September 19, 2024

Computer Chronicles – Macintosh Copland

By 1994, Apple’s System 7 operating system was showing some age. Apple had to make some major overhauls to draw attention away from the upcoming Windows 95 operating system, which boasted modern multitasking and dynamic memory allocation.

Copland, a new operating system released in 1996 as System 8, was supposed to be a saving grace. Instead, it was one of the worst IT disasters in history. When you boil it down, Copland failed because it was too ambitious – a sour example of feature creep. Basic everyone at Apple wanted in, and Copland got so bloated that a working version never arrived, even though Apple promised at WWDC 1996 to ship the operating system to developers within months.

Core features of Copland include protected memory, a “live search” in the toolbar, enhanced multitasking, themes, multi-user support, native PowerPC integration and a function to minimize windows by dropping them to the bottom of the screen, included. It was a revolutionary upgrade that never materialized.

In late 1996, Apple announced that it had purchased NeXT and was bringing Steve Jobs back in an advisory role. With the merger, Apple acquired the Unix-based NeXTSTEP operating system, which would become the foundation of Mac OS X. Many of the features set for Copland were incorporated into subsequent versions of Mac OS.

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