Copland (operating system)
Over the next several years, previews of Copland garnered much press, introducing the Mac audience to operating system concepts such as object orientation, crash-proofing, and multitasking.
Programs that are not in the foreground are periodically given short bits of time to run, but as before, the entire process is controlled by the applications, not the operating system.
Adding greatly to the severity of the problem is the patching mechanism used to add functions to the operating system, known as CDEVs and INITs or Control Panels and Extensions.
[5] The Copland system as a whole consists of the combination of Nukernel, various servers, and a suite of application support libraries to provide implementations of the well-known classic Macintosh programming interface.
[8][page needed] New applications written with Copland in mind, are able to directly communicate with the system servers and thereby gain many advantages in terms of performance and scalability.
Apple suggested that larger programs could place their user interface in a normal Macintosh application, which then start worker threads externally.
In March 1988,[a] technical middle managers at Apple held an offsite meeting to plan the future course of Mac OS development.
On April 12, 1991, Apple CEO John Sculley performed a secret demonstration of Pink running on a PS/2 Model 70 to a delegation from IBM.
During the early 1990s, Apple released a series of major new packages to the system; among them are QuickDraw GX, Open Transport, OpenDoc, PowerTalk, and many others.
Problems with stability, which had existed even with small patches, grew along with the size and requirements of these packages, and by the mid-1990s the Mac had a reputation for instability and constant crashing.
[6] As the stability of the operating system collapsed, the ready answer was that Taligent would fix this with all its modern foundation of full reentrance, preemptive multitasking, and protected memory.
By 1994, the press buzz surrounding the upcoming release of Windows 95 started to crescendo, often questioning Apple's ability to respond to the challenge it presented.
In the first stage, the existing system would be moved on top of a new kernel-based OS with built-in support for multitasking[26] and protected memory.
[34] Throughout the year, Apple released several mock-ups to various magazines showing what the new system would look like, and commented continually that the company was fully committed to this project.
What resulted was a vicious cycle: As the addition of features pushed back deadlines, Apple was compelled to promise still more functions to justify the costly delays.
"[37] As the "package" grew, testing it became increasingly difficult and engineers were commenting as early as 1995 that Apple's announced 1996 release date was hopelessly optimistic: "There's no way in hell Copland ships next year.
"[37] In mid-1996, information was leaked that Copland would have the ability to run applications written for other operating systems, including Windows NT.
Some analysts projected that this ability would increase Apple's penetration into the enterprise market, others said it was "game over" and was only a sign of the Mac platform's irrelevancy.
[39] He repeatedly stated that it was the only focus of Apple engineering and that it would ship to developers in a few months, with a full release planned for late 1996.
It does not yet support text editing, so you couldn’t actually do anything except open and view documents (any dialog field that needed something typed into it was blank and dead).
One of the groups most surprised by the announcement was Apple's own hardware team, who had been waiting for Copland to allow the PowerPC to be natively represented, unburdened of software legacy.
Members of Apple's software QA team joked that, given current resources and the number of bugs in the system, they could clear the program for shipping sometime around 2030.
"[41] Hoping to salvage the situation, Amelio hired Ellen Hancock away from National Semiconductor to take over engineering from Ike Nassi[42] and get Copland development back on track.
[43] After a few months on the job, Hancock came to the conclusion that the situation was hopeless; given current development and engineering, she believed Copland would never ship.
Apple officially canceled Copland in August 1996,[34] The CD envelopes for the developer's release had been printed, but the discs had not been mastered.
To address the aging infrastructure underneath these technologies, Amelio suggested looking outside the company for an unrelated new operating system.
[44] After lengthy discussions with Be and rumors of a merger with Sun Microsystems, many were surprised at Apple's December 1996 announcement that they were purchasing NeXT and bringing Steve Jobs on in an advisory role.
"[46] The project to port NeXTSTEP to the Macintosh platform was named Rhapsody and was to be the core of Apple's cross-platform operating system strategy.
This would in effect open the Windows application market to Macintosh developers as they could license the library from Apple for distribution with their product, or depend on an existing installation.
[48] With the return of Jobs, this rebranding to version 8 also allowed Apple to exploit a legal loophole to terminate third-party manufacturers' licenses to System 7 and effectively shut down the Macintosh clone market.
