In the mid–1990s, Apple worked on an operating system called Copland, which was announced but never commercially released because of project management issues and feature creep. Parts of Copland were eventually included in Mac OS 7.6 and Mac OS 8, but it was so problematic as a whole that Apple nixed it before it was finished.
Michael Steil, who works to reverse engineer vintage hardware and software, was recently able to get Copland running in emulation. He modified the open-source Power Mac emulator DingusPPC, and he said it took 11 patches to get Copland up and running. He has a browser version of Copland you can try on his website, and shared the patches needed to boot Copland.
During Copland's development, Apple released three beta versions. The last beta was D11E4, which is what Steil got to work. He said Copland is "notoriously hard to run on real hardware," and wasn't previously available in emulation.
After Apple canceled Copland in August 1996, it looked outside the company for a new operating system. That led to the purchase of NeXT in 1997 and the return of Steve Jobs. NeXTSTEP, NeXT's operating system, was the precursor to Mac OS X.
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Anyone remember Aaron? The extension that was meant to make os9 look like Copland while we waited? All I remember is it made the window opening animations spiral out.
This story reminds me of what happened to Windows Longhorn. Microsoft was trying to do too much, including introducing a brand new file system called WinFS. They settled on a version of Windows Server as a baseline for what we know as Vista.
I've tried it on the browser, and after a couple of clicks, it just froze.
Damn, if this was the performance of the real thing, I can understand how Apple was at the brink of bankruptcy in those years...
Yeah, Mac OS had become legacy software by that time. Mac OS 8.6 was pretty much what Copland was going to be feature wise but not fully implemented. They were even in talks with Microsoft to base a new Mac OS on NT. 🤢
Apple's first foldable iPhone, with a book-style design featuring a 5.4-inch outer display and a 7.6-inch inner display with a minimal crease down the middle.
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