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Meanwhile, applications written using the older toolkits would be supported using the 'Classic' Mac OS 9 emulator.

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Mac OS applications could be ported to Carbon without the need for a re-write, while still making them full citizens of the new operating system. Over the next two years major effort was applied to re-writing the original Macintosh APIs as Unix libraries known as Carbon. When Jobs announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference that what developers really wanted was a modern version of the Mac OS, and that's what they were going to deliver, this was met with thunderous applause. Jobs was, in essence, given carte blanche by the Apple board to return the company to profitability. This 'rejection' of Apple's plan was largely the result of a string of previous broken promises from Apple after watching one 'next OS' after another disappear and Apple's marketshare dwindle, developers were not interested in doing much work on the platform at all, let alone a re-write.Īpple's financial losses continued, and eventually Jobs persuaded the board of directors to fire CEO Gil Amelio and appoint him Chairman and interim CEO.

Instead, the vast majority of developers told Apple that this would never occur, and that they would rather leave the platform entirely.

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The result was known under the code name Rhapsody, slated for release in late 1998.Īpple expected that developers would port their software to the considerably more powerful OpenStep libraries once they learned of its power and flexibility. At first the plan was to develop a new operating system based almost entirely on an updated version of OpenStep, with an emulator - known as the Blue Box - for running 'classic' Macintosh applications. Avie Tevanian took over OS development and Steve Jobs was brought on as a consultant. Some elements of Copland were incorporated in Mac OS 8, released in 1997.Īfter considering the purchase of BeOS - a multimedia-enabled multi-tasking OS designed for hardware similar to Apple's - the company decided instead to acquire NeXT and use OPENSTEP as the basis for their new OS. By 1996 Copland was nowhere near ready for release, and the effort was eventually cancelled outright. A massive development effort to replace it, known as Copland, was started in 1994, but was generally perceived outside of Apple to be a hopeless case due to political infighting. The aging classic Mac OS had reached the limits of its single-user, cooperative multitasking architecture, and its once-innovative user interface was looking increasingly 'dated' next to the rapidly-evolving Microsoft Windows. Meanwhile, Apple was in fact having commercial difficulties as well. (Some of these efforts, such as Taligent, did not fully come to fruition.)

However, by this point, a number of other companies-notably Apple, IBM, and Microsoft-were claiming they would soon be releasing similar object-oriented operating systems and development tools of their own. NeXTSTEP underwent an evolution into OPENSTEP which separated the object layers from the operating system below, allowing it to run with less modification on other platforms. NeXT managed to maintain a business selling WebObjects and consulting services, but was never a commercial success. It was based on on the Mach kernel and BSD, an open source implementation of Unix dating back to the 1970s, and included the innovative Enterprise Objects Framework database access layer and WebObjects application server development environment. The object-oriented operating system NeXTSTEP, on the other hand, had a more lasting legacy.

NeXT hardware, while somewhat innovative for its time, was more expensive in relation to the rapidly commoditizing workstation market, had several design problems and quirks which made it unpopular, and was phased out in 1993. When Apple Computer sidelined Steve Jobs in 1985, he attempted - with funding from Ross Perot and his own pockets - to create the 'next big thing': the result was NeXT.

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