OS X on Intel reported 9 years ago
I thought everyone would appreciate the time that has gone by before this story became reality.
Back when OS X was barely on the drawing board and known as "Rhapsody," Apple CEO Gil Amelio hinted that Apple was planning a long term strategy to make the new OS portable across systems, allowing it to become the de facto standard of the industry.
From MacSense, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2/25/97
To give you some perspective, in the same issue of MacSense (a very good ezine which ended that year, btw), the new PowerMac line was previewed. $1700 would buy you a single 200Mhz 603e machine on the lowest end and $4700 would get a dual 200Mhz 604e machine on the highest end. Both shipped with Systen 7.5.5, prompting one to think if two processors was really worth it on an OS that didn't support it.
Rhapsody was supposed to though, and that was coming out soon, wasn't it??
Back when OS X was barely on the drawing board and known as "Rhapsody," Apple CEO Gil Amelio hinted that Apple was planning a long term strategy to make the new OS portable across systems, allowing it to become the de facto standard of the industry.
From MacSense, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2/25/97
Quote:
Rhapsody for Intel PCs?
Apple has worked hard to put the kibosh on rumors that it was about to cave and offer a line of NT computers. To the contrary! Apple may offer Rhapsody for Intel machines while keeping its main focus on the PowerPC platform.
Reportedly, Apple's new Senior Vice President Avadis Tevanian (formerly of NeXT) and AppleSoft Marketing Vice President Jim Gable say a version of Rhapsody could be offered for Intel-based PC's as well as Macs. Rhapsody may even be offered for other platforms?such as Sun?at a later date.
Putting some perspective on the matter is a San Francisco Examiner interview (2-9) with Dr. Gil Amelio, Apple?s chairman and CEO. Amelio was asked, point blank, if he were contemplating moving Apple software into the Intel world.
?If you're in my shoes you want multiple sources of supply where your business is not held captive by one supplier or one technology,? Amelio is quoted as saying. ?Today the Mac OS is not a portable operating system. It's woven very tightly into the hardware. But if you could get a next generation operating system that was portable, that would be the very smart thing to do. If I have a portable OS that could run on PowerPC, Pentium, MIPS, Alpha, all of those chips, that gives us alternatives we don't have. What if Motorola and IBM stopped making PowerPC chips? This gives me a contingency plan. Now does that mean we abandon the PowerPC chip? Heck no. We'd be foolish to. We have a lot of customers with PowerPC chips and we're going to support them. But I do look forward to the possibility, a year or two downstream, where I could come up with products based on different processors.?
Mac Daily Journal (2-10), which usually offers exemplary analyses of Mac events, says Apple could ship different versions of Rhapsody. One, a Rhapsody based on NeXT's current OPENSTEP/Mach for Intel could include a "Yellow Box" OPENSTEP layer, the Rhapsody interface (whatever it turns out to be), and the Mach microkernel. This would probably be the first Intel variety of Rhapsody.
MDJ says there could also conceivably be a Rhapsody based on OPENSTEP for Windows NT (and/or Windows 95). Such a Rhapsody (or Rhapsodies) would probably include only the Yellow Box and let the Windows OS handle file system, memory management, and other low-level services. Should Apple make a variety of Rhapsodies available, MDJ says "it's very easy to see a day when developers write Rhapsody software by default because it's easier and it works everywhere."
After reviewing numerous reports and articles, MacSense?s conclusion is that the Yellow Box of Rhapsody (the ?native? part that isn?t backwards compatible with System 7.x) will probably evolve into a portable OS available in either PowerPC or Intel "flavors." Don?t look for such a creature until months after the complete Rhapsody (with both Yellow and Blue boxes) appears for the PowerPC line. (Although at least one NeXT engineer tells us PowerPC and Intel versions could well appear simultaneously.)
-- Dennis Sellers
Rhapsody for Intel PCs?
