Are Modern Macs Really NeXTSTEP in Disguise?

recently we took a look at apple's rhapsody os when we got a booting on this toshiba libretto 50ct to turn it into a tiny 90s hackintosh and many of you replied in the comments to say that you've never heard of rhapsody the precursor to mac os 10 that was almost released for intel or next step the non-apple os that formed the basis for both so today let's do a little system archaeology i've set up these three laptops with the first retail release of mac os 10 apple's final and only commercial rhapsody release and the final release of next step for intel we'll explore some of the quirks of these systems try to find the threads tying them together and try to answer an interesting question was mac os 10 a revolutionary upgrade to the mac os or are today's max really just running the latest version of next step so stay tuned now before we dig into these machines and see the os's that they're running i think it's worth a brief history lesson to explain how each of these operating systems came to be while today it's hard to think about apple without thinking of the legacy and impact of steve jobs it wasn't always that way in fact apple's had a pretty rocky road on the way to becoming a two trillion dollar consumer electronics behemoth way back in 1985 steve jobs was pushed out of apple for being just a bit hard to work with that same year he founded next computers swiping a bunch of macintosh engineers from apple in the process and from this point on apple began a slow decline as they deviated from the jobs vision of a simple mac product line with high quality and desirable machines but next computers would decline too for almost exactly the opposite reason steve jobs was so singularly focused on building the most advanced simple to use machines possible they wound up costing so much that next couldn't find a strong market in 1997 when both companies were basically at their lowest points a 500 million dollar gamble brought them back together next was unable to survive from the computer sales alone and had resorted to making nextstep os available on other platforms and then actually to parsing out some of its technologies to other operating systems even windows nt through the openstep platform at the same time apple had spent over half a billion dollars building their new copeland os just to cancel it in 1996 due to mismanagement and unending technical problems desperate to replace the now ancient classic macos apple purchased next to use openstep as the basis for a new next-gen apple os and brought steve jobs back as an advisor that brings us to these machines each one representing one major milestone in this story but first today's macintosh shenanigans are brought to you by surfsharkvpn on this channel we talk a lot about nostalgia for a simpler time when computers were new the internet was young and together they represented a bright future full of unlimited possibility well the reality turned out a bit different and that's why i'm a huge proponent of vpns especially for the security and privacy that they offer and surf shark offers an excellent mix of both features and speed in addition to strong encryption ip and dns leak protection and a strict no logs policy surfshark is easy to install and run on an unlimited number of devices with a single subscription on my main machine i have surfshark's convenient app and they make it easy to download the openvpn config files and that means i can even use the vpn on my powerpc max so if i ever go full hipster and bring my pismo into a coffee shop i can use surfshark and not worry about insecure wi-fi hotspots on this aging os use promo code action retro to get a massive 83 off the original price and now back to our regularly scheduled shenanigans this pile of garbage compact presario is running openstep for mach 4.2 which is the latest and last version of the true next step that next released before apple acquired them this amd k6 with 32 megs of ram was actually the only machine i could get running openstep at the right resolution in color this powerbook g3 wall street is running rhapsody 5.3 which was also known as mac os 10 server 1.0 when it was released to retail this was the only consumer release of the original apple rhapsody project which was more or less next step with an apple platinum skin over it and our lovely g4 upgraded powerbook pismo is running mac os 10.0 cheetah the first official release of mac os 10. i also have my m1 macbook pro running mac os 11 big sur and it'll be interesting to see what and if anything carried through all the way from pre-apple next step to today's latest max and a quick note i've installed both openstep and rhapsody by configuring them in a virtual machine first and then copying the virtual disks to sd cards with dd on my powerbook g4 i'll make virtual hard drives available in the description below in case you'd like to try out these obscure operating systems yourself okay first let's check out next step on this compact presario 1255 which has an amd k6 processor although interestingly nextstep calls it a pentium and it has 32 megs of ram and the system is running off of a 2 gigabyte sd card now this is actually openstep 4.2 on the mach kernel which was the last version of what's really the full next step desktop and underpinnings released by next computer before being bought out by apple and it runs really well on this very limited budget 90s machine and the next app interface it's interesting it is both a little bit alien and very familiar at the same time when you first boot it up you get the file viewer here with these nice little fancy portfolios for folders and your little me directory which is your home directory and everything is very fluid very fast nice subtle but quick animations and it has a task bar and a recycle bin very much like a modern desktop and you can kind of envision this morphing