Swaine's World, May 11, 1998: In his keynote at Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference in San Jose, Interim CEO Steve Jobs announced that Apple was working on a new version of the MacOS that would have preemptive multitasking, protected address spaces, and other features expected in a modern operating system. MacOS X (pronounced "ten") is scheduled for release in the third quarter of 1999.

Mac OS X will represent a merging of Mac OS 8 technology with the technology in Rhapsody, the unreleased operating system that Apple had been developing from the NeXT- acquired OpenStep software. In essence, Rhapsody is scrapped and the NeXT technology will supply the modern operating system foundation that Apple has been looking for for some years. Rhapsody release 1.0 is still scheduled for third-quarter 1998 release, however. In addition, OS 8 will continue to be developed in parallel with OS X for some time. There will apparently be no OS 9.

The new OS is well along in development, if the demos at WWDC are any indication. One demo, showing Adobe Photoshop running on OS X, also spoke to the porting issue. OS X will require some rewriting of applications, since some 2000 current APIs are being eliminated. Apple is predicting that the effort required to move from OS 8 to OS 10 will be comparable to the effort required to move from 68K to PowerPC. Jobs claimed that extensive tests within Apple indicate that it will be possible to move an application to the new OS and get it up and running in a matter of days, and to get it ready to ship in a month or two. The Photoshop rewrite was done in two weeks.

The new, approved programming interface is dubbed Carbon. "All lifeforms will be based on it," Jobs said. It will target the G3 Macs, so older Macs will require OS 8. Apple will post the Carbon spec at its site and is soliciting developer input for it.