Copland (operating system)
Encyclopedia
Copland was a project at Apple Computer to create an updated version of the Macintosh operating system
. It was to have introduced protected memory
, preemptive multitasking
and a number of new underlying operating system features, yet still be compatible with existing Mac software. Development began in 1994 and was underway in earnest by 1995, when the system started to be referred to as System 8 or Mac OS 8.
During development the system accrued new features and the completion date continued to slip into the future. In 1996, Apple's newest CEO, Gil Amelio
, hired Ellen Hancock
away from National Semiconductor
and put her in charge of engineering in an effort to try to get development back on track. Instead, she decided it was best to cancel the project outright and try to find a suitable third-party system to replace it. Development officially ended in August 1996, and after a short search they announced that Apple was buying NeXT
in order to use their NeXTSTEP
operating system as the basis of a new Mac OS.
Hancock also suggested that Apple should work on improving the existing System 7
while the new system matured. This process would eventually lead to the release of an unrelated operating system using the name Mac OS 8
. The new operating system based on NeXTSTEP shipped in 2001 as Mac OS X
.
s; features that seemed simple enough to implement in the short term (like adding color to the user interface
) were written on blue cards, longer-term goals like multitasking on pink cards, and "far out" ideas like an object-oriented file system
on red cards. Development of the ideas contained on the blue and pink cards was to proceed in parallel, and at first the two projects were known simply as "blue" and "pink
". Apple intended to have the "blue" team (which came to call themselves the "Blue Meanies
" after characters in Yellow Submarine) release an updated version of the existing Macintosh operating system in the 1990–1991 timeframe, and the "pink" team to release an entirely new OS around 1993.
The "blue" team delivered what became known as System 7
on May 13, 1991, but the "pink" team suffered from second-system effect
and continued to slip its release into the indefinite future. Some of the reason for this can be traced to problems that would become widespread at Apple as time went on; as "pink" became delayed, engineers on the project jumped ship to work on "blue" instead. This left the "pink" team constantly struggling for staffing and suffering from the problems associated with high employee turnover. Management ignored these sorts of technical development issues, leading to continual problems delivering working products.
At the same time, the recently-released NeXTSTEP
was generating intense interest in the developer world. Features that were originally part of "red" were folded into "pink" and the red project (also known as "Raptor") was eventually cancelled. This problem was also common at Apple during this period; in order to chase the next big thing, managers would allow new features to be added to their projects with little oversight, leading to enormous problems with feature creep. In the case of "pink", development eventually slowed to the point that the project appeared moribund.
demoed Pink running on an PS/2 Model 70
to a delegation from IBM
in a top-secret mission. The system was not fully functional, but looked a lot like System 7
running on a PC. IBM proved extremely interested and over the next months the two companies formed an alliance to further development of the system. These efforts became public in early 1992, under the new name "Taligent
". At the time, Sculley summed up his concerns with Apple's own ability to ship Pink when he stated "We want to be a major player in the computer industry, not a niche player. The only way to do that is to work with another major player."
Infighting at the new joint company was legendary and the problems with Pink within Apple soon appeared to be minor in comparison. Apple employees made T-shirts graphically displaying their prediction that the result would be an IBM-only project, a prediction that came true on December 19, 1995 when Apple officially pulled out of the project. IBM continued working with Taligent, and eventually released its application development portions under the new name "CommonPoint". This saw little interest and the project disappeared from IBM's catalogs within months.
that was responsible for mediating application access to limited resources like the CPU or hard drive. Instead, applications were placed in control of the entire system, using the libraries to handle common chores. Originally intended to support a single user running a single application at a time on a non-networked monochrome machine with a single floppy disk
drive for storage and printing to a dot matrix
printer, placing the applications in control of the system made sense, and allowed the developers to improve performance compared to a system with a kernel. The introduction of MultiFinder
in 1987 greatly confused matters, placing the current application in control of not only the system, but other applications as well.
Further complicating matters was the way that new functionality was added to the system through the early 1990s. As many of these were optional expansions, they were generally added through a patching mechanism known as CDEV
s and INIT
s. Third party developers also made use of this mechanism to add features like screensavers and a hierarchal Apple menu
, independently of Apple. Some of these third-party control panels became almost universal, like the popular After Dark screensaver package.