into mac os 10 with the bar here just kind of migrating down here with your trash can right here and a lot of the apps in here are going to be very familiar as well so if we start out in the next admin section we have all of your administration stuff including configured on app which is important here for setting up all of your drivers and kind of deeper system preferences and you can see each app has instead of a file menu up at the top bar the menu is kind of floating in this little box here and the one thing i don't like is it kind of jumps around so workspace menu started out over here and then i opened that up and then it jumped over to the right hand side but yeah i mean definitely you can feel the roots of modern mac os in that kind of almost unified menu and then if we go into next apps we'll start to see some stuff that is kind of familiar so first let's open up the terminal which well is a unix terminal giving you access to the bsd command line just like mac os today we have all of our normal unix commands like ls and cd into a different directory and you can do s u to become super user so very similar to what you're familiar with today on mac os and then the button on the left here actually minimizes this down to this part of the taskbar which in today's mac os 10 and mac os 11 big sur that would just be your dock so instead of having one unified dock you have this dock over here and then this dock with your active applications down here all in all pretty familiar and then we have our menu on the left side this time so we'll quit out of that we have some other interesting stuff in here like we have a mail app which kind of survived into mac os 10 and mac os big sur although certainly not in this configuration and interestingly next step in openstep came with the digital webster dictionary a full webster dictionary here built right into the operating system by default we also have preview.app which exists today in mac os and then in the demos folder we have probably some of the most interesting stuff so the one everybody goes to to kind of show the lineage between mac os of today and next up is the chess app which actually is almost a straight port the whole way through if you open chess on your mac today it's pretty much the same exact thing even down to the graphics and i am certainly not good at chess whoops well i lost that game so we'll just close that out also in here is actually the thing i find most interesting is the most kind of obvious thread between this and modern mac os is right here textedit.app it is literally the same text edit that you have on mac os today so if you look at this text edit release 4 copyright 1995-1996 well here it is on mac os 11 big sur and we can see here copyright 1995 to 2020 apple inc so 1995 to 1996 1995 to 2020 yeah that's the same app so yeah i really like next up i like the look and feel of it even on this kind of garbage passive matrix display on this compact i mean on such low specs this runs great and gives you a full unix environment and you can get a lot of modern unix apps that were compiled i mean command line apps but stuff like ssh and you know gnu utilities and all kinds of good stuff for your ancient machine running openstep and that logo i just love that next logo there's actually a lot of fun games on here by default one of my favorites of course is the classic boink out which is a clone of breakout and yeah i'm not very good at it but it's not bad even on this passive matrix screen it also comes with this pretty fun billiards app which well it doesn't really do physics right whoops sorry you scratched my options here are okay or okay forever okay forever you know i like how all the balls just they kind of just lose their momentum immediately as if the table is sticky or something but yeah i don't know it's kind of fun and we also have a bug reporter so if we find any bugs in this next step open step operating system we can send them in to bug underscore next at next.com or bug web objects at next.com let's see if we can just uh fill something out here make pool balls roll nicer thank you sean provide a topic um there we go games and submit okay on to rhapsody 5.3 aka mac os 10 server 1.0 here on the powerbook g3 wall street which if you look on rhapsodyos.org this is the machine that they recommend as being the best one to run this version of rhapsody on because it's the most compatible and the screen is great and the battery is great and everything works so yeah really cool that i have this machine in this good of a condition and this might look like classic mac os like maybe mac os 8.6 but oh boy it is not we can see already some interesting stuff on just these nice looking icons which look almost like the platinum icons but this stuff here has an hfs label for being a mac os formatted partition and our main drive which doesn't have a name actually has ufs as the label for unix file system which is the bsd of this era's file system and if we open our apple menu here it's a bit different than the apple menu in actual mac os classic we have applications here preferences computer settings and an interesting mac os option in the menu which let's click on that now and see what that does [Music] so it seemed like the computer just rebooted lightning quick and is booting into mac os 8.6 but this is actually running in kind of a virtual machine on top of rhapsody and when you're booted into mac os 8.6 here it's kind of hard to tell that this is anything out of the ordinary because it runs as quick as you would expect and hey look there's our mail.app right here but if you look at the icon for the 8.6 hard drive here it's actually a disk image that we're running off of but yeah it's fast and responsive and especially on this pretty powerful g3 it feels like it's just running natively but if we shut down the computer we can see it actually doesn't shut down the machine it just