Rhapsody is an operating system that was developed by Apple Computer after its purchase of NeXT in the late 1990s. It is the fifth major release of the Mach-based operating system that was developed at NeXT in the late 1980s, previously called NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP for Mach. Rhapsody was targeted to developers for a transition period between the Classic Mac OS and Mac OS X. Rhapsody represented a new and exploratory strategy for Apple, more than an operating system, and runs on x86-based PCs and on Power Macintosh.

Rhapsody's OPENSTEP for Mach-based Yellow Box API frameworks were ported to Windows NT for creating cross-platform applications. Eventually, the non-Apple platforms were discontinued, and later versions consist primarily of the OpenStep operating system ported to Power Macintosh, merging the Copland-originated GUI of Mac OS 8 with that of OPENSTEP for Mach. Several existing classic Mac OS frameworks were ported, including QuickTime and AppleSearch. Rhapsody can run Mac OS 8 and its applications in a paravirtualization layer called Blue Box for backward compatibility during migration to Mac OS X.

Background

Naming

Rhapsody follows Apple's pattern through the 1990s of music-related codenames for operating system releases (see Rhapsody (music)). Apple had canceled its previous next-generation operating system strategy of Copland (named for American composer, Aaron Copland) and its pre-announced successor Gershwin (named for George Gershwin, composer of Rhapsody in Blue). Other musical code names include Harmony (Mac OS 7.6), Tempo (Mac OS 8), Allegro (Mac OS 8.5), and Sonata (Mac OS 9).

Previous attempts to develop a successor to the Classic Mac OS

In the mid-1990s, Mac OS was falling behind Windows. In 1993, Microsoft had introduced the next-generation Windows NT, which was a processor-independent, multiprocessing and multi-user operating system. At the time, Mac OS was still a single-user OS, and had gained a reputation for being unstable. Apple made several attempts to develop modern replacements for Mac OS, which all failed, harming public confidence in the company, while Macintosh sales continued to decline. Apple's most promising next-generation operating system, Copland, was mismanaged and had to be abandoned in 1996. In response, Apple CEO Gil Amelio decided to acquire or license an already-built operating system from another company. Apple's executive team considered BeOS, NeXT's NeXTSTEP, Sun Microsystems' Solaris, and Windows NT, and eventually acquired NeXT in December 1996.

Announcement

Rhapsody was announced by Gil Amelio at the January 7, 1997 Macworld Expo SF, and first demonstrated at the May 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).<!-- Needs an additional sentence clarifying that Rhapsody was an attempt to merge NeXTSTEP and Mac OS -->

Pitch to developers

At Macworld SF 1997, Steve Jobs said that Mac OS and its Macintosh Toolbox placed developers on the "fifth floor", Windows NT on the "seventh floor", while Rhapsody's OpenStep libraries would let developers start on the "twentieth floor". Jobs argued that this would make it faster to implement existing apps, and would allow even small developer teams to create innovative apps. Additionally, Rhapsody itself could be installed on either PowerPC Macintoshes or Intel x86 PCs, enlarging developers' potential customer base.

Pitch to users

Apple pitched Rhapsody to users by emphasizing its improved stability and responsiveness. For example, on classic Mac OS, incoming faxes could leave the machine frozen until the fax completes; and if an app crashed, it could take down the whole system and require a reboot, potentially leading to data loss. Additionally, Rhapsody would inherit NeXTSTEP's local network sharing functionality, and make it easy to share data across apps. At Macworld SF 1997, Steve Jobs vaunted NeXTSTEP's maturity by pointing out that it had been adopted by many large organizations, including Wall Street banks and the CIA.

Planned transition from Mac OS

Apple's plan was to maintain compatibility with "most" existing Mac OS applications through Blue Box but require apps to be rewritten for Yellow Box to take advantage of Rhapsody's new features. Blue Box would run in a window, and support System 7 apps (Motorola 68k and PowerPC), but would only be able to support apps that did not need to communicate with the hardware. Throughout Rhapsody's development, Apple would continue to release major upgrades to the classic Mac OS, which would remain supported for several years after Rhapsody's public release.

Architecture

thumb|Rhapsody's architectureRhapsody runs on a modified Mach 2.5 kernel and 4.4BSD Unix environment. Atop that were the threaded, object-oriented Yellow Box libraries, the Blue Box compatibility layer for Mac OS applications, and a Java virtual machine.

Yellow Box was later used as the foundation for Mac OS X's Cocoa framework.

Java virtual machine

Rhapsody's Java virtual machine is derived from Sun's JDK 1.1.3, which was modified so that Java apps could call Yellow Box APIs. Rhapsody DR1 included Sun's Java compiler and libraries.

