Apple Rhapsody is a very early development version of MacOS X. Rhapsody is based on OPENSTEP, which is based on NeXTStep.

MacOS X was first released as MacOS X Server, which did not have the Aqua GUI. The original MacOS X Server looked very much like these Rhapsody screen shots.

Rhapsody DR 2 booting up.

The Rhapsody login screen.

The first thing that comes up is the Workspace Manager (a file manager which is similar to the Macintosh Finder)

No, the "processor type" shown in this screen shot is not an error, this is really running on an Intel Pentium based PC. NeXTStep 3.x was ported to the Intel x86 / PC platform when NeXT tried to change their focus to purely software, thereby dropping their proprietary hardware. OPENSTEP which followed was also available for the x86 PCs. Finally, for whatever reason when Apple started using OPENSTEP as the basis for their new version of MacOS they maintained a PC version for some time. After Rhapsody DR 2, however PC support was dropped.

As shown here, the Workspace Manager has three different views, Columns, Icons, and List.

Menus can be torn off from the menu bar. There are also a variety of appearance, windowing and GUI options.

There is a Quicktime movie player included. A drawing application is also shown here.

To access a PC floppy disk the OS must be told to scan for disks from an option in the menu before the disk can be used. CD-ROMs, however just pop on to the desktop when inserted, and eject when dragged to the trash.

New and improved sticky notes are included. There is also a text editor that can create and edit RTF (Rich Text Format) files.

Like NeXTStep and OPENSTEP, Rhapsody runs on top of a derivative of BSD Unix called Mach.

The hardware configuration utility is the same as the one in OPENSTEP, down to the look and feel.

Both OPENSTEP and Rhapsody have very limited hardware support for PC hardware. This is probably one of the big reasons Apple did not want to mess with MacOS for the PC, it would have had a very hard time supporting the huge amount of hardware available for PCs.

A weird thing I noticed is that some (but not all) of the about boxes display the current year from the system clock as the copyright date. No big deal, just odd.

The Rhapsody user management system. Notice the continued use of the "Column" view that was popular with NeXTStep.

Rhapsody also included a number of demo programs (some of which were also present in OPENSTEP). This larger 1024x768 screen shot shows some of the demo programs running.