Speaking at Microsoft’s (MSFT) Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles today, Rashid talked up his Apple (AAPL) street cred, reminding attendees that he helped develop Mach, the operating system microkernel that’s now the foundation of Mac OS X. “If you use a Macintosh or an iPhone, which honestly, I would not recommend, you would be using code that I wrote more than 25 years ago,” Rashid said. “If you’d asked me 25 years ago if I thought code I was [writing would be] running today on a cellphone, my reaction would have been, ‘What’s a cellphone?’ It just shows you things really do survive and get used in interesting ways.”

Used in interesting ways in Apple products, anyway. Just ask PARC.

[Image Credit: Someecards]

The reason you do basic research is for survival. You (provide) the agility to change when change is critical. That’s true for society and humanity more broadly, like if something really bad happens–war, famine, Google–you can respond.”

–Rich Rashid, a founding member of Microsoft Research, adds Google to the Seven Plagues of Revelation.