In my continuing adventures with computing oddities of the 1990s, I occasionally look around for copies of the various failed operating systems from the era, especially Apple’s, and have built myself a little archive of them. Some are easy enough to run under emulation, I have hardware which can be coaxed to run others, and a few (Such as A/UX) would require I pick up new machines or fix an emulator to run. Two of the “desirables” of that sort are Copland, the full custom microkernel based OS that could have been Mac OS 8, and Rhapsody, the missing link that connects Macs that have things in common with the original Macintosh and NeXTStep, prior to the birth of OS X. There are several versions of the latter in existence, including early versions of OS X Server, but the most interesting isRhapsody DR2, a developer release prior to the OS X name. In the PPC version, it has “BlueBox,” the predecessor to the Classic environment, but perhaps more amusing is the x86 version, showing an early version of the OS X codebase (or really, a late version of the OpenSTEP/Mach codebase with some Apple extensions) running on IA32 almost a decade before the first x86 compatible OS X releases.
During a distraction that reminded me to look, I found my way to a server (amusingly, an apple-hosted “me”/”iDisk” account) containing imaged install media for both Copland (and it’s marketing materials) and Rhapsody DR2. I would have to go get the 6100/66 from my parent’s house to use the Copland image, but the Rhapsody media should include the x86 version, and it apparently plays nice (-ish) with some of the emulation packages…
Obviously COMPLETELY useless software, but things I’ve wanted for my little archive of obscurities for a long time.
