recently we took a look at apple'srhapsody os when we got a bootingon this toshiba libretto 50ct to turn itinto atiny 90s hackintosh and many of youreplied in the comments to say thatyou've never heard of rhapsody theprecursor to mac os 10that was almost released for intel ornext stepthe non-apple os that formed the basisfor bothso today let's do a little systemarchaeologyi've set up these three laptops with thefirst retail release of mac os 10apple's final and only commercialrhapsody releaseand the final release of next step forintelwe'll explore some of the quirks ofthese systems try to find the threadstying them togetherand try to answer an interestingquestion was mac os 10 a revolutionaryupgrade to the mac osor are today's max really just runningthe latest versionof next step so stay tunednow before we dig into these machinesand see the os's that they're runningi think it's worth a brief historylesson to explain how each of theseoperating systemscame to be while today it's hard tothink aboutapple without thinking of the legacy andimpact of steve jobsit wasn't always that way in factapple's had a pretty rocky roadon the way to becoming a two trilliondollar consumerelectronics behemoth way back in 1985steve jobs was pushed out of apple forbeing just a bit hard to work withthat same year he founded next computersswiping a bunch of macintosh engineersfrom apple in the processand from this point on apple began aslow declineas they deviated from the jobs vision ofa simple macproduct line with high quality anddesirable machinesbut next computers would decline toofor almost exactly the opposite reasonsteve jobs was sosingularly focused on building the mostadvancedsimple to use machines possible theywound up costingso much that next couldn't find a strongmarketin 1997 when both companies werebasically at their lowest pointsa 500 million dollar gamble brought themback togethernext was unable to survive from thecomputer sales aloneand had resorted to making nextstep osavailable on other platforms and thenactually to parsing out some of itstechnologies to other operating systemseven windows nt through the openstepplatform at the same timeapple had spent over half a billiondollars building their newcopeland os just to cancel it in 1996due to mismanagementand unending technical problemsdesperate to replace the nowancient classic macos apple purchasednext to useopenstep as the basis for a new next-genapple os and brought steve jobs backas an advisor that brings us to thesemachineseach one representing one majormilestonein this story but firsttoday's macintosh shenanigans arebrought to you by surfsharkvpnon this channel we talk a lot aboutnostalgia for a simpler timewhen computers were new the internet wasyoung and together they represented abrightfuture full of unlimited possibilitywell the reality turned out a bitdifferentand that's why i'm a huge proponent ofvpns especially for the security andprivacy that they offer and surf sharkoffers anexcellent mix of both features and speedin addition to strong encryptionip and dns leak protection and a strictno logs policysurfshark is easy to install and run onan unlimited number of devices with asingle subscription on my main machine ihave surfshark's convenient appand they make it easy to download theopenvpn config filesand that means i can even use the vpn onmy powerpc maxso if i ever go full hipster and bringmy pismo into a coffee shop i can usesurfshark and not worry about insecurewi-fi hotspotson this aging os use promo code actionretro to get amassive 83 off the original priceand now back to our regularly scheduledshenanigansthis pile of garbage compact presario isrunning openstep for mach4.2 which is the latest and last versionof thetrue next step that next released beforeapple acquired them this amd k6 with 32megs of ramwas actually the only machine i couldget running openstep at the rightresolutionin color this powerbook g3 wall streetis running rhapsody 5.3which was also known as mac os 10 server1.0when it was released to retail this wasthe only consumer release of theoriginalapple rhapsody project which was more orless next step with an apple platinumskinover it and our lovely g4 upgradedpowerbook pismo is runningmac os 10.0 cheetah the first officialreleaseof mac os 10. i also have my m1 macbookprorunning mac os 11 big surand it'll be interesting to see what andifanything carried through all the wayfrom pre-apple next stepto today's latest max and a quick notei've installed both openstep andrhapsody by configuring themin a virtual machine first and thencopying the virtual disks tosd cards with dd on my powerbook g4i'll make virtual hard drives availablein the description belowin case you'd like to try out theseobscure operating systemsyourself okay first let's check out nextstep on this compact presario 1255which has an amd k6 processor althoughinterestinglynextstep calls it a pentium and it has32 megs of ramand the system is running off of a 2gigabyte sd cardnow this is actually openstep 4.2 on themachkernel which was the last version ofwhat's really the full next stepdesktop and underpinnings released bynext computer before being bought out byappleand it runs really well on this verylimitedbudget 90s machineand the next app interface it'sinterestingit is both a little bit alien and veryfamiliarat the same time when you first boot itup you get the file viewer herewith these nice little fancy portfoliosfor folders and your little me directorywhich is your home directoryand everything is very fluid very fastnice subtle but quick animationsand it has a task bar and a recycle binvery much like a