We recently noticed that our AWStats statistics page listed a user running Mac OS X 10.7. As most of you are aware, the current version of Mac OS X is 10.6, so we decided to take a closer look. Upon closer inspection of the HTTP logs, we found this entry:
17.x.x.x – – [16/Feb/2010:17:13:28 -0600] “GET /SNASM68K HTTP/1.1” 200 8447 “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=snasm68k&aq=0&aqi=g1&oq=snasm” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_7; en-us) AppleWebKit/533 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.1 Safari/533” (In:-) (Out:-:-pct.)
The IP range 17.x.x.x/8 is owned by none other than Apple, Inc. It seems that an Apple employee was researching the SNASM68k assembler for some reason. It may have something to do with compatibility with older Macintosh models, since the Macintosh line used the original Motorola 68000 CPU series up until the PowerPC CPU was created in 1991. (Compatibility with 68000 CPUs was dropped starting wtih Mac OS 8.5, and compatibility with 68000 applications was dropped entirely with Mac OS X 10.0.)
Incidentally, as of this writing, Sonic Retro’s SNASM68K page is currently the #1 hit on Google for “SNASM”.