Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser
pagetable.comOne interesting outcome of Apple going with NeXT instead of being able to deliver Copland or failing to agree with Gassé on Be's acquisition, is that both platforms were heavily based on C++, and following Apple's culture, very little UNIX into them.
So who knows if Apple would have managed to make it, without Jobs, or the UNIX to sell to Linux folks that wanted a shinny laptop back in 2000's, to the point I have attended FOSDEM editions where that was more macOS than GNU/Linux on the corridors.
As a long time apple fan, Copland and what may have been occupies far more of my mind than is reasonable. But I never thought I’d actually get a chance to touch it. This is awesome to see.
I got this working a few years ago on era-appropriate hardware. It was awful -- unstable and crashy. There were glimpses of what they were trying for, but it was painfully obvious they were a long way from even the stability of 7.5. I'm sure it was a tough call, but whoever decided to axe it made the right one. Besides, if it had succeeded, they might not have bought NeXT and we might not have gotten OS X!
I was at WWDC in 1996. Each presentation showing off a new feature of Copeland required booting a custom build of the binary, and even then it was flakey as hell because it didn't implement proper memory protection. I vividly remember getting a sudden realisation that Copeland was never going to ship.
The decision to axe it and go with NeXT was widely attributed to Ellen Hancock (RIP)
According to her Wikipedia page she wanted to go for Solaris and was against acquiring NeXT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Hancock#:~:text=was%20ag...
Based on what has been reported, I don’t think it was all that tough a call to axe it. What to do after that has hard but cancelling Copeland was an obvious decision to make.
Oof, that hit me right in the nostalgia - I grew up with that style of Macintosh UI and miss it quite a lot.
(and also, how cool is it that we can run whole computers in our web browsers, just like that!)
If that hit you in the nostalgia, this is going to outright blow your nostalgia off its feet:
Using a home PC without an internet connection in the 90s, I would basically do laps of the entire OS, looking at every app/window/dialog, searching for novel stuff. That's what exploring one of these feels like!
Yes! I knew every dialog and setting by heart.
Insane, I've never used those versions of macos before.
I’d kill to see Project Star Trek but well never see that.
For those who don’t know it was Apple’s port to Intel before they decided that PPC was the way forward after m68k.
I wouldn't be so pessimistic.
There are a few copies of late shell builds floating around in private collections that have release predicated on the end of someone's legal liability (shall we euphemistically say). I don't know about complete system images, though.
And those guys are all getting up there in years.
Oh really? I had assumed it lost long long ago. Since it never got past internal demo (and use in PPC in some ways) I just didn’t think there would be enough copies of it to not get lost very quickly.
> Since it never got past internal demo (and use in PPC in some ways)…
For anyone who might not know, parts of it did forcefully and successfully escape containment. Core Mac Toolbox APIs originally created for Star Trek (like the portable C implementation of QuickDraw 2D) were installed on hundreds of millions of PCs as QTML, which QuickTime for Windows was built on, which was in turn a requirement for iTunes for Windows. QTML on Rhapsody was also the PoC for Carbon for Mac OS X, with ClarisWorks as the guinea pig.
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... (see page 28)
Right. I know they used the BIOS rewrite and way of keeping it in memory to base the PPC code on to get a jumpstart because it was already done and useful.
But it was never released as an x86 version, not even to developers. And by the time OS X went to Intel they were on a totally different codebase so I expect little if any code survived that.
> Since it never got past internal demo
it was a joint venture with novell and caldera employees had exposure to the resources, a year or so after the project fell apart.
> just didn’t think there would be enough copies of it to not get lost very quickly
a lot more people had exposure to it than you'd think. it sounds very interesting to us, but honestly, it was probably pretty obvious to everyone involved that it was a bad idea unless apple was serious about dropping ppc
It wasn’t about dropping PPC. It was a project that was killed because they moved to PPC instead of Intel.
It would be sort of interesting, but would it be a lot different from the CHRP version?
