Copland (operating System) - Development

Development

The Copland project was first announced in March 1995. Parts of Copland, most notably an early version of the new file system, were demonstrated at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in May 1995. Apple also promised that a beta release of Copland would be ready by the end of the year, for full release in early 1996. Gershwin would follow the next year. Throughout the year, Apple released a number of 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. By the end of the year, however, the developer release was nowhere in sight.

As had happened in the past during the development of Blue/Pink, developers within Apple soon started abandoning their own projects in order to work on the new system. Middle management and project leaders fought back; they would claim that their project was vital to the success of the system, and move it into the Copland development stream—that way it could not be canceled and their employees removed to work on Copland. This process took on momentum over the next year.

"Anytime they saw something sexy it had to go into the OS," said Jeffrey Tarter, publisher of the software industry newsletter Softletter. "There were little groups all over Apple doing fun things that had no earthly application to Apple's product line." 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. Moreover, this Sisyphean pattern persisted at a time when the company could scarcely afford to miss a step.

Soon the project looked less like a new operating system and more like a huge collection of new technologies; QuickDraw GX, SOM and OpenDoc became core components of the system, while completely unrelated technologies like a new file management dialog box (the "open dialog") and "themes" support appeared as well. The feature list grew much faster than the features could be completed, a classic case of creeping featuritis.

An industry executive noted that "The game is to cut it down to the three or four most compelling features as opposed to having hundreds of nice-to-haves, I'm not sure that's happening."

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. I just hope it ships in 1997."