Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

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/

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.

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 ;)

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`.

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