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

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.

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.

“Many have asked ‘Why are you doing this? There’s not much demand for new VIC-20 software.’ It was the challenge of creating a bridge between the past and present. It’s amazing how far technology has progressed in the past 30 years. The software runs from a cassette tape on an unexpanded VIC-20 with only 5 KB of RAM and a processor that runs at 1 MHz,” commented Syd Bolton, Curator of the Personal Computer Museum.

To put this in perspective, an average PC today runs at 3000 MHz and contains 2,097,152 KB. That means the average computer today has 419,430 times the memory power and 3000 times the speed of a personal computer from the 80’s.
The museum created a software platform for many vintage computers to be able to "tweet" (called "TweetVER" which is short for Tweeting from a Vintage ComputER). For those who would like a copy of the software program, visit the museum’s website http://www.pcmuseum.ca for information.

OS/2 was supposed to be the next DOS, developed in co-operation between Microsoft and IBM. Microsoft dropped their end of the deal when Windows 3.0 gained popularity. For awhile, and because they'd shared APIs, IBM was able to run Windows apps within OS/2 Warp, but the compatibility plan wasn't really in their best interests.
IBM did go on to continue to improve on OS/2 with Warp coming out in 1994 -- before Windows 95 was out, adding pre-emptive multi-tasking, improved memory management, and a solid networking stack. But by then Microsoft's FUD was in effect, and most consumers waited for the next version of Windows.
OS/2 did hold a fair bit of ground in banking and in embedded systems (like ATMs) and although its no longer supported by IBM, a product called eCommstation continues its development and technologies.

Alas, it does not work in VMWare, as they long ago decided support wasn't worth it. Works fine in VirtualPC, however. This guy has some tips, and you can copy the floppy images right off the CD and use them (without conversion) in VirtualPC.
Once I gave up on VMWare (won't boot past the second floppy, no matter how I configured the VM) this was one of the easier virtual machines I've built. Video was decent at SVGA, sound worked pretty well (the installer likes making funky noises.) Still messing with networking.

Hit the jump for some screen shots...

The Floppy part of the install requires 3 disks that you can make (or copy) from the CD.

Once you're in the GUI, you can set-up your hardware.

The installer takes a few minutes, and makes random happy sounds while doing it.

The Warp Guide annoyingly tells you about every part of every dialog. You can turn this off!

The OS/2 Warp Menu. Look familiar, maybe?

When Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple, he set out to create a new company that would deliver elite hardware, and a revolutionary operating system. NeXT was started to build powerful hardware and software that would leapfrog the Mac (and everyone else on the market.) They eventually had to kill off the hardware line (after making some very nice, uber-high-end machines) but the software they made changed the industry. It was on a NextStation computer, using the NextStep OS that Tim Berners Lee would invent the World Wide Web, and its the true Object Oriented approach of the OS that many companies have imitated or borrowed.

By the mid-90s Apple was in truly rough shape. Their archaic OS, once the greatest thing on the market, was showing its age, and Apple had tried, and failed (mostly due to mismanagement) to replace it. It was determined that they should buy an existing next-gen OS, and re-build on top of it. After flirting with IBM and BeOS, they settled on a deal with NeXT. A deal that grew until Apple acquired the company, re-acquiring Steve Jobs in the process. He became the iCEO (interim CEO) and the de-facto leader of the company. Existing ideas were rapidly brought over from the Mac onto NextStep/OpenStep, layered on top of its rock-solid BSD Mach microkernel, Object Oriented underpinnings, and a re-vamped version of its graphics layer, was a new Interface, and a Classic emulator to allow old Mac apps to run.

The end product, after many variations, pre-releases, betas, and one or two fairly ugly general releases, was what we know today as Mac OS X. Much of NextStep is still intact, including low-level OS APIs, visual and development concepts, and culture.

If you're interested in getting NextStep up and running in VMWare (I'm using a Windows Vista 64-Bit Host OS, but these steps should work with most versions of VMWare -- including Fusion) you'll need to find an ISO of the NextStep OS somewhere, and maybe these steps will help you...

