Comment by masklinn
4 years ago
> and IIRC 4.4BSD
4.3, only Rhapsody incorporated elements from 4.4, but that was the tail end of nextstep, essentially the initial preview of macos (it was released as osx server 1.0, then forked to darwin from which the actual OSX 10.0 would be built, two major pieces missing from rhapody were Classic and Carbon, so it really was nextstep with an OS9 skin).
Thanks for the correction, man has it been a long, long time. I had the Public Beta and than got on the OS X train pretty fast on a good old B&W G3. Even with the slowness the multitasking still allowed getting around it and having all Unix right there with a big rush to initial porting was really interesting, good times. I remember calling Apple for help getting Apache compiled and got forwarded right out of the regular call system to some dev whose name I sadly forget and we worked through it.
Everything is a million times more refined and overall better now but I do have a bit of nostalgia for the community and really getting your hands dirty back then while still having a fairly decent fallback. I haven't actually needed to mess with kernel stuff since 10.5 or so but thinking back makes me wonder about paths not taken.
> so it [Rhapsody] really was nextstep with an OS9 skin
Sorry to be pedantic, but Rhapsody's user interface is modeled after the Mac OS 8 "Platinum" design language. Though 9 also was modeled on Platinum, Rhapsody's interface appears nearly identical to Mac OS 8's except for the Workspace Manager which doesn't exist in 8.
Rhapsody was a fairly ugly and distorted copy of the Platinum theme if we’re honest.
Ok, but Rhapsody looks almost exactly like Mac OS 8.