Copland
Apple's next generation operating system, which it originally envisioned as "Mac OS 8" was codenamed Copland. It was announced in March 1994 alongside the introduction of the first PowerPC Macs. Apple intended Copland as a completely native PowerPC operating system offering intelligent agents, a microkernel, a customizable interface known as Appearance Manager, hardware abstraction, and a relational database integrated into the Finder. Copland was to be followed by Gershwin, which promised protected memory spaces and full preemptive multitasking. The operating system was intended to be a complete re-write of the Mac OS, and Apple hoped to beat Microsoft Windows 95 to market with a development cycle of just one year.
The Copland development was hampered by countless missed deadlines. The release date was first pushed back to the end of 1995, then to mid-'96, late '96, and finally to the end of 1997. With a dedicated team of 500 software engineers and an annual budget of $250 million, Apple executives began to grow impatient with the project continually falling behind schedule. At the Worldwide Developers Conference in January 1997, Apple CEO Gil Amelio announced that rather than release Copland as a single monolithic release, Copland features would be phased into the Mac OS following a six month release cycle. These updates began with Mac OS 7.6, released during WWDC. Mac OS 8.0, released six months later, continued to integrate Copland technologies into the Mac OS.
In August 1996, Apple Chief Technology Officer, Ellen Hancock, froze development of Copland and Apple began a search for an operating system developed outside the company. This ultimately led to Apple's purchase of NeXT and the development of OS X.
Read more about this topic: Mac OS 8