Apple has worked hard to put the kibosh on rumors that it was about to cave and offer a line of NT computers. To the contrary! Apple may offer Rhapsody for Intel machines while keeping its main focus on the PowerPC platform.
Reportedly, Apple's new Senior Vice President Avadis Tevanian (formerly of NeXT) and AppleSoft Marketing Vice President Jim Gable say a version of Rhapsody could be offered for Intel-based PC's as well as Macs. Rhapsody may even be offered for other platforms?such as Sun?at a later date.
Putting some perspective on the matter is a San Francisco Examiner interview (2-9) with Dr. Gil Amelio, Apple?s chairman and CEO. Amelio was asked, point blank, if he were contemplating moving Apple software into the Intel world.
?If you're in my shoes you want multiple sources of supply where your business is not held captive by one supplier or one technology,? Amelio is quoted as saying. ?Today the Mac OS is not a portable operating system. It's woven very tightly into the hardware. But if you could get a next generation operating system that was portable, that would be the very smart thing to do. If I have a portable OS that could run on PowerPC, Pentium, MIPS, Alpha, all of those chips, that gives us alternatives we don't have. What if Motorola and IBM stopped making PowerPC chips? This gives me a contingency plan. Now does that mean we abandon the PowerPC chip? Heck no. We'd be foolish to. We have a lot of customers with PowerPC chips and we're going to support them. But I do look forward to the possibility, a year or two downstream, where I could come up with products based on different processors.?
Mac Daily Journal (2-10), which usually offers exemplary analyses of Mac events, says Apple could ship different versions of Rhapsody. One, a Rhapsody based on NeXT's current OPENSTEP/Mach for Intel could include a "Yellow Box" OPENSTEP layer, the Rhapsody interface (whatever it turns out to be), and the Mach microkernel. This would probably be the first Intel variety of Rhapsody.
MDJ says there could also conceivably be a Rhapsody based on OPENSTEP for Windows NT (and/or Windows 95). Such a Rhapsody (or Rhapsodies) would probably include only the Yellow Box and let the Windows OS handle file system, memory management, and other low-level services. Should Apple make a variety of Rhapsodies available, MDJ says "it's very easy to see a day when developers write Rhapsody software by default because it's easier and it works everywhere."
After reviewing numerous reports and articles, MacSense?s conclusion is that the Yellow Box of Rhapsody (the ?native? part that isn?t backwards compatible with System 7.x) will probably evolve into a portable OS available in either PowerPC or Intel "flavors." Don?t look for such a creature until months after the complete Rhapsody (with both Yellow and Blue boxes) appears for the PowerPC line. (Although at least one NeXT engineer tells us PowerPC and Intel versions could well appear simultaneously.)
-- Dennis Sellers
To give you some perspective, in the same issue of MacSense (a very good ezine which ended that year, btw), the new PowerMac line was previewed. $1700 would buy you a single 200Mhz 603e machine on the lowest end and $4700 would get a dual 200Mhz 604e machine on the highest end. Both shipped with Systen 7.5.5, prompting one to think if two processors was really worth it on an OS that didn't support it.
Rhapsody was supposed to though, and that was coming out soon, wasn't it??
Comments
Essentially, YellowBox was just Cocoa for Windows. You would write an app using the Cocoa API, and could compile it for PPC, and run it on a Mac, or compile it for Intel, and run it on Windows. Same app, same code.
Universal binaries are *kind* of like that, in that they allow you to run on multiple chip architectures, but YellowBox is still MIA.
Originally posted by troberts
I am not familiar with YellowBox (and BlueBox?), but would it have operated the same way that Virtual PC does, a window opens containing the Mac desktop?
The YellowBox evolved out of OpenSTEP and into Cocoa. On Windows NT, a YellowBox application would have looked just like any other Windows application. The BlueBox morphed into Classic. It would have run exclusively on Apple hardware. IIRC, the BlueBox would have been slightly less integrated with Rhapsody than Classic is with MacOS X. In neither case would there be any emulation involved. The YellowBox running on the Mac would run PPC code. On Windows NT, it would have run Intel code. The BlueBox as I said before was to be exclusive to the Mac.
