The Apple II came out in 1977, 43 years ago.
1998 therefore roughly marks the halfway point between the dawn of mainstream personal computers and the present day. I dare say 1998 was a very long time ago, in PC years.
"There was a time—recent enough that it was within most of our lifetimes—when most computers had less than 200 MB of RAM total. You could read on those computers just fine."
Most ofthe gnu utils still work perfectly fine many of them were written in late 70’s and 80’s , apple itself ships , in the latest OSX , posix utilities from late 80’s versions for GPL reasons.
Perhaps it is not fair comparison , utilities are not the same as an OS . unix or Linux from the same era may not work anymore as well.
In addition to being an entire OS as you mentioned, Rhapsody was a "developer preview". The final version was called "Mac OS X Server 1.0". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0
Rhapsody was more of a quick and dirty port of NeXTSTEP to Mac hardware than a version of OS X.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP
>Rhapsody came out in 1998.
NeXTSTEP is from the late 80's.
The version he tested was from 1998. Similar to how Windows NT came out in 1993, but the current version (Windows 10) has a few added capabilities since.
At first, I couldn't get it to boot—it kept kernel panicking, and I couldn't figure out why. After a bit of Googling, I found the problem—I'd given the VM too much memory. Rhapsody DP2 will not boot if it has access to more than 192 MB of RAM. I assume Apple figured that no one would ever need that much.
Rhapsody came out in 1998. Not really that long ago.