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A Power Macintosh 9600/300 running Rhapsody Developer Release 2

  • First release: October 13, 1997 (Developer Release 1, aka Rhapsody 5.0)
  • Commercial release: Mac OS X Server 1.0 (Rhapsody 5.3), on March 16, 1999
  • Final release: Mac OS X Server 1.2 v3 (Rhapsody 5.6), October 27, 2000

Apple settled on buying NeXT, Inc to acquire their NeXTSTEP operating system as the foundation for a new Macintosh operating system, as it provided the key architectural features needed: preemptive multitasking, multithreading, and protected memory. This new OS was codenamed Rhapsody. Several developer releases were followed by an initial commercial release for server use, called “Mac OS X Server.” Rhapsody replaced the black-and-gray NeXTSTEP user interface with the “platinum” UI originally developed for Copland and used in the publicly-released Mac OS 8 and 9.

Within Rhapsody, Mac OS 8 could be booted in the “Blue Box” environment to allow running classic Mac OS software. Both operating systems can run at the same, but they take the full screen and only one can be visible at a time. However, third-party developers pushed back on Apple, saying that this wasn’t sufficient to support their applications during the transition to the new OS. Apple would refine their strategy for backwards compatibility, naming it Mac OS X.

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