Rhapsody blues as Apple favours OS X
Software Changes are afoot as Apple overhauls its operating system.
Apple's much hyped Rhapsody operating system will be ditched before it is even launched, in a major overhaul of the company's operating systems strategy.
At the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference in San Jose last week, interim CEO Steve Jobs announced that yet-to-ship Rhapsody OS will be replaced by Mac OS X, an operating system based on the same kernel as Rhapsody but with most of the programming interfaces of the original Mac OS.
This will make it simpler to port applications to the system and may help Apple in its bid to keep software developers loyal to the Mac architecture, even as they are lured to the lower risk delights of Windows.
Apple will rework Rhapsody to support natively about 6,000 of the 8,000 application programming interfaces (APIs) in Mac OS, Jobs told a crowd of developers at the conference. The remaining APIs must be discarded, he said, to allow support for long-awaited features like memory protection, advanced virtual memory and pre-emptive multitasking. The ported Mac OS 8 APIs, combined with additional ones, will be codenamed Carbon.
Porting applications from Mac OS 8 to Carbon will require no more than a tune-up Jobs claimed, typically taking no more than one or two months.
For many years, Apple has been promising a next generation operating system with features such as protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking.
A first attempt, codenamed Copeland, was ditched in 1996 after years of delays, when Apple decided to acquire Steve Jobs' company Next Software.
Early last year, Apple announced a plan to build a next generation OS for the Mac that was based on Next's Nextstep. The system, codenamed Rhapsody, would run existing applications using an emulation mode called Blue Box, while new applications would have to be written to a different API set, the Yellow Box. To take advantage of features such as protected memory, developers would be forced to rewrite their applications to address Yellow Box.
But Apple was never able to convince Macintosh developers to port their applications to the Yellow Box, creating the prospect of an OS without native applications to take advantage of it.
This forced Apple to change course yet again. Last year, the manufacturer had already started to reposition Rhapsody as a server operating system rather than a replacement for Mac OS and said it would continue to develop Mac OS 8 in parallel.
Mac OS X, with the Mach microkernel of Rhapsody but most of the APIs from Mac OS, will make it easier for developers to port their applications.
But some porting will be needed. The new operating system will use the Blue Box to run existing Mac OS applications unchanged. These existing applications will not benefit from the operating system's new features.
The approach that Apple has chosen is similar to the migration path Microsoft designed to bring users from 16-bit Windows 3.11 to 32-bit Windows 95.
Windows 95 allowed new applications to benefit from features such as pre-emptive multitasking, while continuing to run existing applications.
Avie Tevanian, Apple senior vice president of software engineering, admitted that software developers had not been prepared to port Mac applications to Yellow Box. 'Developers didn't want to rewrite their applications to take advantage of (Yellow Box),' he said. 'Some developers like it a lot because of the things they can do (with it). But developers of the 12,000 existing applications don't care.'
Tevanian said the Yellow Box - which runs on top of Windows NT as well as Rhapsody - will continue to be supported on Mac OS X. But it will clearly have lower priority than Carbon.
Analysts suggested the move would help to prevent more Mac developers from abandoning the platform. Chris Le Tocq, analyst at Dataquest, said: 'This is some masterful repositioning by Steve Jobs. The Mac OS is now called System 8 and Rhapsody is now called Mac OS.' He added that while the next generation OS itself will now ship later than expected, it will at least ship with a lot more applications.
Jobs outlined a roadmap for Apple's operating systems, following Apple shipping Mac OS 8.1 in January. This will be followed in the third quarter by Mac OS 8.5, codenamed Allegro.
The first quarter of 1999 will see the release of Mac OS 8.6, and in the third quarter Apple will follow up with a release code-named Sonata.
Meanwhile, Rhapsody 1.0 will ship in the third quarter. It will be oriented towards the internet and multimedia server market and will be replaced by Mac OS X when that comes out, probably in the third quarter of 1999.
A first beta of Mac OS X will be shipped in the first quarter of 1999.
It is not yet clear at what point in the future the Mac OS 8 line will be superseded by Mac OS X.