Emulating Mac OS X Server 1.2

Before Mac OS X 10.0 and it’s Developer Preview, the first public appearance of Mac OS X was Server 1.0, codename Rhapsody, which was released in March 1999.

This is the first time we can see the descendent of the NeXTSTEP operating system dressed up in a Mac-like theme. I was able to get Server 1.2 running in QEMU.

Instead of the logo and progress bar, our boot screen is a text console.

I suppose this would be the first piece of software that allows you to log in to your Mac as root.

Instead of Finder we have Workspace Manager.

The Server 1.x releases didn’t yet have the Carbon framework, so only newly written apps using Yellow Box (which became Cocoa) were supported. OmniWeb was one of the few apps that could run in this environment.

The Apache web server is included out of the box.

Check out how this was marketed on Apple’s website in 1999. Some of the notable features are the Mach BSD kernel, POSIX compatible APIs, and 100% pure Java. Technologies to enable web serving were also emphasized, such as Apache, QuickTime Streaming, and WebObjects.

Let’s not forget, a virtualized copy of Mac OS 8 is present.

There you have it, Mac OS X Server 1.2! The 1.0 release debuted at a price of $499 and was met with a poor reception. Even in 1999, I can’t imagine that there was much of a market willing to pay this price to host websites and run Unix network applications on Apple hardware. Despite how impractical it might have been in its time, it is an interesting piece of history showing a critical step of the evolution of NeXTSTEP into the Mac OS X we are familiar with today.