Edit: Yes, and I was never aware of Novell's part in all of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project#Architecture
> DingusPPC does not take patches written with the help of AI, so maybe someone wants to re-do these fixes based on the explanations in the commit messages. (The patches for this wasm version are on this branch.)
Oh goodie! Another fork for my fork collection :)
Copland is such an interesting glimpse into an alternate future. One where Apple got its early-90s management problems sufficiently under control, to transition classic MacOS into a modern operating system without adopting the full NeXT lineage
Very cool, I've been using macos so long but am also young enough to forget & finding it surprising just how long that monochrome watch pointer has been around.
Its fun playing around and seeing how much has stayed the same in desktops since then, and so far the most surprising thing to me was that a scrollable text area does not re-render the text as you move the scroll bar with your mouse
Totally makes sense that it wouldn't be worth the cycles back then, but its one of the few things that was actually surprising to me today
I am so grateful that I can play with Copland. I was the ultimate fan boy back it the day. My first computer was an Apple ][ and we had the first Macintosh at home. All the mac fans were desperate to get a reentrant multithreaded system that didn’t let a rogue application take down the system. That and virtual memory were desperately needed. The UI is what made it all worth it, so clean and comprehensible. You always knew what was where and what felt like complete mastery of the system. MacOSX was a welcome change but it was never as comfortable or friendly or even as responsive as the original. The original mac mouse latency is still better and any system in common use today.
It's crazy that an emulated version of a famously-buggy alpha OS running in a browser is more responsive than the host OS, but there you go. These Copland windows open at lightning speed in comparison to Golden Gate.
> That and virtual memory were desperately needed
Didn't system 7 have virtual memory, at least for systems with a MMU? I seem to recall some applications that wouldn't run if it was enabled and also wouldn't run if you didn't have enough available ram, but I don't think I understood how to actually close applications on Mac when I ran into these... I certainly didn't know how to selectively run only the extensions needed either.... sometimes I managed to get whatever game to run on the macs in the middle school computer lab, but mostly I didn't, and had to spend the lunch period looking through cd-rom encylopedias instead.
Mac OS 7 “Virtual Memory” was just the swap file. Fundamentally classic Mac OS had a flat memory layout with special hooks defined that did not allow for virtual memory as more commonly defined. Multiprocessing came in asymmetric and symmetric forms but really wasn’t terribly useful until 8.5/8.6 and later but by that time Mac OS X was about to show up which solved all these issues.
Yes I should have been more precise about the virtual memory. There was something like it that could swap to disk (in os 8 i think). Anyone remember RAMDoubler? It wasn't anything like the UNIX VM that came with MacOSX.
I want to recommend the excellent Designed in California podcast, which has a ongoing series about the switch to macOS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN3U3QCwL9g&list=PLOOjdnfSl3...
Maybe we will be able to experience Taligents CommonPoint one day in the browser too.
Cool stuff.
What about the enterprise version (https://lain.wiki/images/5/53/CoplandOS.png), though? :^)
Exactly what I thought of when I saw the article title.
Was so disappointed when they shut that project down in its infancy.
It looked further along than I expected. I remember hearing that they were having a hell of a time making it a modern os with proper multitasking etc.
What I'd really like to see, is Apple and Microsoft dedicating at least 1 person each (or even just part of their time), to meaningfully engage with the retro community about their company's older operating systems. Maybe fix some old bugs or write/port some newer apps to those OSes... or teach how to code/debug with period-correct software... something, anything, would be most welcome.
If retro win2k worked, microslop would not sell another copy of win11/12/whatever
Seems to work just fine: https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...
Has anyone gotten it to crash yet?
I was really curious to see what Gerbils! is in the Applications folder, but that just triggers a hard lock up after the splash screen. I see the menus are "Environment", "Rendering" and "Camera" though.
Gerbils! is a demo app for QuickDraw 3D where gerbils are racing on a roller coaster track (or similar…it’s been a few decades). It existed for classic Mac OS too (I remember playing it on a 6100)
Speed run to game over by simply opening the text editor.
that does seem to be its main function