Rhapsody is the development series of

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

's next-generation

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

. Targeting only developers for a transition period, its releases came between Apple's purchase of

NeXT Next may refer to: Arts and entertainment Film * ''Next'' (1990 film), an animated short about William Shakespeare * ''Next'' (2007 film), a sci-fi film starring Nicolas Cage * '' Next: A Primer on Urban Painting'', a 2005 documentary film Lit ...

in late 1996 and the announcement of

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

(later renamed macOS) in 1998. Rhapsody represented a new and exploratory strategy for Apple, more than an operating system, and runs on

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introd ...

-based PCs and on

Power Macintosh The Power Macintosh, later Power Mac, is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer as the core of the Macintosh brand from March 1994 until August 2006. Described by ''MacWorld'' as "the most important te ...

. Its OPENSTEP based Yellow Box

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...

frameworks were ported to

Windows NT Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems sc ...

for creating cross-platform applications. Eventually, the non-Apple platforms were discontinued, and later versions consist primarily of the

OPENSTEP OpenStep is a defunct object-oriented application programming interface (API) specification for a legacy object-oriented operating system, with the basic goal of offering a NeXTSTEP-like environment on non-NeXTSTEP operating systems. OpenStep was ...

operating system ported to Power Macintosh, merging the Copland-originated

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

Mac OS 8 Mac OS 8 is an operating system that was released by Apple Computer on July 26, 1997. It includes the largest overhaul of the classic Mac OS experience since the release of System 7, approximately six years before. It places a greater emphasis on ...

with that of OPENSTEP. Several existing

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The ...

frameworks were ported, including

QuickTime QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is avai ...

and

AppleSearch AppleSearch was a client/server search engine from Apple Computer, first released for the classic Mac OS in 1994. AppleSearch was a client/server application, although the vast majority of the logic was located in the server. The server portion ...

. Rhapsody can run Mac OS 8 and its applications in a

paravirtualization In computing, paravirtualization or para-virtualization is a virtualization technique that presents a software interface to the virtual machines which is similar, yet not identical, to the underlying hardware–software interface. The intent o ...

layer called Blue Box for backward compatibility during migration to Mac OS X.

History

After Apple's purchase of NeXT in 1996, Rhapsody was announced at the

MacWorld Expo Macworld/iWorld was an information technology trade show with conference tracks dedicated to the Apple Macintosh platform. It was held annually in the United States during January. Originally ''Macworld Expo'' and then ''Macworld Conference & Expos ...

in San Francisco on January 7, 1997 and first demonstrated at the 1997

Worldwide Developers Conference The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is an information technology conference held annually by Apple Inc. The conference is usually held at Apple Park in California. The event is usually used to showcase new software and technologies in t ...

(WWDC). Subsequent general Developer Releases are for a select set of

and

hardware. Apple announced a "Premier" version akin to what became the

Mac OS X Public Beta The Mac OS X Public Beta (internally code named "Kodiak") was the first publicly available version of Apple Computer's Mac OS X (now named macOS) operating system to feature the Aqua user interface. It was released to the public on September 1 ...

, followed by the full "Unified" version in the second quarter of 1998 which was canceled. Apple's development schedule in integrating the features of two very different systems complicated the forecast of features of upcoming releases. At the 1998

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, industrial designer, media proprietor, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a ...

announced that Rhapsody would be publicly released as

Mac OS X Server 1.0 Mac OS X Server 1.0 is an operating system developed by Apple Computer, Inc. Released on March 16, 1999, it was the first version of Mac OS X Server. It was Apple's first commercial product to be derived from "Rhapsody"—an eventual replacemen ...

, which was shipped in 1999. No home version of Rhapsody was ever released. Its low-level

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

base was forked into Darwin, as the

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

Unix-like foundation of Mac OS X. In a meeting with

Michael Dell Michael Saul Dell (born February 23, 1965) is an American billionaire businessman and philanthropist. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Dell Technologies, one of the world's largest technology infrastructure companies. He is ranked the 2 ...

, owner of PC maker

Dell Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data ...

demonstrated Rhapsody on

, 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.

Design

Rhapsody is defined by a heavily modified "hybrid" OSFMK 7.3 (Open Software Foundation Mach Kernel) from the OSF, a

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

operating system layer (based on

4.4BSD The History of the Berkeley Software Distribution begins in the 1970s. 1BSD (PDP-11) The earliest distributions of Unix from Bell Labs in the 1970s included the source code to the operating system, allowing researchers at universities to modify a ...

), the object-oriented

Yellow Box ''Eucalyptus melliodora'', commonly known as yellow box, honey box or yellow ironbark, is a species of medium-sized to occasionally tall tree that is endemic to south-eastern, continental Australia. It has rough, flaky or fibrous bark on part o ...

API framework, the

Blue Box A blue box is an electronic device that produces tones used to generate the in-band signaling tones formerly used within the North American long-distance telephone network to send line status and called number information over voice circuits. ...

compatibility environment for "classic" Mac OS applications, and a

Java Virtual Machine A Java virtual machine (JVM) is a virtual machine that enables a computer to run Java programs as well as programs written in other languages that are also compiled to Java bytecode. The JVM is detailed by a specification that formally describes ...

