Work with Apple's Rhapsody Operating System which Allows Simultaneous UNIX Program Development, UNIX Program Execution, and PC Application Execution

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.