This is all i could find and i got it from phar0e's site i believe.

"Shortly after this time (March I believe) a new "state of the step" report was released by the dev team. It spoke of the still unreleased .24.6 and the dev team was still planning (at this time) to get it out and off their back. The report went on to detail plans for the now infamous "raptor" and "phoenix" projects. Phoenix was the code name for the .25.0 strain of Litestep. Raptor was a shell core services thingy that in theory any shell could run from\to. Not sure exactly how to explain that, but anyway it was a joint project between the LS devs and the Geoshell dev. It was a bold ambitious new direction with much promise but also required much in the way of development time and expertise. Another direction that was laid out was the separation of Litestep's core files from the UI modules (ie: popup, wharf, shortcuts, etc.). That direction has remained even till today. Despite that, work has continued on those UI modules and several alternative ones have been developed as well."

Of course that was in 2001, Pretty vague, anyone else want to enlighten me, im actually kind of interested in this.