The overall developer reaction to DR1 was positive. BYTE magazine<nowiki/>'s Tom Thompson described DR1 as a "Jekyll-and-Hyde mixture" of an "amazingly Mac-like" user interface and hard-to-use NeXTSTEP components, some of which could only be configured properly through the command line, but said it "did not crash once" during his testing. In Q4 FY1997, quarterly Macintosh sales declined from 932,000 to 625,000 year-over-year, and Apple had an operating loss of $24 million (though it still had $1.45 billion in cash). Shortly before the August 6, 1997 Macworld Expo Boston, Amelio tried to obtain a commitment from Microsoft to release Office for Rhapsody, but Bill Gates refused. Some small developers announced Rhapsody ports of their apps, including Stone Design's Create, Anderson Financial systems' PasteUp, Onyshuk & Associates' Glyphix, OpenBase, and Dantz Development's Retrospect.

Strategy

In a meeting with Michael Dell, owner of PC maker Dell, Steve Jobs demonstrated Rhapsody on Intel x86, and offered to license the operating system to Dell for distribution on its PCs. The deal failed, however, when Jobs insisted that all of its computers ship with both Mac OS and Windows so that consumers could choose the platform they prefer (which would have resulted in Dell having to pay royalties to Apple for every computer it sells), as opposed to Dell's preference that the choice of OS be a factory option.<!-- Clarify this paragraph with more context on Jobs's evolving thoughts on cloning. -->

In mid-1997, after Amelio was ousted as Apple's CEO and Jobs informally replaced him, the company grew quieter on Rhapsody, leading to speculation over its fate. At the October 1997 Seybold publishing conference, Jobs announced that the transition would be more "gradual" than previously announced by Amelio, and would follow a "dual-OS" strategy, with Rhapsody oriented towards servers, followed by a consumer release several years later, imitating Microsoft's Windows NT strategy.

At WWDC 1998 held in May, Apple stated that "not a single" major third-party developer had committed to rewriting their apps for Rhapsody. Apple instead unveiled their Mac OS X strategy: classic Mac OS applications would not need a complete rewrite to run well on the system, which Jobs said could have taken as long as two years; instead, applications could run on Mac OS X with only "minor adjustments". Widely used Mac OS libraries like QuickTime and AppleScript were ported and published to developers. Carbon allows full compatibility and native functionality for both platforms, while enabling new features. Apple also announced that Adobe, Microsoft and Macromedia were on board with the new strategy, and had committed to releasing their applications for Mac OS X.

As part of the landmark Microsoft antitrust trial, Avie Tevanian argued that Rhapsody's failure was partly caused by Windows's dominance, which made new operating system platforms inherently uncompetitive; however, The Register<nowiki/>'s John Lettice argued that "those [Yellow Box] APIs Apple couldn't get developers to support [...] are of course APIs that NeXT couldn't get developers to support". Lettice described Rhapsody as inherently flawed, stating that: "The theory of this school of OS development [that] says you allow users to run their existing apps while making it possible for a whole new generation of compelling apps to take over in the long run" is a strategy that "has not so far worked in practice".

Though developers were expecting Rhapsody DP3, Steve Jobs announced at the July 1998 MacWorld Expo NY that an improved version of Rhapsody would be publicly released as Mac OS X Server 1.0, which would bundle WebObjects, the QuickTime Streaming Server, and an Apache web server.

Legacy

Apple forked Rhapsody into Darwin, an open source operating system that is the foundation for Apple's current commercial operating systems.

Since Rhapsody could run on both PowerPC and Intel x86, some commentators speculated that Apple could be planning to switch the Macintosh from PowerPC to Intel processors. This switch occurred in 2005, with Apple revealing that it had internally tested Intel builds of Mac OS X since the year 2000.

In 2016, historian Hanson Hsu called Steve Jobs's vision for developers "prescient" (Jobs's vision is described in the §Pitch to developers section). Many NeXTSTEP innovations were foundational to Mac OS X, including the Cocoa framework, Interface Builder (which became part of Xcode), and the Objective-C programming language. These technologies attracted many indie developers to the Mac, and are still in use today on the Mac; they were later used on the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, and the Apple TV.

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Notes

References

Bibliography

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  • Shaw's Rhapsody Resource Page
  • Toastytech GUI Gallery — Screenshots of Rhapsody Developer Release 2
  • GUIdebook > Screenshots > Rhapsody DR2 — Screenshots of Rhapsody (Intel version) and its components.
  • "Apple shows off Rhapsody OS" — An article written shortly after Apple first demonstrated Rhapsody.
  • "Overall summary on Apple Rhapsody: A User Overview" — An overview of Rhapsody's technologies.
  • "Rhapsody" at OSData.com — Technical specifications on the operating system.
  • First Impressions On Apple Rhapsody Blue Box, Beta Version 1
  • TidBITS: Yellow Box, Blue Box, Rhapsody & WWDC
  • Cocoa and the Death of Yellow Box and Rhapsody, By Daniel Eran Dilger, 2007-02-19, RoughlyDrafted