This patching mechanism had no central control, so it was not at all difficult for two extensions to interfere with each other. As they were operating at the level of the underlying OS (equivalent to a kernel patch on a modern system), these often resulted in system crashes. These sorts of problems would normally be protected against through the use of protected memory of some sort. However, as the original model of the Mac was a single-user system, the developers had made a fateful choice to share certain important bits of data between the applications and the system libraries. This was widely used within QuickDraw
for instance, which allowed the system to have reasonable performance in spite of the limited hardware it ran on. This made the addition of a protected memory system very difficult - not impossible, but at the price of greatly reduced performance.
While Taligent collapsed, system development had continued on in a business as usual fashion. During the early 1990s Apple released a series of major new packages to the system; among them were QuickDraw GX
, OpenTransport, OpenDoc
, PowerTalk and many others. Some of these were larger than the operating system itself. Problems with stability that 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.
which reached demo quality. Invariably these projects were cancelled for one reason or another. However, while Apple was struggling to modernize their system, others were not suffering from the same problems. By 1994 the press buzz surrounding the upcoming release of Windows 95
started to grow to a crescendo, often with questions about Apple's response to the challenge it presented. The press turned on the company, often introducing Apple's new projects as failures in the making.
Given this pressure, the collapse of Taligent, and the growing problems with the existing operating system, after System 7.5 was released in autumn 1994, Apple management decided that the decade-old operating system had run its course. A new system addressing these problems was needed, and soon. In order to regain the trust of the press and the industry as a whole, the project simply had to ship.
Since so much of the existing system would be difficult to re-write, Apple developed a two-stage approach to the problem. In the first stage, the existing system would be moved on top of a new kernel-based OS with built-in support for multitasking and protected memory. The existing libraries, like QuickDraw, would take too long to be re-written for the new system and would not be converted, so user-facing programs would not be able to take advantage of these features. Once the new kernel in place and this basic upgrade was released, development would move on to re-writing the older libraries into new forms that could run directly over the new kernel. At that point, applications would gain the modern features that were available from Microsoft
in Windows NT
since 1993.
As System 7.5 was code-named
"Mozart", the next-generation operating system that was intended to address the looming architectural issues was dubbed "Copland" after composer Aaron Copland
. The follow-on system, "Gershwin", would complete the process of moving the entire system to the new platform.
named Nukernel
, which would handle basic tasks such as application startup and memory management, leaving all other tasks to a series of semi-special programs known as servers. For instance, networking and file services would not be provided by the kernel itself, but by servers which would be sent requests though interapplication communications
. Copland consisted of the combination of Nukernel, various servers, and a suite of application support libraries to provide implementations of the well-known Macintosh programming interface.
Application services would be offered through a single program known officially as the "Cooperative Macintosh Toolbox environment", but universally referred to as the blue box. The blue box encapsulated an existing System 7 operating system inside a single process and address space
. Mac programs would run inside the blue box much as they did under System 7, as 'co-operative tasks' that used the non-re-entrant Toolbox calls. A worst-case scenario was that an application in the blue box would crash, taking down the entire box with it. This would not result in the system as a whole going down, however, and the blue box could be restarted.
New applications, those written with Copland in mind, would be able to directly communicate with the system servers and thereby gain many advantages in terms of performance and scalability. They could also communicate with the kernel to “spin off” separate applications or threads, which would run as separate processes in protected memory, as in most modern operating systems. However, these separate applications could not use non-re-entrant calls like QuickDraw, and thus could have no user interface. Apple suggested that larger programs could place their user interface in a normal Macintosh application, which would then start "worker threads" externally.
Another key feature of Copland was that it would be completely PowerPC
"native". System 7 had been ported to the PowerPC (PPC) with great success; large portions of the system ran in PPC code, including both high-level functionality, such as the majority of the user interface "toolbox" managers, and low-level functionality, such as interrupt management. However there was enough 68k code left in the system, and especially user applications, that the operating system had to map some data between the two environments. In particular, every call into the Mac OS required a mapping between the 68k's interrupt system and the PPCs. Removing these mappings would greatly improve general system performance; at WWDC'96, engineers claimed that the performance of system calls would be as much as 50% faster.
Copland was also based on the newly-defined Common Hardware Reference Platform
, or CHRP, which standardized the Mac hardware to the point where it could be built by different companies and run other operating systems (Solaris and AIX were two of many mentioned). This was a common theme at the time; many companies were forming groups to define standardized platforms to offer an alternative to the "Wintel
" platform that was rapidly becoming dominant - examples included 88open
, ACE
and the AIM alliance
.
The challenge in Copland would be getting all of this functionality to fit into an ordinary Mac. System 7.5 already used up about 2.5 megabyte
s (MB) of RAM, and at the time this was a significant portion of the total RAM in most machines. Copland would be running what was essentially a complete copy of System 7.5 (in the blue box) and an entirely separate operating system running “under” it as well. Copland therefore was to use a Mach
-inspired memory management system and rely extensively upon shared libraries, with the goal being for Copland to be only some 50% larger than 7.5.
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.
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."
, used the keynote to talk almost exclusively about Copland, now known as System 8. He repeatedly stated that it was the only focus of Apple engineering and that it would ship to developers at the end of summer with a full release planned for late fall. Very few, if any, demos of the running system were shown at the conference. Instead, various pieces of the technology and user interface that would go into the package (such as a new file management dialog) were demonstrated. Little of the core system's technology was demonstrated and the new file system that had been shown a year earlier was absent.
There was one way to actually use the new operating system, by signing up for time in the developer labs. This did not go well:
After a number of people at the show complained about the microkernel's lack of sophistication, notably the lack of symmetric multiprocessing
— a feature that would be exceedingly difficult to add on to an already existing system within a few months — Amelio came back on stage and announced that they would be adding that to the feature list.
In August 1996, "Developer Release 0" was sent to a small number of selected partners. Far from demonstrating improved stability, it often crashed after doing nothing at all, and was completely unusable for development. In October, Apple moved the target delivery date to 'sometime', hinting that it might be 1997. 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 truly shine. Members of Apple's software QA team suggested, jokingly, that given current resources and the number of bugs in the system they could clear the program for shipping some time around 2030.
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 was 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.
Mac OS
Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...
. It was to have introduced protected memory
Memory protection
Memory protection is a way to control memory access rights on a computer, and is a part of most modern operating systems. The main purpose of memory protection is to prevent a process from accessing memory that has not been allocated to it. This prevents a bug within a process from affecting...
, preemptive multitasking
Computer multitasking
In computing, multitasking is a method where multiple tasks, also known as processes, share common processing resources such as a CPU. In the case of a computer with a single CPU, only one task is said to be running at any point in time, meaning that the CPU is actively executing instructions for...
and a number of new underlying operating system features, yet still be compatible with existing Mac software. Development began in 1994 and was underway in earnest by 1995, when the system started to be referred to as System 8 or Mac OS 8.
During development the system accrued new features and the completion date continued to slip into the future. In 1996, Apple's newest CEO, Gil Amelio
Gil Amelio
Gilbert Frank Amelio is an American technology executive. He grew up in Miami, Florida and received a bachelor's degree, master's degree, and Ph.D. in physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology...
, hired Ellen Hancock
Ellen Hancock
Ellen Hancock is a technology manager from the United States who has worked for IBM and Apple, among others.Hancock was born in the Bronx, New York City and raised in Westchester...
away from National Semiconductor
National Semiconductor
National Semiconductor was an American semiconductor manufacturer, that specialized in analog devices and subsystems,formerly headquartered in Santa Clara, California, USA. The products of National Semiconductor included power management circuits, display drivers, audio and operational amplifiers,...
and put her in charge of engineering in an effort to try to get development back on track. Instead, she decided it was best to cancel the project outright and try to find a suitable third-party system to replace it. Development officially ended in August 1996, and after a short search they announced that Apple was buying NeXT
NeXT
Next, Inc. was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured a series of computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets...
in order to use their NeXTSTEP
NEXTSTEP
NeXTSTEP was the object-oriented, multitasking operating system developed by NeXT Computer to run on its range of proprietary workstation computers, such as the NeXTcube...
operating system as the basis of a new Mac OS.
Hancock also suggested that Apple should work on improving the existing System 7
System 7
System 7 is the name of a Macintosh operating system introduced in 1991.System 7 may also refer to:* System 7 , a British dance/ambient band* System 7 , 1991 album* IBM System/7, a 1970s computer system...
while the new system matured. This process would eventually lead to the release of an unrelated operating system using the name Mac OS 8
Mac OS 8
Mac OS 8 is an operating system that was released by Apple Computer on July 26, 1997. It represented the largest overhaul of the Mac OS since the release of System 7, some six years previously. It puts more emphasis on color than previous operating systems...
. The new operating system based on NeXTSTEP shipped in 2001 as Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
.
Pink
In March 1987, technical middle managers at Apple held an offsite meeting to plan the future course of Mac OS development. Ideas were written on index cardIndex card
An index card consists of heavy paper stock cut to a standard size, used for recording and storing small amounts of discrete data. It was invented by Carl Linnaeus, around 1760....
s; features that seemed simple enough to implement in the short term (like adding color to the user interface
User interface
The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...
) were written on blue cards, longer-term goals like multitasking on pink cards, and "far out" ideas like an object-oriented file system
File system
A file system is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device which contain it. A file system organizes data in an efficient manner and is tuned to the...
on red cards. Development of the ideas contained on the blue and pink cards was to proceed in parallel, and at first the two projects were known simply as "blue" and "pink
Taligent
Taligent was the name of an object-oriented operating system and the company dedicated to producing it...
". Apple intended to have the "blue" team (which came to call themselves the "Blue Meanies
Blue Meanies (Apple Computer)
The Blue Meanies of Apple Computer was an engineering group primarily responsible for the architecture of System 7 during the early and mid 1990s....
" after characters in Yellow Submarine) release an updated version of the existing Macintosh operating system in the 1990–1991 timeframe, and the "pink" team to release an entirely new OS around 1993.
The "blue" team delivered what became known as System 7
System 7 (Macintosh)
System 7 is a single-user graphical user interface-based operating system for Macintosh computers. It was introduced on May 13, 1991 by Apple Computer. It succeeded System 6, and was the main Macintosh operating system until it was succeeded by Mac OS 8 in 1997...
on May 13, 1991, but the "pink" team suffered from second-system effect
Second-system effect
The second-system effect refers to the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to have elephantine, feature-laden monstrosities as their successors. The term was first used by Fred Brooks in his classic The Mythical Man-Month...
and continued to slip its release into the indefinite future. Some of the reason for this can be traced to problems that would become widespread at Apple as time went on; as "pink" became delayed, engineers on the project jumped ship to work on "blue" instead. This left the "pink" team constantly struggling for staffing and suffering from the problems associated with high employee turnover. Management ignored these sorts of technical development issues, leading to continual problems delivering working products.
At the same time, the recently-released NeXTSTEP
NEXTSTEP
NeXTSTEP was the object-oriented, multitasking operating system developed by NeXT Computer to run on its range of proprietary workstation computers, such as the NeXTcube...
was generating intense interest in the developer world. Features that were originally part of "red" were folded into "pink" and the red project (also known as "Raptor") was eventually cancelled. This problem was also common at Apple during this period; in order to chase the next big thing, managers would allow new features to be added to their projects with little oversight, leading to enormous problems with feature creep. In the case of "pink", development eventually slowed to the point that the project appeared moribund.
Taligent
On April 12, 1991, Apple CEO John SculleyJohn Sculley
John Sculley is an American businessman. Sculley was vice-president and president of PepsiCo , until he became CEO of Apple on April 8, 1983, a position he held until leaving in 1993...
demoed Pink running on an PS/2 Model 70
IBM Personal System/2
The Personal System/2 or PS/2 was IBM's third generation of personal computers. The PS/2 line, released to the public in 1987, was created by IBM in an attempt to recapture control of the PC market by introducing an advanced proprietary architecture...
to a delegation from IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
in a top-secret mission. The system was not fully functional, but looked a lot like System 7
System 7
System 7 is the name of a Macintosh operating system introduced in 1991.System 7 may also refer to:* System 7 , a British dance/ambient band* System 7 , 1991 album* IBM System/7, a 1970s computer system...
running on a PC. IBM proved extremely interested and over the next months the two companies formed an alliance to further development of the system. These efforts became public in early 1992, under the new name "Taligent
Taligent
Taligent was the name of an object-oriented operating system and the company dedicated to producing it...
". At the time, Sculley summed up his concerns with Apple's own ability to ship Pink when he stated "We want to be a major player in the computer industry, not a niche player. The only way to do that is to work with another major player."
Infighting at the new joint company was legendary and the problems with Pink within Apple soon appeared to be minor in comparison. Apple employees made T-shirts graphically displaying their prediction that the result would be an IBM-only project, a prediction that came true on December 19, 1995 when Apple officially pulled out of the project. IBM continued working with Taligent, and eventually released its application development portions under the new name "CommonPoint". This saw little interest and the project disappeared from IBM's catalogs within months.
Business as usual
By modern standards, the original Mac OS was not an operating system at all, but a collection of application support libraries. There was nothing equating to a kernelKernel (computing)
In computing, the kernel is the main component of most computer operating systems; it is a bridge between applications and the actual data processing done at the hardware level. The kernel's responsibilities include managing the system's resources...
that was responsible for mediating application access to limited resources like the CPU or hard drive. Instead, applications were placed in control of the entire system, using the libraries to handle common chores. Originally intended to support a single user running a single application at a time on a non-networked monochrome machine with a single floppy disk
Floppy disk
A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic carrier lined with fabric that removes dust particles...
drive for storage and printing to a dot matrix
Dot matrix
A dot matrix is a 2-dimensional array of LED used to represent characters, symbols and images.Typically the dot matrix is used in older computer printers and many digital display devices. In printers, the dots are usually the darkened areas of the paper...
printer, placing the applications in control of the system made sense, and allowed the developers to improve performance compared to a system with a kernel. The introduction of MultiFinder
MultiFinder
MultiFinder was the name of an extension software for the Apple Macintosh, introduced on August 11, 1987 and included with System Software 5. It added the ability to co-operatively multitask between several applications at once – a great improvement over the previous systems, which could only...
in 1987 greatly confused matters, placing the current application in control of not only the system, but other applications as well.
Further complicating matters was the way that new functionality was added to the system through the early 1990s. As many of these were optional expansions, they were generally added through a patching mechanism known as CDEV
Control panel (Mac OS)
Under Mac OS 9 and earlier, a control panel is a small application which enabled the user to modify software and hardware settings such as the sound volume and desktop pattern. Control panels differ from extensions in that they allow the user to specify options, whereas extensions provide the user...
s and INIT
Init
init is a program for Unix-based computer operating systems that spawns all other processes. It runs as a daemon and typically has PID 1. The boot loader starts the kernel and the kernel starts init...
s. Third party developers also made use of this mechanism to add features like screensavers and a hierarchal Apple menu
Apple menu
The Apple menu has been a feature in Apple's Mac OS since its inception. It is the first item on the left hand side of the menu bar. The Apple menu's role has changed throughout the release history of Mac OS, but the menu has always featured a version of the Apple logo.-System 6 and earlier:In...
, independently of Apple. Some of these third-party control panels became almost universal, like the popular After Dark screensaver package.
This patching mechanism had no central control, so it was not at all difficult for two extensions to interfere with each other. As they were operating at the level of the underlying OS (equivalent to a kernel patch on a modern system), these often resulted in system crashes. These sorts of problems would normally be protected against through the use of protected memory of some sort. However, as the original model of the Mac was a single-user system, the developers had made a fateful choice to share certain important bits of data between the applications and the system libraries. This was widely used within QuickDraw
QuickDraw
QuickDraw is the 2D graphics library and associated Application Programming Interface which is a core part of the classic Apple Macintosh operating system. It was initially written by Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld. QuickDraw still exists as part of the libraries of Mac OS X, but has been...
for instance, which allowed the system to have reasonable performance in spite of the limited hardware it ran on. This made the addition of a protected memory system very difficult - not impossible, but at the price of greatly reduced performance.
While Taligent collapsed, system development had continued on in a business as usual fashion. During the early 1990s Apple released a series of major new packages to the system; among them were QuickDraw GX
QuickDraw GX
QuickDraw GX was a replacement for the QuickDraw 2D graphics engine and Printing Manager inside the "classic" Mac OS. Its underlying drawing platform was a resolution-independent object oriented retained mode system, making it much easier for programmers to perform common tasks...
, OpenTransport, OpenDoc
OpenDoc
OpenDoc was a multi-platform software componentry framework standard for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding ....
, PowerTalk and many others. Some of these were larger than the operating system itself. Problems with stability that 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.
Another try
The problems with the underlying system were well known within Apple, but as long as Taligent was still a going concern, it was difficult to gain any traction. Several new projects started during this time, notably the Star Trek projectStar Trek project
Star Trek was the code name given to a prototype project at Apple Computer and Novell during 1992 and 1993. The project was named after the Star Trek science fiction franchise with the slogan "To boldly go where no Mac has gone before."...
which reached demo quality. Invariably these projects were cancelled for one reason or another. However, while Apple was struggling to modernize their system, others were not suffering from the same problems. By 1994 the press buzz surrounding the upcoming release of Windows 95
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...
started to grow to a crescendo, often with questions about Apple's response to the challenge it presented. The press turned on the company, often introducing Apple's new projects as failures in the making.
Given this pressure, the collapse of Taligent, and the growing problems with the existing operating system, after System 7.5 was released in autumn 1994, Apple management decided that the decade-old operating system had run its course. A new system addressing these problems was needed, and soon. In order to regain the trust of the press and the industry as a whole, the project simply had to ship.
Since so much of the existing system would be difficult to re-write, Apple developed a two-stage approach to the problem. In the first stage, the existing system would be moved on top of a new kernel-based OS with built-in support for multitasking and protected memory. The existing libraries, like QuickDraw, would take too long to be re-written for the new system and would not be converted, so user-facing programs would not be able to take advantage of these features. Once the new kernel in place and this basic upgrade was released, development would move on to re-writing the older libraries into new forms that could run directly over the new kernel. At that point, applications would gain the modern features that were available from Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
in Windows NT
Windows NT
Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. It was a powerful high-level-language-based, processor-independent, multiprocessing, multiuser operating system with features comparable to Unix. It was intended to complement...
since 1993.
As System 7.5 was code-named
Code name
A code name or cryptonym is a word or name used clandestinely to refer to another name or word. Code names are often used for military purposes, or in espionage...
"Mozart", the next-generation operating system that was intended to address the looming architectural issues was dubbed "Copland" after composer Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later in his career a conductor of his own and other American music. He was instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, and is often referred to as "the Dean of American Composers"...
. The follow-on system, "Gershwin", would complete the process of moving the entire system to the new platform.
Design
Copland was designed to run the Mac OS on top of a microkernelMicrokernel
In computer science, a microkernel is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system . These mechanisms include low-level address space management, thread management, and inter-process communication...
named Nukernel
Nukernel
NuKernel was a microkernel developed at Apple Computer during the early 1990s. Designed using concepts from Mach 3.0 with extensive additions for soft real-time scheduling to improve multimedia performance, it was intended to be used as the basis for the Copland operating system. Only one version...
, which would handle basic tasks such as application startup and memory management, leaving all other tasks to a series of semi-special programs known as servers. For instance, networking and file services would not be provided by the kernel itself, but by servers which would be sent requests though interapplication communications
Inter-process communication
In computing, Inter-process communication is a set of methods for the exchange of data among multiple threads in one or more processes. Processes may be running on one or more computers connected by a network. IPC methods are divided into methods for message passing, synchronization, shared...
. Copland consisted of the combination of Nukernel, various servers, and a suite of application support libraries to provide implementations of the well-known Macintosh programming interface.
Application services would be offered through a single program known officially as the "Cooperative Macintosh Toolbox environment", but universally referred to as the blue box. The blue box encapsulated an existing System 7 operating system inside a single process and address space
Address space
In computing, an address space defines a range of discrete addresses, each of which may correspond to a network host, peripheral device, disk sector, a memory cell or other logical or physical entity.- Overview :...
. Mac programs would run inside the blue box much as they did under System 7, as 'co-operative tasks' that used the non-re-entrant Toolbox calls. A worst-case scenario was that an application in the blue box would crash, taking down the entire box with it. This would not result in the system as a whole going down, however, and the blue box could be restarted.
New applications, those written with Copland in mind, would be able to directly communicate with the system servers and thereby gain many advantages in terms of performance and scalability. They could also communicate with the kernel to “spin off” separate applications or threads, which would run as separate processes in protected memory, as in most modern operating systems. However, these separate applications could not use non-re-entrant calls like QuickDraw, and thus could have no user interface. Apple suggested that larger programs could place their user interface in a normal Macintosh application, which would then start "worker threads" externally.
Another key feature of Copland was that it would be completely PowerPC
PowerPC
PowerPC is a RISC architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM...
"native". System 7 had been ported to the PowerPC (PPC) with great success; large portions of the system ran in PPC code, including both high-level functionality, such as the majority of the user interface "toolbox" managers, and low-level functionality, such as interrupt management. However there was enough 68k code left in the system, and especially user applications, that the operating system had to map some data between the two environments. In particular, every call into the Mac OS required a mapping between the 68k's interrupt system and the PPCs. Removing these mappings would greatly improve general system performance; at WWDC'96, engineers claimed that the performance of system calls would be as much as 50% faster.
Copland was also based on the newly-defined Common Hardware Reference Platform
Common Hardware Reference Platform
Common Hardware Reference Platform was a standard system architecture for PowerPC based computer systems published jointly by IBM and Apple in 1995. Like its predecessor PReP, it was conceptualized as a design to allow various operating systems to run on an industry standard hardware platform,...
, or CHRP, which standardized the Mac hardware to the point where it could be built by different companies and run other operating systems (Solaris and AIX were two of many mentioned). This was a common theme at the time; many companies were forming groups to define standardized platforms to offer an alternative to the "Wintel
Wintel
Wintel is a portmanteau of Windows and Intel, referring to personal computers using Intel x86 compatible processors running Microsoft Windows...
" platform that was rapidly becoming dominant - examples included 88open
88open
The 88open Consortium was an industry standards group set up by Motorola in 1988 to standardize Unix systems on their Motorola 88000 RISC processor systems...
, ACE
Advanced Computing Environment
The Advanced Computing Environment was defined by an industry consortium in the early 1990s to be the next generation commodity computing platform, the successor to personal computers based on Intel's 32-bit instruction set architecture...
and the AIM alliance
AIM alliance
The AIM alliance was an alliance formed on October 2, 1991, between Apple Inc. , IBM, and Motorola to create a new computing standard based on the PowerPC architecture. The stated goal of the alliance was to challenge the dominant Wintel computing platform with a new computer design and a...
.
The challenge in Copland would be getting all of this functionality to fit into an ordinary Mac. System 7.5 already used up about 2.5 megabyte
Megabyte
The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...
s (MB) of RAM, and at the time this was a significant portion of the total RAM in most machines. Copland would be running what was essentially a complete copy of System 7.5 (in the blue box) and an entirely separate operating system running “under” it as well. Copland therefore was to use a Mach
Mach (kernel)
Mach is an operating system kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University to support operating system research, primarily distributed and parallel computation. Although Mach is often mentioned as one of the earliest examples of a microkernel, not all versions of Mach are microkernels...
-inspired memory management system and rely extensively upon shared libraries, with the goal being for Copland to be only some 50% larger than 7.5.
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 ConferenceWorldwide Developers Conference
The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, commonly abbreviated WWDC, is a conference held annually in California by Apple Inc. The conference is primarily used by Apple to showcase its new software and technologies for developers, as well as offering hands-on labs and feedback sessions...
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
QuickDraw GX
QuickDraw GX was a replacement for the QuickDraw 2D graphics engine and Printing Manager inside the "classic" Mac OS. Its underlying drawing platform was a resolution-independent object oriented retained mode system, making it much easier for programmers to perform common tasks...
