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...
Thanks for this. I know little about this period. I was busy in the 90s as it looked like Apple was headed for oblivion. Little did I know at working on SUN gear was actually the wrong choice.
A little more historical context. Rhapsody had two or three big problems:
- There was no transition plan for Mac apps other than Blue Box emulation. Adobe, Quark, Microsoft were the essential Mac developers and all of them completely refused to port to AppKit, full stop.
- Adobe refused to license Display PostScript under terms that would make it possible to ship as a consumer OS (supposedly they didn’t want to support DPS anymore, and refused to budge on a high per-seat price, as a way of tanking it the entire thing).
- Rhapsody was slower than classic MacOS on a wide variety of tasks, and unusable for others. The UI was a weird mashup of NeXT and Mac idioms
Note that it took until 2003 or 2004 for Mac OS X to become usable for non-technical end users. OpenStep had a lot of rough edges for non-Unix people; Rhapsody was the (false) start of a _long_ journey. (Ironically, given better engineering management, Apple could have shipped Copland well before then.)
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/
- There was no transition plan for Mac apps other than Blue Box emulation. Adobe, Quark, Microsoft were the essential Mac developers and all of them completely refused to port to AppKit, full stop.
- Adobe refused to license Display PostScript under terms that would make it possible to ship as a consumer OS (supposedly they didn’t want to support DPS anymore, and refused to budge on a high per-seat price, as a way of tanking it the entire thing).
- Rhapsody was slower than classic MacOS on a wide variety of tasks, and unusable for others. The UI was a weird mashup of NeXT and Mac idioms
Note that it took until 2003 or 2004 for Mac OS X to become usable for non-technical end users. OpenStep had a lot of rough edges for non-Unix people; Rhapsody was the (false) start of a _long_ journey. (Ironically, given better engineering management, Apple could have shipped Copland well before then.)