Comment by quesera
14 years ago
OSX in 2001 (the time of this story) had evolved significantly from the NeXTStep of 1996 (when Apple bought NeXT). There was a lot of work to be done to bring all the Rhapsody and Yellow Box work to a second architecture.
1.5 man-years? Plausible, I think.
This story is fairly content-free, and the source being that man-year worker's adoring wife, wrapping up a pleasant family history definitely squeaks of pablum. But the basic premise is believable. :)
If a group of people can hack together a working MacOS Classic environment for BeOS (http://sheepshaver.cebix.net/) without source-code for the all-important ROM, there's nothing implausible about this story at all.
The task of porting and keeping an OS under active development ported is no small task but certainly within the capability of a talented, knowledgable engineer.