  Over the past decade, UNIX workstations have provided a very powerful program
development environment. However, workstations are more expensive than PCs and
Macintoshes and require a system manager for day-to-day tasks such as disk
backup, adding users, and setting up print queues. Native commercial software
for system maintenance and "PC applications" has been lacking under UNIX.
Apple's new Rhapsody operating system puts the current MacOS on a NeXT UNIX
foundation and adds an enhanced NeXTSTEP object oriented development
environment called Yellow Box. Rhapsody simultaneously runs UNIX and commercial
Macintosh applications such as word processing or spreadsheets. Thus a UNIX
detector Monte Carlo can run for days in the background at the same time as a
commercial word processing program. And commercial programs such as Dantz
Retrospect are being made available to make disk backup easy under Rhapsody.
Apple has announced that in 1999 they intend to be running Rhapsody, or MacOS X
as it will be called in the commercial release, on all their newer computers.
MacOS X may be of interest to those who have trouble hiring expert UNIX system
managers; and to those who would prefer to have a single computer and operating
system on their desktop that serves both the needs of UNIX program development
and running commercial applications, simultaneously. We present our experiences
running UNIX programs and Macintosh applications under the Rhapsody DR2
Developer Release.
