HACKER Q&A
📣 quux

Which came first? OpenStep on PPC? Or the MacOS UI on a NeXT derived OS?


I've been playing with OpenStep in a VM lately and it got me wondering what the transition from OpenStep on Intel/Sparc/NeXT hardware to Rhapsody on PPC was like.

Were there builds of basically stock OpenStep 4.2 running on PPC Macs within Apple on the early days? Were there builds with the Rhapsody UI running on Intel only while the rest of the OS was still being ported? Were these both happening at the same time in the same codebase?

I figure someone on here should have some inside information ;)

  👤 mattl Accepted Answer ✓
When the merger first happened, OPENSTEP 4.0 was out and ran on SPARC, x86 and 68k. There was some effort internally at NeXT to get it running on a PowerPC machine, but not a Mac. NeXT's hardware division was spun off as FirePower Systems, Inc and Canon had a large stake in it (they had a large stake in NeXT too).

First thing Apple did was keep selling OPENSTEP, and let 4.1 and 4.2 come out later in 96/97. I think they even gave copies to developers along with WebObjects and called this "prelude to Rhapsody"

Then Rhapsody came along in various releases. DR1, DR2. This was basically OPENSTEP 5.0 -- OPENSTEP with a semi-Mac UI slapped on it.

Eventually this was released as Mac OS X Server 1.0 (version 1.23 was the last released) and then the Mac OS X Public Beta came along a little while later.