. The user interface was modeled after

's "Platinum" appearance, which had originated with the canceled Copland prototype. Developer Release 1 (DR1) does not have Mac OS's Finder, and has

's Workspace Manager, Shelf, and column view. The Shelf was eliminated in favor of OPENSTEP's

Dock A dock (from Dutch language, Dutch ''dok'') is the area of water between or next to one or a group of human-made structures that are involved in the handling of boats or ships (usually on or near a shore) or such structures themselves. The ex ...

; and Finder was added, inheriting column view. Rhapsody's Blue Box environment, available only on

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

due to

, provides runtime compatibility with Mac OS 8 applications. All virtualized applications and their associated windows are encapsulated within a single Blue Box desktop window instead of being interspersed with native Yellow Box applications. To avoid the pitfalls of running within Blue Box and take full advantage of Rhapsody's features, software must be rewritten for Yellow Box. Yellow Box is a superset of OPENSTEP, with an object-oriented model completely unlike the

procedural programming Procedural programming is a programming paradigm, derived from imperative programming, based on the concept of the ''procedure call''. Procedures (a type of routine or subroutine) simply contain a series of computational steps to be carried ...

model typical of Blue Box software. The large difference between the two frameworks require significant developer effort. The consequent lack of adoption and objections by developers, including

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the crea ...

and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

, became major factors in Apple's decision to cancel Rhapsody in 1998. Most of Yellow Box and other Rhapsody technologies became the

Cocoa API Cocoa is Apple's native object-oriented application programming interface (API) for its desktop operating system macOS. Cocoa consists of the Foundation Kit, Application Kit, and Core Data frameworks, as included by the Cocoa.h header file, and ...

. Bowing to developers' wishes, Apple also ported existing classic Mac OS frameworks into Mac OS X and developed the cross-platform Carbon API for Mac OS 9 and X as the transition layer. Widely used Mac OS libraries like

and

AppleScript AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. that facilitates automated control over scriptable Mac applications. First introduced in System 7, it is currently included in all versions of macOS as part of a package of system automa ...

were ported and published to developers. Carbon allows full compatibility and native functionality for both platforms, while enabling new features.

Name

Rhapsody Rhapsody may refer to: * A work of epic poetry, or part of one, that is suitable for recitation at one time ** Rhapsode, a classical Greek professional performer of epic poetry Computer software * Rhapsody (online music service), an online m ...

follows Apple's pattern through the 1990s of music-related

codename A code name, call sign or cryptonym is a Code word (figure of speech), code word or name used, sometimes clandestinely, to refer to another name, word, project, or person. Code names are often used for military purposes, or in espionage. They may ...

s for operating system releases. Apple had canceled its previous next-generation operating system strategy of Copland (named for

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

composer,

Aaron Copland Aaron Copland (, ; November 14, 1900December 2, 1990) was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later a conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as "the Dean of American Com ...

) and its pre-announced successor Gershwin (named for

George Gershwin George Gershwin (; born Jacob Gershwine; September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937) was an American composer and pianist whose compositions spanned popular, jazz and classical genres. Among his best-known works are the orchestral compositions ' ...

, composer of ''

Rhapsody in Blue ''Rhapsody in Blue'' is a 1924 musical composition written by George Gershwin for solo piano and jazz band, which combines elements of classical music with jazz-influenced effects. Commissioned by bandleader Paul Whiteman, the work premiered i ...

''). Other musical code names include Harmony (

Mac OS 7.6 System 7, codenamed "Big Bang", and also known as Mac OS 7, is a graphical user interface-based operating system for Macintosh computers and is part of the classic Mac OS series of operating systems. It was introduced on May 13, 1991, by Apple ...

), Tempo (

), Allegro (

Mac OS 8.5 Mac OS 8 is an operating system that was released by Apple Computer on July 26, 1997. It includes the largest overhaul of the classic Mac OS experience since the release of System 7, approximately six years before. It places a greater emphasis ...

), and Sonata (

Mac OS 9 Mac OS 9 is the ninth major release of Apple Inc., Apple's classic Mac OS operating system which was succeeded by macOS, Mac OS X (renamed to OS X in 2011 and macOS in 2016) in 2001. Introduced on October 23, 1999, it was promoted by Apple as "T ...

Release history

References

External links

NeXT Archive
->

— Screenshots of Rhapsody Developer Release 2
GUIdebook > Screenshots > Rhapsody DR2
— Screenshots of Rhapsody (Intel version) and its components.

— An article written shortly after Apple first demonstrated Rhapsody.

— An overview of Rhapsody's technologies.

— Technical specifications on the operating system.
First Impressions On Apple Rhapsody Blue Box, Beta Version 1TidBITS: Yellow Box, Blue Box, Rhapsody & WWDC
By Daniel Eran Dilger, 2007-02-19, RoughlyDrafted {{DEFAULTSORT:Rhapsody (Operating System) Apple Inc. operating systems Berkeley Software Distribution MacOS Mach (kernel) Discontinued operating systems