Apple Rhapsody Report (1997) | Hacker News Reader

Apple Rhapsody Report (1997)

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42 pointsLammy20 comments

Historical context: the “Premier” and “Unified” releases planned here in 1997 got canceled, and all x86 work (Rhapsody for Intel and Yellow Box For Windows) got canceled after Rhapsody Developer Release 2. Rhapsody for PowerPC did see brief public availability as Mac OS X Server 1.{0..2} and shipped both in retail box (like mine!) and bundled with Server configurations of G3 and G4 towers. The “rootless” (only applications visible) Blue Box mentioned here eventually happened when Blue Box became the Classic Environment.

Even though it's actually usable for very little, Rhapsody remains my favorite “weird dead-end Apple thing” just for the novelty of having essentially NEXTSTEP 5.x (Display Postscript and all) with a Mac Platinum UI. Copland would probably hold that title for me if any of its builds actually worked, but Rhapsody has real stability, real application support, and a real POSIX environment via its NeXT heritage: http://rhapsodyos.org/ https://betawiki.net/wiki/Category:Mac_OS_X_Server_1.x_build...

Mac OS X Server v1.2v3 a.k.a. Rhapsody 5.6 is my favorite thing to run on my Blue & White G3 — the OG New World machine `PowerMac1,1`! https://cooltrainer.org/rhapsody-in-blue-and-white/

I wouldn't call Rhapsody a dead end; it took more work than expected but it evolved into OS X. And the delays were worth it because OS X solved a bunch of the thorny problems described in this document.

> And the delays were worth it

Agreed — I love Rhapsody's alternate-history NeXT vibe because I was a Mac user but never a NeXT user, so it's interesting to glimpse a timeline where the NeXT genes were more dominant. I'm glad we got the OS X we got because the OS X we got was actually successful. They pulled off Carbon amazingly well.

I 'member upgrading my WallStreet PowerBook (already a pretty old machine by 2001) to 128MB of RAM and installing 10.0 when it first came out, and I've been revisiting early OS X again on that same machine recently: https://old.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/15s67e8/266_m...

A friend of mine came across an x86 Rhapsody machine, but it was password protected and he wasn't able to ever login. Sadly I believe he wiped it.

Cool alternative history that kinda-sorta ended up coming true.

In the unlikely event that this happens again, boot to single-user mode by typing `-s` at the `boot:` prompt. Then you can re-mount the filesystem as rw and change root's password:

  fsck -y /dev/hd0a
  mount -w /
  passwd root
  sync
  reboot

Then log in as root at the graphical login prompt and you can use the graphical NetInfo admin tools to list/create/reset regular users.

One can also replace/reset the local NetInfo DB entirely by copying `/usr/template/client/etc/netinfo/local.nidb`, `/usr/template/client/etc/hostconfig`, and `/usr/template/client/etc/hosts` over the files at the same paths minus `/usr/template/client`.

I vaguely remember that Yellow Box for Windows still existed with some WebObjects releases. Existed in the sense that you actually got ProjectBuilder and InterfaceBuilder and all the libraries and were able to build Objective-C applications on Windows. I’m not sure anymore though if this was officially supported in any way.

Here are some screenshots of it, including InterfaceBuilder http://www.shawcomputing.net/resources/apple/os_pictures/yb2...

According to https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=29049 there's an even older version branded “OPENSTEP Enterprise 4.2 for Windows” instead of Yellow Box.

edit: Neat, I never realized TextEdit was a Java Yellow Box app. Cool way to both test/dogfood and market the Java bindings: http://www.shawcomputing.net/resources/apple/os_pictures/yb2...

Also, it's not-even-mildly interesting but the Start Menu shortcuts are oppositely-spaced compared to the branding within the apps themselves for some reason — i.e. “Project Builder” vs “ProjectBuilder” and "YellowBox” vs “Yellow Box”. And it comes with a Bourne Shell! http://www.shawcomputing.net/resources/apple/os_pictures/yb2...

IIRC OPENSTEP Enterprise for Windows was a version before Rhapsody and was actually an official release. I had this on CD-ROM, I might actually still have it somewhere.

There was also a OPENSTEP Solaris for Sparc, but I think this was a bit more obscure, don’t have any firsthand experience with that.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/96579068@N05/13061732584/

I was working for a bank around that time and we used a trading system which was initially running on NeXT boxes, but we had it also running on NT 4.0 later on.

Edit: I think I even found some screenshots of that trading application:

https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.8d154655f6713bc112d178164e4ffe51...

This seems to be running on Windows XP, so that was quite a bit later. But if you look at the toolbar icons, the heritage is quite clear ;)

Yes! A very exciting time. I had a Mac at home and used NeXT at school, and i was able to buy Rhapsody / Mac OS X Server 1.02 for half off as a student. I ran my own web server out of my apartment with it for years on a PowerMac 7500 (w/ a 604e upgraded CPU, back when you could do that with Macs). Handled fairly heavy traffic for the time without any complaints.

