Wise on Tech » Apple

Apple’s Pippin Game System booting to Marathon

Jonathan Wise — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 00:41:53 +0000

One of Apple's dazzling failures, the Pippin @World or Atmark, produced by Bandai (the Power Rangers people) and briefly by Katz Media, was to be a TV set-top box/game system with Internet connectivity. It was a barely disguised PowerPC-based Mac, with modified (ruggedized) ADB ports, and flash memory in place of a hard drive. It ran a modified version of Mac OS 7.5.2 which was contained, in its entirety, on each game CD.

Here's a Pippin booting to the classic Bungie game, Marathon...

Apple’s Prototype Copland OS Booting

Jonathan Wise — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 00:38:45 +0000

This was intended to be Mac OS 8, a microkernel (called NuKernel) based OS that would finally modernize Apple's aging technology stack. It failed, although several of its user-oriented components made their way into later versions of the OS (both Classic and OS X).

This is booting off a PowerMac 7600/66 AV, but connected to a Dell LCD monitor so you don't have to see the refresh. It boots to the "Z Theme" which was a little silly. During start-up you can see a very unique splash animation, and various hardware being identified and initialized.

Copland was to contain a "blue box" emulation layer for classic Mac apps -- a concept that would later be re-used as "Classic" in Mac OS X -- while next-generation apps would be optimized for the PowerPC CPU.

Installing Rhapsody DR2 on VMWare

Jonathan Wise — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 04:04:07 +0000

Between the acquisition of NeXT by Apple in the late 90s, and the release of OS X, Apple tried and abandoned a path to merge the two company's technologies into a new, modern OS. Ultimately, a similar but different path was chosen, where much of the proprietary technology that made OpenStep expensive (specifically Adobe-licensed PostScript) were re-created, and better compatibility (introducing Carbon into the Classic OS to give developers an easier migration path than the hard and fast change to Yellowbox) with existing Mac applications was provided for.

Nonetheless, what amounts to an experiment: Rhapsody, essentially the NeXTStep/OpenStep OS with Mac interface elements bolted onto it (sometimes), was incredibly interesting. Yellowbox was to represent the new app platform (with built-in multi-architecture support) while the Bluebox, for compatibility with Classic Mac apps was to be added before release.

~~Shortly I will outline instructions here for getting Rhapsody DR2 (x86) up and running in VMWare~~. OK, it turns out this process is exactly the same as for installing NextStep. In case it wasn't obvious, these two OSes are very closely related.