Well it's actually NOT OS 9 based at all... It looks like it, but it's something else.
Rhapsody is a
OpenStep API based based GUI...
You see after Steve Jobs got kicked out of Apple he started a company to take Unix and make a great interface to go with it. So he started a company called
NextStep that built special purpose machines that were able to knock the socks off of the PCs aviable at the time.
It was based on the free software BSD Unix OS and it ran a Mach (microkernel) kernel.
However it was very expensive.
Later on after bad hardware sales it was ported to x86 machines. However by that time Windows 3.11 was established and even though it was superior in every conceviable way to Microsoft Windows, it never got popular.
Meanwhile Apple was furiously trying to build a new OS to replace the aging OS 7 stuff which lacks most of the niceties of a modern OS such as good memory managment. One big flop it tried to do was something refered to as "Copland" which was suppose to be OS 8. But it didn't work out and they did the best they could to modernize OS 7 and eventually released that as the real OS 8.
So then NextStep released the OpenStep as a open standards OS and Jobs was eventually bought back into the Apple fold...
So Apple worked on it's Unix replacement based on NextStep/Openstep for a long long time, but it never quite worked out. That's what this Rhapsody stuff is.
It wasn't until they incorporated more BSD code and created the open source OS Darwin which they used for the basis of OS X. Without using the BSD/Linux development community that has built up over the past few years OS X would of never happenned.
So OS 7 ---> OS 8 (plus probably a bit of Copland) ---> OS 9 ---> OS X's Carbon API
NextStep ---> OpenStep ---> Rhapsody ---> OS X's Cocoa API
From
Apple's website:
Application Frameworks
Xcode Mac OS X includes a variety of rich application frameworks, built on top of the traditional UNIX APIs, to support developers in many different communities. Developers can create Aqua user interfaces for Cocoa, Carbon, AppleScript and Java applications with the included XCode development environment. Cocoa is a set of object-oriented frameworks designed for rapid application development, making it easy to add rich Aqua interfaces to existing UNIX software or to create entirely new applications. Carbon provides a gentle migration path for developers who have moved their applications from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. AppleScript lets you create your own applications that automate application commands, information retrieval and repetitive tasks. Java 2 Standard Edition v.1.4.1 on Mac OS X is fully-compliant, highly-optimized, and tightly integrated with the native look-and-feel, making it easy to run standards-based Java applications right out of the box.
NextStep's GUI was something else, too. It was based on Postscript...
They took that, modernized it, made it hardware accelerated and that's the basis of OS X's GUI Aqua.
Linux itself has a couple OpenStep based X window managers/desktop enviroments like
GnuStep. They could of been something very cool in themselves, but their development has been eclipsed heavily by
Gnome and
KDE.
edit:
GNUStep framework, my mistake.
And actually I read somewere that it's possible to port modern Cocoa applications to run in Linux's version of Openstep, but it's usually not worth it because Apple does not document much of how Cocoa's internals work. If they did then it would be possible to make the GnuStep run some OS X applications without too much trouble and visa versa.
you can find stuff like that here and there on mailing lists. All pretty interesting stuff to a geek curious about OS X.
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