There's a nice John Siracusa article from 2008 https://arstechnica.com/staff/2008/04/rhapsody-and-blues/ about how central the cross-platform ambitions were to the Rhapsody vision, and how they failed, souring Apple's relationship with Adobe in the process:

> It was a hard sell, to be sure. The sweetener that Apple hoped would push the deal over the top was that applications written using this API could also be compiled to run on Windows. And so the complete pitch to the Adobes and Microsofts of the world was this: rewrite your huge existing applications using these APIs and end up with a single code base for both Mac and Windows. Alternately, just rewrite the Mac versions of your applications using these new APIs.

> The answer from the Mac development community was, essentially, "Yeah, uh, no thanks." Remember, this is the Apple of the late 1990s, its power and influence at an all-time low. It's hard to imagine a company like Adobe or (even more laughably) Microsoft betting the future of its flagship software products on 1997-Apple's ability to ship and support a "new" API (its NeXT origins and history counting for little among this crowd). This is after years and years of Apple demonstrating a complete inability to ship a modern replacement for its aging operating system. As for rewriting just their Mac applications using a new API, even that represented a tremendous investment of time and resources for a platform that could very well be on its way out. So yeah, no thanks, Apple. We'll take a pass.

Of course the plan for cross-platform Rhapsody is notably similar to late-era, software-only NeXT's cross-platform plans for NeXTSTEP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep .

> Rhapsody will have superb support for Java. Apple has decided that Java is a very important part of their future and has devoted significant resources to integrating it into Rhapsody. In his keynote speech, Avie Tevanian said that "Java is Apple's biggest opportunity." I found the Java information to be some of the most interesting and pleasantly surprising news to come out of the conference.

And it did for a while, this always felt like a Plan B, in case Mac OS developer community bread with Object Pascal and C++, would not accept Objective-C.

As soon as they got the message that Objective-C was being fully embraced by the developer community, Java bridge was dragged behind the barn and shot.

And then a whole decade was spent looking for a successor to Objective-C.

> As Jobs said in his chat, "we put a gun to their heads and shot them dead". (I'm paraphrasing Jobs here, but he said something close to that - it was equally brutal, anyway.) Say good-bye to PowerTalk, OpenDoc, Copland, and their ilk. Good riddance, I say.

At least one man was very upset with this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

Plenty of people were but Apple was on a path to bankruptcy. Turning that around meant killing some stuff and letting some people go. Some of that was stuff that people outside of Apple liked, but part of Apple’s problem was that they hadn’t been putting Apple first in their list of priorities, and they really needed to.

I like to think of Apple as an unfocused fount of innovation during its "interregnum" years (1985-1996). There were many interesting projects that came out of Apple during this time, including (but not limited to) Pink/Taligent, SK8, A/UX, Newton, OpenDoc, and Dylan. As a major fan of the contributions that Xerox PARC made to the world, it's really cool to think of an alternate timeline where Apple leapfrogged even NeXT when it came to developing an operating system that combined the best 1990s research in operating systems and programming languages with Apple's experience developing usable, pleasant interfaces. Just imagine the ideas of OpenDoc combined with a very flexible object-oriented language like Common Lisp or Dylan to create a component-based system that is essentially a Lisp machine running on mid-1990s Power Macintoshes with a Macintosh interface. I personally think many of these concepts should be revisited today, especially in the free, open-source software world, but updated to reflect modern concerns such as security and the Web.

But an Apple built on those ideas wasn't meant to be; Apple lacked a coherent vision and leadership willing to carry out that vision, which led to epic failures in project management (Pink/Taligent and Copland come to mind) that helped contribute to Apple's dire situation in 1996 when it was fighting to stay alive.

Steve Jobs brought not only a vision for Apple (the marriage of the Macintosh user interface with OPENSTEP technology), but he also enforced this vision. This led to the death of Newton, OpenDoc, and many other technologies. However, this led to the birth of Mac OS X and compelling Apple hardware, which helped revive Apple and helped pave the way for Apple's inroads into consumer electronics (e.g., the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad). For a long time Mac OS X, in my opinion, was heads and shoulders better than its competitors on the desktop, and even today macOS is my favorite of the mainstream desktops.

I remember that there was the potential of a Mac-OS/2 merger through Taligent and as someone who had a Mac on one desk and an OS/2 machine on the other I was really hoping this would happen.

I don't know if this is the same thing, but you may be interested in this failed project from IBM in the 1990s that attempted to leverage Taligent and OS/2 to create a universal operating system that used a microkernel and was capable of presenting different UI and programmatic "personalities."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_OS

Yeah, I think that was it. Most of what I remember from that era was the pile of printed OS/2 programming manuals on my desk.

> Unnamed. Summer 2000

Mac OS X Public Beta

(9/13/2000 being extremely late "summer". Weird to sell a beta OS at retail, but Apple apparently did so for $29.95.)

That was a release that came out in Summer 2000, but it has very little to do with this 1997 plan. Pretty much all of this plan was thrown out shortly after this was published. The Mac OS X Public Beta we got was a result of the later 1998 plan that brought us Carbonlib for classic Mac OS and Carbon-the-OS a.k.a. Mac OS X.

> The Apple and NeXT engineering teams are merging effectively

ho ho ho, right there is the doooooo r

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