Configuring VMWare

After much frustration, I finally got past the initial hurdle of configuring it so the installer would run off a CD image. Here's what I had to do:

Get the NextStep 3.3 floppy disc images from this great resource site, nextstepcomputers.org. It has pretty much everything you need, plus some forums that you may or may not find helpful. You're going to need at least:

- Boot Disk
- Driver Disk
- Beta Drivers
- Core Drivers

Configure a new VM, and tell VMWare that the Guest OS will be BSD.

Create a virtual hard drive no larger than 2GB -- and it must be pre-allocated.

64MB of RAM will be more than enough

"Insert" the Boot Disk floppy image (rename the extensions of all the disc images you downloaded to .flp to make VMWare find them easily) and "Insert" the ISO for the Install CD.

Your Hard Drive and CD-ROM should be configured as IDE. The Hard Disk must be configured as IDE 0:0 and the CD-ROM MUST be configured as IDE 1:0 due to the primitive driver support.

Installing NextStep 3.3

Start up the VM, following the prompts until you're asked for driver discs.

Start with the Core Drivers. It'll only need that disk for a second to load keyboard support, and other basics.

When asked for SCSI drivers, first use the "3.3 Driver Disk" and tell it to use option 4 -- Adaptec 2940. This isn't really present on your VM (no configuration in VMWare will let you use the SCSI drivers) but we just need to make the installer get past this step.

You'll be asked a second time for SCSI drivers. I assume the first time is about the CD-ROM, and the second time is about the hard drive. In any case, this is the important driver. Insert the "3.3 Beta Drivers" disc, and press 1 to list its drivers. Press 7 to go to the next page, and press 2 to choose "Dual IDE" option.

Finally press 1 to skip loading any other drivers, and continue...

The installer will ask a whole bunch of times if you really want to wipe out your hard drive (just the hard drive image, don't worry!) and then it'll copy the files it needs. When its done, it'll ask you to remove (disconnect) the floppy and reboot.

The OS will begin to load, and then notice it needs some drivers again. It'll list the devices it doesn't know about on its own. Supply the "3.3 Beta Drivers" disc, and then the "3.3 Core Drivers" disc to continue...

Soon you'll see the Graphical OS Loader kick-in...

It'll take a few minutes and then it'll want the "3.3 Beta Drivers" disc again. At this point you should have mouse support, so things get a little nicer. Following that, it'll want the "3.3 Core Drivers" disc again too.

You'll see the famous beach ball from OS X (but in grayscale instead of color) and then a Summary of Devices.

Just to start out, I clicked on Monitors and added the Default VGA Adapter. I'll have to mess with this, and what's available online. I've heard its possible to get a much better resolution than VGA.

The mouse was working, so I didn't mess with that. Network is another whole ball of wax (apparently DHCP support needs to be hacked in) so I skipped over this for now.

In sound, I added Sound Blaster 16, since that used to be very compatible. I don't know if it'll work, but its worth a try. I didn't touch the SCSI or Hard Drive drivers, since the ones I was using got me this far!

In the next step, I unchecked the languages I didn't want, and installed everything else so I could play with it. It struck me that much of the terminology used in the installer looked similar to that used in the OS X installer.

When its done copying, remove the floppy (like it tells you to!) and go ahead and reboot.

Pretty soon you'll be up and running inside NextStep! Check your e-mail -- there's a note there from our old friend Steve!
I have had some mouse problems -- it behaves erractically, so I'll be searching the forums for fixes on that. I found that if I hit "Ctrl + Alt" to release the mouse, then click inside NexStep again to send control back to the Guest OS, that clears up the problem... for a bit. Obviously I'll be working on display and network drivers, but thats outside of the scope of this article. It's alive, and that's all we were after today.

From here I'm going to point you to a couple links that should help you finish up a good install. I've also made a drivers ISO that will simplify things greatly.

• More technical information and advice,
• Custom drivers by a guy on the scene that fix things like the mouse (which will get progressively worse with each reboot!)
• Custom NextStep/VMWare video drivers for higher resolutions and color!
• A pre-made disc full of all of these NextStep custom drivers.
• How to copy files onto your NextStep VM (harder than it sounds!)
• How to set-up networking on NextStep (once the custom drivers are installed)

Enjoy your bit of Apple/technology nostalgia...