Rhapsody
At the 1997 World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), Apple demonstrated an early build of Rhapsody, a version of NEXTSTEP that ran on Macintosh hardware. With NeXT’s experience porting the system to multiple hardware architectures, it was easy enough for Apple to get a build up and running on a single Mac model in time for the conference. The development community was invigorated as an ambitious project plan was announced that would supposedly lead to a release in 1998 of a new Mac OS for the PowerPC and Intel platforms.
As part of the project plan, three major components were announced: the Yellow Box , which would run OpenStep-based applications on top of Rhapsody; the Blue Box , which would run a future version of the classic Mac OS as a Rhapsody process; and the Red Box , which would allow OpenStep applications to run on top of Windows with a simple recompile.
Rhapsody brought the integration of the following technologies into the current Mac OS X:
- Classic
With the outgrowth of the Blue Box, Classic allows older Mac applications to run unmodified under the new operating system. Essentially an operating system running within a process, it doesn’t confer all the advantages of a protected-memory preemptive system to the applications running within it. If an application crashes inside Classic, it can corrupt any other applications also running in Classic. However, Classic allows the old and new operating systems to run at once with the same screen, mouse, and a modicum of ...