Copland (operating System) - Cancellation

Cancellation

Later that summer, the situation was no better. Amelio complained that Copland was "just a collection of separate pieces, each being worked on by a different team ... that were expected to magically come together somehow." Hoping to salvage the situation, Amelio hired Ellen Hancock away from National Semiconductor to take over engineering and get Copland development back on track.

After a few months on the job, Hancock came to the conclusion that the situation was hopeless; given current development and engineering, she felt Copland would never ship. Instead, she suggested that the various user-facing technologies in Copland be rolled out in a series of staged releases, instead of a single big release. To address the aging infrastructure below these technologies, Hancock suggested looking outside the company for an entirely new operating system. Apple officially canceled Copland in August 1996. While the CD envelopes for the developer's release had been printed, the discs themselves had not been mastered.

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. Amelio quipped that they "choose Plan A instead of Plan Be." The project to port OpenStep to the Macintosh platform was named Rhapsody and was eventually released as Mac OS X, which, prior to the Intel release of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), also used the 'blue box' concept in the form of Classic to run applications written for older versions of Mac OS.

Following Hancock's plan, development of System 7.5 continued, with a number of technologies originally slated for Copland being incorporated into the base OS. Apple embarked on a buying campaign, acquiring the rights to various third-party system enhancements and integrating them into the OS. The Extensions Manager, hierarchical Apple menu, collapsing windows, the menu bar clock, sticky notes — all were developed outside of Apple. Stability and performance were improved by Mac OS 7.6, which dropped the "System" moniker. Eventually, many features developed for Copland, including the new Finder and support for themes (the default Platinum was the only theme included) were rolled into Mac OS 7.7, which was rebranded as Mac OS 8.

With the return of Jobs, this rebranding 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. Later, Mac OS 8.1 finally added the new filesystem and Mac OS 8.6 updated the nanokernel to handle preemptive tasks. Its interface was Multiprocessing Services 2.x and later, but there was still no process separation and the system still used cooperative multitasking between processes. Even a process that was Multiprocessing Services-aware still had a portion that ran in the blue box, a task that also ran all single-threaded programs (and the only task that could run 68k code).

A number of features originally seen in Copland demos, including its advanced Find command, built-in Internet browser, and support for video-conferencing, have reappeared in recent releases of Mac OS X as Spotlight, Safari, and iChat AV, respectively, although the implementation and user interface for each feature is completely different.