modern desktop and youcan kind of envision thismorphing into mac os 10 with thebar here just kind of migrating downhere with your trash canright here and a lot of the apps in hereare going to be very familiar as wellso if we start out in the next adminsection we have all of youradministration stuffincluding configured on app which isimportant here forsetting up all of your drivers and kindofdeeper system preferencesand you can see each app hasinstead of a file menu up at the topbar the menu is kind of floatingin this little box here and the onething i don't like is it kind of jumpsaround soworkspace menu started out over here andthen i opened that up and then it jumpedover to theright hand side but yeah i meandefinitelyyou can feel the roots of modern mac osin that kind ofalmost unified menu and then if we gointo nextapps we'll start to see some stuff thatis kind of familiarso first let's open up the terminalwhichwell is a unix terminalgiving you access to the bsd commandline just likemac os today we have all of our normalunix commandslike ls and cd into a differentdirectory and you can dos u to become super userso very similar to what you're familiarwith todayon mac os and thenthe button on the left here actuallyminimizes thisdown to this part of the taskbar whichin today's mac os10 and mac os 11 big sur that would justbe your dockso instead of having one unified dockyou have this dock over hereand then this dock with your activeapplications down hereall in all pretty familiar and then wehave ourmenu on the left side this timeso we'll quit out of that we have someother interesting stuff in here like wehave a mail appwhich kind of survived into mac os10 and mac os big sur although certainlynot in this configurationand interestinglynext step in openstep came with thedigital websterdictionarya full webster dictionary here builtright into the operating systemby defaultwe also have preview.app whichexists today in mac osand then in the demos folder we haveprobably some of the most interestingstuffso the one everybody goes to to kind ofshow the lineage betweenmac os of today and next up is the chessappwhich actually is almost a straight portthe whole way through if you open chesson your mac todayit's pretty much the same exact thingeven down to the graphicsand i am certainly not good at chesswhoops well i lost that game so we'lljust close that outalso in here is actually the thing ifind most interesting is the mostkind of obvious thread between thisand modern mac os is right heretextedit.app it is literally the sametext editthat you have on mac os today so if youlook at thistext edit release 4 copyright 1995-1996well here it is on mac os11 big sur and we can see herecopyright 1995 to 2020 apple incso 1995 to 19961995 to 2020 yeahthat's the same app so yeah i reallylike next up i like the look and feel ofit even on thiskind of garbage passive matrix displayon this compacti mean on such low specs this runs greatand gives youa full unix environment andyou can get a lot of modern unix appsthat werecompiled i mean command line apps butstuff like sshand you know gnu utilities andall kinds of good stuff for your ancientmachine runningopenstep and that logo i just love thatnext logothere's actually a lot of fun games onhere by defaultone of my favorites of course is theclassic boink out which isa clone of breakout and yeah i'm notverygood at it but it's not bad even on thispassive matrix screenit also comes with this pretty funbilliards app whichwell it doesn't really do physics rightwhoops sorry you scratchedmy options here are okay or okayforever okay foreveryou know i like how all the balls justthey kind of just lose their momentumimmediately as if the table is sticky orsomethingbut yeah i don't know it's kind of funand we also have a bug reporter so if wefind any bugs in thisnext step open step operating system wecan send them into bug underscore next at next.comor bug web objects at next.comlet's see if we can just uh fillsomething out heremake pool balls roll nicerthank you seanprovide a topic umthere we go games and submitokay on to rhapsody 5.3 akamac os 10 server 1.0 here on thepowerbook g3 wall street which if youlook on rhapsodyos.orgthis is the machine that they recommendas being the best one to runthis version of rhapsody on because it'sthe most compatibleand the screen is great and the batteryis great and everything works soyeah really cool that i have thismachine in this good of a conditionand this might look like classic mac oslike maybe mac os 8.6 butoh boy it is not we can see alreadysome interesting stuff on just thesenice looking icons whichlook almost like the platinum icons butthis stuff here has an hfslabel for being a mac os formattedpartitionand our main drive which doesn't have aname actually hasufs as the label for unix file systemwhich isthe bsd of this era's file system and ifwe open our apple menu hereit's a bit different than the apple menuin actualmac os classic we have applications herepreferences computer settings and aninterestingmac os option in the menu whichlet's click on that now and see whatthat does[Music]so it seemed like the computer justrebooted lightning quickand is booting into mac os 8.6but this is actually running in kind ofa virtual machineon top of rhapsodyand when you're booted into mac os 8.6hereit's kind of hard to tell that this isanything out of the ordinarybecause it runs as quick as you wouldexpect and hey look there's our mail.appright herebut if you look at the icon for the 8.6hard drive hereit's actually a disk image that we'rerunning off of but yeahit's fast and responsive and especiallyon thispretty