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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/

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com2kid 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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wmf 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	Lammy 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> 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...

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pjmlp 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Rhapsody will have superb support for Java. Apple has decided that Java is a very important part of their future and has devoted significant resources to integrating it into Rhapsody. In his keynote speech, Avie Tevanian said that "Java is Apple's biggest opportunity." I found the Java information to be some of the most interesting and pleasantly surprising news to come out of the conference.

And it did for a while, this always felt like a Plan B, in case Mac OS developer community bread with Object Pascal and C++, would not accept Objective-C.

As soon as they got the message that Objective-C was being fully embraced by the developer community, Java bridge was dragged behind the barn and shot.

And then a whole decade was spent looking for a successor to Objective-C.

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marcus0x62 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> As Jobs said in his chat, "we put a gun to their heads and shot them dead". (I'm paraphrasing Jobs here, but he said something close to that - it was equally brutal, anyway.) Say good-bye to PowerTalk, OpenDoc, Copland, and their ilk. Good riddance, I say.

At least one man was very upset with this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

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SllX 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Plenty of people were but Apple was on a path to bankruptcy. Turning that around meant killing some stuff and letting some people go. Some of that was stuff that people outside of Apple liked, but part of Apple’s problem was that they hadn’t been putting Apple first in their list of priorities, and they really needed to.

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linguae 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I like to think of Apple as an unfocused fount of innovation during its "interregnum" years (1985-1996). There were many interesting projects that came out of Apple during this time, including (but not limited to) Pink/Taligent, SK8, A/UX, Newton, OpenDoc, and Dylan. As a major fan of the contributions that Xerox PARC made to the world, it's really cool to think of an alternate timeline where Apple leapfrogged even NeXT when it came to developing an operating system that combined the best 1990s research in operating systems and programming languages with Apple's experience developing usable, pleasant interfaces. Just imagine the ideas of OpenDoc combined with a very flexible object-oriented language like Common Lisp or Dylan to create a component-based system that is essentially a Lisp machine running on mid-1990s Power Macintoshes with a Macintosh interface. I personally think many of these concepts should be revisited today, especially in the free, open-source software world, but updated to reflect modern concerns such as security and the Web.

But an Apple built on those ideas wasn't meant to be; Apple lacked a coherent vision and leadership willing to carry out that vision, which led to epic failures in project management (Pink/Taligent and Copland come to mind) that helped contribute to Apple's dire situation in 1996 when it was fighting to stay alive.

Steve Jobs brought not only a vision for Apple (the marriage of the Macintosh user interface with OPENSTEP technology), but he also enforced this vision. This led to the death of Newton, OpenDoc, and many other technologies. However, this led to the birth of Mac OS X and compelling Apple hardware, which helped revive Apple and helped pave the way for Apple's inroads into consumer electronics (e.g., the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad). For a long time Mac OS X, in my opinion, was heads and shoulders better than its competitors on the desktop, and even today macOS is my favorite of the mainstream desktops.

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dhosek 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I remember that there was the potential of a Mac-OS/2 merger through Taligent and as someone who had a Mac on one desk and an OS/2 machine on the other I was really hoping this would happen.

	▲	linguae 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't know if this is the same thing, but you may be interested in this failed project from IBM in the 1990s that attempted to leverage Taligent and OS/2 to create a universal operating system that used a microkernel and was capable of presenting different UI and programmatic "personalities." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_OS

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mistrial9 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The Apple and NeXT engineering teams are merging effectively

ho ho ho, right there is the doooooo r