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mtnif
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Classic Mac OS/Rhapsody topic

welcome to the Classic Mac OS/Rhapsody topic
i need some users to help me expand this

Last edited by mtnif (March 5, 2026 22:39:09)

ma007rio
Scratcher
500+ posts

Classic Mac OS/Rhapsody topic

adding this to the OS topic directory

https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/858483/
mtnif
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Classic Mac OS/Rhapsody topic

bump
medians
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Classic Mac OS/Rhapsody topic

Bringing this topic up
rdococ
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Classic Mac OS/Rhapsody topic

Classic Mac OS was certainly interesting.

The original Macintosh didn't have the RAM for multitasking, so the OS was built to run one application at a time and each application had most of the system's memory. When multitasking was added, each app had to be given a fixed amount of memory as they didn't “ask for more memory” like programs on modern systems do. This resulted in a lot of bugs and crashes.

Rhapsody is actually an early version of Mac OS X, built on top of the NeXTSTEP operating system which had much better multitasking capabilities. It looks similar to Classic because they didn't have the Aqua theme ready yet, so they ported the Platinum theme over from Mac OS 8-9.

Last edited by rdococ (March 20, 2026 13:16:48)

medians
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Classic Mac OS/Rhapsody topic

rdococ wrote:

Classic Mac OS was certainly interesting.

The original Macintosh didn't have the RAM for multitasking, so the OS was built to run one application at a time and each application had most of the system's memory. When multitasking was added, each app had to be given a fixed amount of memory as they didn't “ask for more memory” like programs on modern systems do. This resulted in a lot of bugs and crashes.

Rhapsody is actually an early version of Mac OS X, built on top of the NeXTSTEP operating system which had much better multitasking capabilities. It looks similar to Classic because they didn't have the Aqua theme ready yet, so they ported the Platinum theme over from Mac OS 8-9.
Yea, I suggested for him to include Rhapsody bc I feel like it's still technically pre-Mac OS X and i thought it was interesting lol

Last edited by medians (March 20, 2026 14:57:51)

mtnif
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Classic Mac OS/Rhapsody topic

bump
mtnif
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Classic Mac OS/Rhapsody topic

bump
medians
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Classic Mac OS/Rhapsody topic

Bringing this topic up.
BigNate469
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Classic Mac OS/Rhapsody topic

The original Mac didn't have much ROM space, to the point where they even had a mascot in the works that never saw the light of day because they literally didn't have enough space left to add an image. It still exists, printed on a prototype Mac motherboard PCB, which is presumably somewhere at either Apple Park or one of the Infinite Loop buildings.

Also, as a result of having so little space, the code was optimized to take up as little space as possible, which made it really hard to maintain and lead to Apple looking for alternatives in the mid 1990s, resulting in their purchase of NeXT (for their OS, NeXTSTEP) and Steve Jobs' return to Apple.

Last edited by BigNate469 (April 30, 2026 01:27:18)

medians
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Classic Mac OS/Rhapsody topic

Bringing this topic up
Jonathan50
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Classic Mac OS/Rhapsody topic

Here's the GCC toolchain to use for classic MacOS – https://github.com/autc04/Retro68

Thanks to Carbon you can (if you like) run the same program on classic Mac OS and OS X <= 10.6. Unfortunately I've found programming and debugging to be a real pain the neck. My app works fully under OS X but with OS 9 it freezes when you click away and go back, and when I added multithreading with Multiprocessing Services the whole OS freezes after a bit or you get “an error of type 2” and I have no clue why… so I'm probably gonna give up on Carbon development and just target Cocoa
Jonathan50
Scratcher
1000+ posts

Classic Mac OS/Rhapsody topic

BigNate469 wrote:

The original Mac didn't have much ROM space, to the point where they even had a mascot in the works that never saw the light of day because they literally didn't have enough space left to add an image. It still exists, printed on a prototype Mac motherboard PCB, which is presumably somewhere at either Apple Park or one of the Infinite Loop buildings.

Also, as a result of having so little space, the code was optimized to take up as little space as possible, which made it really hard to maintain and lead to Apple looking for alternatives in the mid 1990s, resulting in their purchase of NeXT (for their OS, NeXTSTEP) and Steve Jobs' return to Apple.
On the other hand, the Mac 128K is pretty awesome IMO for having a basically 32-bit (or “16/32-bit” apparently) 68000 processor in 1984. (When the C64 and like were all 8 bit and IBM PCs were 16 bit.) The same CPU family that literal UNIX workstations of the 80's had in the era where there was a dichotomy between expensive businessy workstations and your comparatively flimsy home computer which wasn't meant for multitasking.
Humble_banana
Scratcher
100+ posts

Classic Mac OS/Rhapsody topic

rdococ wrote:

Classic Mac OS was certainly interesting.

The original Macintosh didn't have the RAM for multitasking, so the OS was built to run one application at a time and each application had most of the system's memory. When multitasking was added, each app had to be given a fixed amount of memory as they didn't “ask for more memory” like programs on modern systems do. This resulted in a lot of bugs and crashes.

Rhapsody is actually an early version of Mac OS X, built on top of the NeXTSTEP operating system which had much better multitasking capabilities. It looks similar to Classic because they didn't have the Aqua theme ready yet, so they ported the Platinum theme over from Mac OS 8-9.
Also the RAM on classic Mac OS wasn't protected, so if you crashed one app you crashed the whole Mac.
I always multitask so classic Mac OS is probably not for me. Right now, I'm in advanced topics, watching the news on TV and researching about IE on classic Mac OS (20 wikipedia tabs) XD

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