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De Sound on Sound magazine
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Apr03/a ... 09dbe7a386
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Rhapsody In A Blue Box ? The History Of OS X
Amazingly, plans were originally being discussed for the next generation of the Mac operating system back in 1994 ? nearly a decade ago! This successor to the-then System 7.0 was codenamed Copland, and was an incredibly ambitious project that eventually proved to be too ambitious. It was eventually scrapped in 1996.
So began Apple's lengthy search for a new OS. Rumour has it that their first port of call was Be, a company founded by former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee, whose media-orientated operating system, BeOS, ran on both Intel and PowerPC processors ? but this deal never happened. Apple's next move surprised everyone; just before Christmas 1996, they purchased Next, the computer company founded by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1985, after he had been ousted from Apple. The $425 million deal brought Apple full circle, seeing Jobs return to Apple, first as an advisor to the CEO, Gil Amelio, and later as his replacement when Amelio resigned in July 1997, days before the company released Mac OS 8.
While Next had started off as a computer company in a similar mould to Apple, their famously cube-shaped computer hardware had never been terribly successful. However, the UNIX-based operating system and development tools Next created, known as NextStep and OpenStep respectively, were technically brilliant, and had attracted many developers.
NextStep was an operating system based on the Mach kernel. A kernel is basically the low-level foundation on which an operating system is built, and in NextStep, the Mach kernel provided such features as advanced multitasking and memory management facilities behind a version of the widely used BSD Unix distribution. OpenStep, on the other hand, was an advanced object-orientated programming interface, ideal for rapid application development, and was originally designed to be independent of the computer on which it was implemented.
The challenge for Apple was therefore to get NextStep and OpenStep running on the Mac, and to use these technologies in creating the next-generation Mac operating system, which was codenamed Rhapsody. A preview of Rhapsody was shown to developers in 1997, and the company expected to have the product shipping to customers by the middle of 1998. However, there was just one problem ? the attitude towards Rhapsody of the existing Mac development community, including companies like Adobe and Macromedia, was lukewarm at best.
In terms of its architecture, Rhapsody consisted of what was known as a Yellow Box and a Blue Box. The Yellow Box provided all the advanced features of the operating system, but existing Mac applications would have to be completely reengineered to work in this mode, which would have been costly to manufacturers. The Blue Box gave compatibility to existing Mac OS applications, but without any of the benefits ? so while any Mac application would theoretically run in the Blue Box, such an application would look and perform the same way it had always done. In 1998, a year after showing a preview of Rhapsody, Apple revised their operating system strategy into what we now know as OS X, and hoped to have it shipping by late 1999.
In many ways, OS X wasn't all that different to Rhapsody, but Apple had a cunning plan to woo developers, called Carbon. The interface a computer program uses to communicate with an operating system (or another computer program, for that matter) is known as the Application Programming Interface, abbreviated as just API. Carbon is basically a streamlined implementation in OS X of the most common API calls used by applications running on the original Mac OS. Although existing applications would still have to be tweaked slightly to run on OS X ? a process Apple dubbed Carbonisation ? it would take larger developers months, rather than years, to make the necessary changes.
Crucially, even though the Carbonised code would be quite similar to the original, Carbonised applications would be able to take advantage of all OS X's advanced features, and able to run almost as efficiently as those applications developed for the Yellow Box. Carbon provided the ideal halfway solution to encourage existing developers to support Apple's new operating system, and the Yellow and Blue boxes became known as Cocoa and Classic.
1999 saw the release of Mac OS 9 to bridge the gap between Mac OS 8 and X, although Apple did ship what would have been Rhapsody in the guise of Mac OS X Server, which, with the UNIX-based core of the technology acquired from Next, was ideal for turning ordinary desktop Macs into powerful servers. A public beta of OS X went on sale for $30 in September 2000, and the first release version (10.0) finally hit the shelves on March 24 2001.
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