Originally posted by JeffDM
I thought Rhapsody as an OS was project abandoned when they went the NeXT route.
No, that was Copland. Rhapsody is OS X. Just the code name for it before it was finished. Like Longhorn was the codename for Vista.
It wouldn't shock me if this is a surprise feature of Leopard and is announced at WWDC, although Apple may want to wait until the intel transition is finished first.
Also, to support this theory, lots of Apple code is already ported to windows for iTunes, including QuickTime media handling, Webkit for rendering the iTunes store, and some other data handling/syncing functions.
another and another
Originally posted by Xool
I expect that like the Mac OS X intel builds, YellowBox is alive and kicking in some secret dark Apple lab. Deploying cocoa for Windows and Linux would really encourage developers to write apps for it since they'd now be cross-platform (the intel compiler was required for this), but also it could increase Mac adoption since you'd probably need a Mac to write the apps, even though the could run elsewhere.
A lot of people say this but don't think that such a thing could backfire if, say, Cocoa apps could run on Windows and Windows developers kept coding in the languages they know best using the frameworks they know best (ie...not Obj-C nor Cocoa)...then Windows would have access to all the great OS X apps and Mac OS X would be left with nothing.
It's a risk that Apple doesn't want to take, IMO.
It wouldn't shock me if this is a surprise feature of Leopard and is announced at WWDC, although Apple may want to wait until the intel transition is finished first.
Doubtful.
Also, to support this theory, lots of Apple code is already ported to windows for iTunes, including QuickTime media handling, Webkit for rendering the iTunes store, and some other data handling/syncing functions.
iTunes and QuickTime is about it. WebKit isn't used to render the iTunes Music Store.
Although I haven't checked if WebCore can compile correctly on Win32 platforms, I know the Safari team has only recently begun to clean the code up for it to become platform agnostic.
Originally posted by Gene Clean
Damn that's ugly.
It's pretty nominal 1990's interface fare.
Originally posted by Xool
I expect that like the Mac OS X intel builds, YellowBox is alive and kicking in some secret dark Apple lab. Deploying cocoa for Windows and Linux would really encourage developers to write apps for it since they'd now be cross-platform (the intel compiler was required for this), but also it could increase Mac adoption since you'd probably need a Mac to write the apps, even though the could run elsewhere.
Before WebObjects 5.3, Yellow Box for Windows was shipped with WebObjects since the development tools on the Windows side were "Cocoa" applications. WebObjects 5.3 dropped development support on non-Mac OS X platforms, so that's no longer the case.
Click here for Louzer prediction
See the third post down from the top.
Originally posted by Phong
I thought everyone would appreciate the time that has gone by before this story became reality.
Back when OS X was barely on the drawing board and known as "Rhapsody," Apple CEO Gil Amelio hinted that Apple was planning a long term strategy to make the new OS portable across systems, allowing it to become the de facto standard of the industry.
From MacSense, Volume 4, Issue 1, 2/25/97
To give you some perspective, in the same issue of MacSense (a very good ezine which ended that year, btw), the new PowerMac line was previewed. $1700 would buy you a single 200Mhz 603e machine on the lowest end and $4700 would get a dual 200Mhz 604e machine on the highest end. Both shipped with Systen 7.5.5, prompting one to think if two processors was really worth it on an OS that didn't support it.
Rhapsody was supposed to though, and that was coming out soon, wasn't it??
Originally posted by Placebo
It's pretty nominal 1990's interface fare.
It reminds me of today's Solaris. Max's Platinum theme is better than this.
Originally posted by TednDi
on another note Gil amelio and Steve Woz just started another corp for the express purpose of acquiring another business. I wonder which business it will be and if it will be in the spirit of the NEXT acquisition.
Wow, really? Can you link us to a story?