The former notebook pioneer Toshiba has long since left the market – and hardly anyone speaks of Apple’s Rhapsody OS either. Reason enough for a hobbyist to unite two worlds and create a Hackintosh based on the tiny Toshiba Libretto sub-notebook and the old Apple system. Rhapsody is the ancestor of Mac OS X, demonstrated for the first time at the MacWorld Expo in January 1997. The idea was to combine parts of the Copland development with the NeXT operating system. The project already consisted of a UNIX substructure, whereas the interface was based on Mac OS 8. Rhapsody should run on both X86 and PowerPC computers, System 8 could be run in a “blue box”. Apple took a different path than originally planned, because Rhapsody did not come onto the market as a kind of bridging system. Instead, Apple put all its energy into Mac OS X and also dropped its Intel support.
Rhapsody on a miniature notebook
Given the x86 support, said hobbyist named Action Retro was able to install the age-old Apple system on the Toshiba Libretto. Its processor with 75 MHz, 32 MB RAM and an 800 MB hard disk was hopelessly overwhelmed with Windows 98, Windows 95 ran with noises – it was mockingly said that this was the most nonsensical Pentium laptop on the market. As Retro adds with a smile: Thanks to his project, he managed to make the libretto even less meaningful.
The installation was carried out by removing the (impressively loud) hard drive in favor of an IDE-to-SD adapter to move the system from a modern computer to a virtual drive via the command line. This actually worked and the Toshiba libretto could be booted with Rhapsody. The following video describes the process and shows Rhapsody in action:
The Toshiba Libretto with Apple Rhapsody is clearly unique and a great curiosity. As mentioned, the utility value is close to zero – apart from the fact that Action Retro’s handicraft project shows you computer history in two ways.