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Rhapsody was the “next-generation” operating system that AppleComputer had been working on before they renamed it MacOSX.

It was basically NeXT’s NeXTSTEP/OpenStep operating system repurposed for Apple hardware, after NeXT was acquired by Apple.

A lot of the Really Amazing Stuff in MacOSX was first thought of in connection with Rhapsody. For instance, the BlueBox which we now call Classic was originally intended to run System 7.x (that old!). And Rhapsody was going to have the YellowBox, which eventually became Cocoa, which we all know and love. Finally, full Java support was a Big Thing about Rhapsody, and as you can see, it’s paid off: Java in OS X works.

Besides Aqua and Quartz and all the other wonderful technologies in MacOSX, the biggest change since Rhapsody is probably the invention of Carbon. Carbon allows lazy (and/or efficient…call it what you like) developers to continue using most of their Classic Mac OS codebase and only update a little bit of the code so that their program will work in MacOSX, instead of rewriting it with Cocoa. I don’t know that I can blame them, but it seems that it’s easier to write a nice Cocoa application than it is to write a nice Carbon one (your mileage may vary).


Another Child of AppleRhapsody was MacOSX Server 1.x. It came before Aqua, and had 48x48 .tiff based icon files.

And a Cocoa Finder… sigh

Anyone got any pics? Did it look like Mac OS < 10?

Courtesy Apple Mexico, which really needs to update their website [http://www.apple.com/mx/software/macosx/server/screenshots.html]

More Rhapsody screenshots: [http://members.aol.com/kupan787/Rhapsody_Down.htm]. Linked article at [http://members.aol.com/kupan787/Rhapsody.txt] says “While Rhapsody won’t really reach the hands of the general publi il July of 1998…” heh…


The full Rhapsody strategy, if it was ever carried out, would have made Rhapsody ‘the Java of OSes’. It would have ran on x86, PowerPC and possibly Alpha CPU architectures, and developers could compile the same code for each and ship a single ‘obese binary’ package that would run on all of them


Some of that is already coming to pass with Universal Binaries in the PowerPC -> x86 transition. – JoshuaPenn


Yet more Rhapsody screenshots:

[http://next.z80.org/graphics/screenshots/rhapsody/markus_rhapsody_special/]

[http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/Rhapsody%20DR2/index.htm]


Ick! Personally, I’m happy with the way things are looking now-a-days. If the Mac OS looked like that today, well, it wouldn’t have enticed many to switch no matter how rock-solid. I used to be a Mac basher just a few years ago. I bashed Windows almost as much, don’t get me wrong, but I always had it out for the Mac’s look and feel … it bothered me. A lot. ;-) At any rate, I am now proud to say I own only one PC and several Macs. The PC has Linux on it and hasn’t been powered up in nearly two years. And it took OS X / Cocoa to get me back into software development after a very long hiatus due to my Java Strike (TM). Man … I’m really judgmental … ;-)


Actually, the ‘Rhapsody strategy’ someone mentioned above was fully executed with OpenStep and NeXTStep, both of which ran on a variety of architectures (and even on top of other operating systems). – FinlayDobbie

Fully, except for the PowerPC part.