powerful g3 it feels like it'sjust runningnatively but if we shut down thecomputerwe can see it actually doesn't shut downthe machine it just goes right backlightning fast into the rhapsodyinterfaceand being that this is a proto mac os 10we have a lot of ourmac os 10 software includingour terminal right here where we onceagain have access to all of ourunix commands and if we open up our harddrive here we're greeted with a verynext step file manager in fact it'sexactly the file manager from nextstepjustin an apple platinum theme and it doesrun lightning fast on herebut we have all the same stuff that wehad inrhapsody on that compact here on the macincluding the grab screenshot tool andourtextedit.app continues to make itsappearance hereand if you look at about text edit thisis now version 9.2copyright 1995 to 1998 apple computerand well it seems like text edit isfrozen now here is ourspinning wheel again which you knowthat's the same spinning wheel from nextstepand we're gonna see that spinning wheelagain in mac os 10cheetah and we have some of the samedemos as we hadon the compact including our favoritegameof boink out whichnow has soundthat i can't seem to turn down okaywell that has a horrible amount of soundso let's get out of thereand now the main menu is frozen wellthere we goi'll just pop into sound here and see ifwe canturn that down a bitand hey look we have some of ourfavorite system soundswild eep sounds just as it shouldand there's our spinning next step beachball againand of course we have to check out ourchess appwhich well that is exactly the same asthe chess appas we saw it on the compact i mean rightdown to the graphicsand right down to my horrible openingmovebecause i am not very good at chessall right that's enough for thatnow we do have some more stuff in hereincluding some stuff for runningjava we have a different pdf viewerwe have our stickies of course which arevery importantin classic mac os and interestinglyamongst different mac os's the shutdownprocedureon rhapsody here is completely differentso on mac os 10 you would go up to theapple menu and log outand on classic back you would go to thespecial menu which isn't hereand you would shut down the machinethere but nowin rhapsody or mac os 10 server 1.0you go to file log outand power off and we get our nicemac os 10 server shutting down withagain our next step spinning beach balland this is actually the same windowthat's on next step okay and finallylet's take a look at mac os10.0 cheetah the first real versionof mac os 10 and this now has everythingthat we'd consider familiar we haveour dock down here on the bottom we haveour stuff up here with the icons thatwe've come to be familiar with in mac os10 we have our apple menu with ournormal apple menuoptions but hidden deep within thisoperating systemactually hidden kind of right on thesurface as wellis all of that next step heritage so ifwe gointo our applications we can see a lotof our old stuffwe have our good friend text editwhich is now version 1.0 copyright1995-2001and i guess for some reason they decidedto take the names of the developers outof it sokind of a snub there from apple and wealso have ourgood old chess which yeahit's an updated version but it haspretty muchthe same graphics the same gameplaythe same highlighting of the squares asi make myterrible and not thought out first movehereand here's the chess app running on allthree systemsnext step mac os 10 andrhapsody 5.3 and i've made the sameterrible opening move here onall of the different machines and it didrespond differently here on rhapsody butthe reason these are also similar if wetake a look at the about boxon openstep here it actually says chessis a next front end for gnu chessand a piece of free gnu software yeah sowe can see on these boxes hereit's pretty much the same although theyjust switched froma next front end for gnu chess to anapple front end for gnu chess butyeah it's pretty cool to see this threadtying all of these systems togetheri wonder what it looks like on big suryeah the about box is different but itstill has the gnu public license herebecause this is still a front end forgnu chessall right well that'll do it for thislook at the origins of mac os 10and it's so interesting playing aroundwith next step especially onold pc hardware because it's just soweird seeingapps that we associate with macintosh onsuch a weirdsystem and unfortunately rhapsody 5.3 onpowerpc herehas crashed so hard that mac os 9doesn't even see the partition it wasinstalled on anymoreso i don't know what's up with that butprobably not the best software to useas a server but i really think weanswered the questionabout modern mac os this really hasmuch more next step than it does classicmac osso i'd be inclined to say that mac osbig sur and mac os 10 they're moreof a modern release of next step thanthey areof mac os but if there's any aspect ofnext step that you want to seein more depth let me know in thecomments below because again this issuperinteresting stuff at least to me and ireally would love to find some originalnext hardwareand really compare the differentversions of next step in openstep toreally see just how far ahead of itstimethis operating system was back in the80s when steve jobsstarted that company but if you enjoyedthis video i'd appreciate a thumbs upand if you'd like to seemore macintosh shenanigans like thisplease subscribe down belowand thank you very much for watchingand a special thanks to justin chrisrocky modssword eclectic and spike who are myhighest tiered patrons andall of my patreon supporters for helpingmake these videos possibleyou