip that you need to get around. but, at the time, there was a small community dedicated to figuring this out, and i was able to get relatively far on what i had.

you can read about that here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackintosh