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I stand corrected, noob that I am :-)

To repay my debt to slashdot society here is a page that you might find interesting on the subject.

Also... I suspect that it is actually Rhapsody Developer's Release 2. Some of you may remember that Rhapsody was an x86 port of MacOSX Server but was canned after Developer's Release 2.

This is totally unsurprising; Rhapsody, something that was kinda like OSX's ancestor ran on both PPC and x86 Hardware (look here for screenshots). A whole wack of the NeXT and FreeBSD code that is under the hood of OSX runs natively on x86, so I don't think that maintaing code on both architechtures would be that difficult. But seriously, as probably half of the other posters have pointed out, Apple is a hardware company, and the only way you'd be able to run an x86 OSX would be on proprietary Apple hardware.

Besides, as much as people want to slag PPC chips for being slower than x86, they have certain advantages in terms of power use and temperature management which allow Apple to build neat-o computers like the new iMac and the TiBook. And even if neat-o doesn't cut it for the Slashdot crowd, Apple seems to be doing pretty well for themselves selling neat-o.

And even if Apple decided to radically shift their business model to selling OS software for x86 computers, Microsoft would squash that dream pretty quickly, using their agreements with OEMs.

PC Hardware support was very limited, however, and was probably one of the many reasons they decided to drop it.

More inbformation and screen shots of Rhapsody running on an Intel PC here: http://toastytech.com/guis/rhap.html

Actually, apple released an incomplete build of an early development build of OSX compiled for X86 to ADC members sometime around 4 years ago. It was dubbed as the Apple Rhaposody OS Developer Release 3. It was quite intersesting to pick up the similarities between it and OSX. A ton of information, along with screenshots are posted at this site.

It was really a transitional OS which gap between NextSTEP and OSX. It contains both elements of both OSes. Anybody recognize the chess program at the bottom of the page?

First of all, Apple has never strictly enforced the licensing systems they have in place. Nearly all Mac users I've dealt with are lax about it too, usually installing the copy they get with their new computer on their older equipment, or borrowing a copy from a friend.

Uhhh... I think that this applies to all software - not just Apple OSs. This is why the new XP stuff has the online product activation. If Apple followed suit, I don't see how they'd lose any money. The bottom line is that Apple initially planned an OS for x86. Microsoft got scared so they made an "investment" in Apple and then OSX for Intel mysteriously disappears.

OSX on Intel would be extremely profitable for Apple. Unfortunately, I think that Microsoft makes it extremely profitable for Apple's management not to release it.

MS Office pretty much mimicks the old WordPerfect GUI, and OpenOffice follows WordPerfect much more closely than it follows MSO.

I'll say it again, and a bit more bluntly this time: Microsoft has not produced a single innovation with regards to GUI design, even in terms of look-and-feel.

Microsoft Bob was the GUI-ideas that led to such astrophies as Clippy and the Windows XP assistants.

This page shows what can happen when IE is allowed to spread...

They should have used the Java pet instead, just to annoy Sun and make some headlines. :)

hehehe, that Puppy comes from MS BOB so I guess it wasn't a total flop....just had to wait and resurface when more dumb people were using computers.

See old versions of windoze here

Anybody know who gets paid every time one of these is sold? MS? Would be kind of ironic, if so.