Rhapsody

Rhapsody is the code name given to Apple Computer's next-generation operating system during the period of its development between Apple's purchase of NeXT in late 1996 and the announcement of Mac OS X in 1998.

«Rhapsody was a short-lived operating system, a missing piece linking both classic Mac OS and NeXTSTEP and eventually evolving into Mac OS X.»

"In December of 1996 Apple announced that it had acquired NeXT Software (formerly NeXT Computer). NeXT was best known for it's computers and innovative software (including the NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP operating system, Enterprise Objects and WebObjects development tools). At the time OPENSTEP 4.1 was the current version of the NeXT operating system.

The plan was to try to bring the Mac look and feel to the underlying development platform of OPENSTEP. The result was a fifth version of what was now Apple's operating system. This new OS was given (yet again) a new name, Rhapsody. The first version (5.0) was made mainly from OPENSTEP and had the main goal of working out the bugs of a port to PowerPC. Because of it's close relation to OPENSTEP some apps worked on the Intel version of Rhapsody 5.0 without needing any rewriting at all."

"Over the next four years, the NeXTSTEP operating system was ported to the PowerPC architecture, and the Intel version and the OpenStep Enterprise toolkit for Windows were kept in sync. The operating systems were code-named Rhapsody, while the toolkit for development on all platforms was given the moniker Yellow Box. Apple added many of their facilities and tools to Rhapsody, including QuickTime and ColorSync. For backwards compatibility, Apple added the Blue Box to the Mac version of Rhapsody; this allowed existing Mac applications to be run in a self-contained environment.

Historically, Rhapsody 5.1 (aka Rhapsody Developer Release 2) is best known not as a developer tool, but as the last Apple OS (besides Darwin) to run on Intel based hardware. The reason for this is that Apple scrapped the Rhapsody 1.0 (aka Rhapsody 5.2) public release when the company started working on Carbon and started the Mac OS X project.

Rhapsody was first demonstrated at the 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). There were two subsequent general Developer Releases for computers with Intel x86 or PowerPC processors. The full version was intended for release in spring of 1998.

"I assume that there have been seven versions of Rhapsody, version 5.0 through 5.6 (eight if you count both versions of Rhapsody 5.6), but I have never seen Rhapsody 5.2. This was to be the first public release, but was pulled by Apple at the last minute when they turned their energies towards the Mac OS X project."

At the 1998 MacWorld Expo in New York, Steve Jobs announced that Rhapsody would be released as Mac OS X Server 1.0.

1999: Rhapsody Server 1.0 (aka Rhapsody 5.3) was renamed Mac OS X Server 1.0 to reflect the new direction. More notably, the Intel versions were dropped from the Rhapsody line completely. All versions of Rhapsody after 5.1 (5.3 - 5.6) would be restricted to Apple hardware.

Two years later, a consumer version was released as Mac OS X 10.0. The server version was brought into sync soon after. The OpenStep toolkit was renamed from Yellow Box to Cocoa. Rhapsody's Blue Box was re-named Classic Environment.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT
http://www.rhapsodyos.org/

Related:
NeXT
Operating Systems

---