goes right back lightning fast into the rhapsody interface and being that this is a proto mac os 10 we have a lot of our mac os 10 software including our terminal right here where we once again have access to all of our unix commands and if we open up our hard drive here we're greeted with a very next step file manager in fact it's exactly the file manager from nextstep just in an apple platinum theme and it does run lightning fast on here but we have all the same stuff that we had in rhapsody on that compact here on the mac including the grab screenshot tool and our textedit.app continues to make its appearance here and if you look at about text edit this is now version 9.2 copyright 1995 to 1998 apple computer and well it seems like text edit is frozen now here is our spinning wheel again which you know that's the same spinning wheel from next step and we're gonna see that spinning wheel again in mac os 10 cheetah and we have some of the same demos as we had on the compact including our favorite game of boink out which now has sound that i can't seem to turn down okay well that has a horrible amount of sound so let's get out of there and now the main menu is frozen well there we go i'll just pop into sound here and see if we can turn that down a bit and hey look we have some of our favorite system sounds wild eep sounds just as it should and there's our spinning next step beach ball again and of course we have to check out our chess app which well that is exactly the same as the chess app as we saw it on the compact i mean right down to the graphics and right down to my horrible opening move because i am not very good at chess all right that's enough for that now we do have some more stuff in here including some stuff for running java we have a different pdf viewer we have our stickies of course which are very important in classic mac os and interestingly amongst different mac os's the shutdown procedure on rhapsody here is completely different so on mac os 10 you would go up to the apple menu and log out and on classic back you would go to the special menu which isn't here and you would shut down the machine there but now in rhapsody or mac os 10 server 1.0 you go to file log out and power off and we get our nice mac os 10 server shutting down with again our next step spinning beach ball and this is actually the same window that's on next step okay and finally let's take a look at mac os 10.0 cheetah the first real version of mac os 10 and this now has everything that we'd consider familiar we have our dock down here on the bottom we have our stuff up here with the icons that we've come to be familiar with in mac os 10 we have our apple menu with our normal apple menu options but hidden deep within this operating system actually hidden kind of right on the surface as well is all of that next step heritage so if we go into our applications we can see a lot of our old stuff we have our good friend text edit which is now version 1.0 copyright 1995-2001 and i guess for some reason they decided to take the names of the developers out of it so kind of a snub there from apple and we also have our good old chess which yeah it's an updated version but it has pretty much the same graphics the same gameplay the same highlighting of the squares as i make my terrible and not thought out first move here and here's the chess app running on all three systems next step mac os 10 and rhapsody 5.3 and i've made the same terrible opening move here on all of the different machines and it did respond differently here on rhapsody but the reason these are also similar if we take a look at the about box on openstep here it actually says chess is a next front end for gnu chess and a piece of free gnu software yeah so we can see on these boxes here it's pretty much the same although they just switched from a next front end for gnu chess to an apple front end for gnu chess but yeah it's pretty cool to see this thread tying all of these systems together i wonder what it looks like on big sur yeah the about box is different but it still has the gnu public license here because this is still a front end for gnu chess all right well that'll do it for this look at the origins of mac os 10 and it's so interesting playing around with next step especially on old pc hardware because it's just so weird seeing apps that we associate with macintosh on such a weird system and unfortunately rhapsody 5.3 on powerpc here has crashed so hard that mac os 9 doesn't even see the partition it was installed on anymore so i don't know what's up with that but probably not the best software to use as a server but i really think we answered the question about modern mac os this really has much more next step than it does classic mac os so i'd be inclined to say that mac os big sur and mac os 10 they're more of a modern release of next step than they are of mac os but if there's any aspect of next step that you want to see in more depth let me know in the comments below because again this is super interesting stuff at least to me and i really would love to find some original next hardware and really compare the different versions of next step in openstep to really see just how far ahead of its time this operating system was back in the 80s when steve jobs started that company but if you enjoyed this video i'd appreciate a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more macintosh shenanigans like this please subscribe down below and thank you very much for watching and a special thanks to justin chris rocky mods sword eclectic and spike who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping make these videos possible you

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 176,521

Keywords: retro, vintage computers, macintosh, apple, retrocomputing, retro computers

Id: HyitnJQRvu0

Length: 23min 40sec (1420 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 27 2021