, SOM
System Object Model
In computing, the System Object Model is an object-oriented shared library system developed by IBM. DSOM, a distributed version based on CORBA, allowed objects on different computers to communicate.-Applications:...
and OpenDoc
OpenDoc
OpenDoc was a multi-platform software componentry framework standard for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding ....
became core components of the system, while completely unrelated technologies like a new file management dialog box (the "open dialog") and "themes
Appearance Manager
In pre-Mac OS X versions of the Macintosh operating system, the Appearance Manager controlled the overall look of the Mac GUI widgets and supported several themes. The Appearance Manager was originally developed for Apple's failed Copland project, but with the cancellation of this project the...
" 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."
Developer release
At WWDC '96, Apple's new CEO, Gil AmelioGil Amelio
Gilbert Frank Amelio is an American technology executive. He grew up in Miami, Florida and received a bachelor's degree, master's degree, and Ph.D. in physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology...
, used the keynote to talk almost exclusively about Copland, now known as System 8. He repeatedly stated that it was the only focus of Apple engineering and that it would ship to developers at the end of summer with a full release planned for late fall. Very few, if any, demos of the running system were shown at the conference. Instead, various pieces of the technology and user interface that would go into the package (such as a new file management dialog) were demonstrated. Little of the core system's technology was demonstrated and the new file system that had been shown a year earlier was absent.
There was one way to actually use the new operating system, by signing up for time in the developer labs. This did not go well:
"There was a hands-on demo of the current state of OS 8. There were tantalizing glimpses of the goodies to come, but the overall experience was awful. 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).
Also, it was incredibly fragile and crashed repeatedly, often corrupting system files on the disk in the process. The demo staff reformatted and rebuilt the hard disks at regular intervals. It was incredible that they even let us see the beast."
After a number of people at the show complained about the microkernel's lack of sophistication, notably the lack of symmetric multiprocessing
Symmetric multiprocessing
In computing, symmetric multiprocessing involves a multiprocessor computer hardware architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single shared main memory and are controlled by a single OS instance. Most common multiprocessor systems today use an SMP architecture...
— a feature that would be exceedingly difficult to add on to an already existing system within a few months — Amelio came back on stage and announced that they would be adding that to the feature list.
In August 1996, "Developer Release 0" was sent to a small number of selected partners. Far from demonstrating improved stability, it often crashed after doing nothing at all, and was completely unusable for development. In October, Apple moved the target delivery date to 'sometime', hinting that it might be 1997. 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 truly shine. Members of Apple's software QA team suggested, jokingly, that given current resources and the number of bugs in the system they could clear the program for shipping some time around 2030.
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 HancockEllen Hancock
Ellen Hancock is a technology manager from the United States who has worked for IBM and Apple, among others.Hancock was born in the Bronx, New York City and raised in Westchester...
away from National Semiconductor
National Semiconductor
National Semiconductor was an American semiconductor manufacturer, that specialized in analog devices and subsystems,formerly headquartered in Santa Clara, California, USA. The products of National Semiconductor included power management circuits, display drivers, audio and operational amplifiers,...
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
BeOS
BeOS is an operating system for personal computers which began development by Be Inc. in 1991. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was optimized for digital media work and was written to take advantage of modern hardware facilities such as symmetric multiprocessing by utilizing...
and rumors of a merger with Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
, many were surprised at Apple's December 1996 announcement that they were purchasing NeXT
NeXT
Next, Inc. was an American computer company headquartered in Redwood City, California, that developed and manufactured a series of computer workstations intended for the higher education and business markets...
and bringing Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc...
on in an advisory role. Amelio quipped that they "choose Plan A instead of Plan Be." The project to port OpenStep
OpenStep
OpenStep was an object-oriented application programming interface specification for an object-oriented operating system that used a non-NeXTSTEP operating system as its core, principally developed by NeXT with Sun Microsystems. OPENSTEP was a specific implementation of the OpenStep API developed...
to the Macintosh platform was named Rhapsody and was eventually released as Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
, which, prior to the Intel release of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), also used the 'blue box' concept in the form of Classic
Classic (Mac OS X)
Classic, or Classic Environment, was a hardware and software abstraction layer in Mac OS X that allowed applications compatible with Mac OS 9 to run on the Mac OS X operating system...
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 was 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
Mac OS 8
Mac OS 8 is an operating system that was released by Apple Computer on July 26, 1997. It represented the largest overhaul of the Mac OS since the release of System 7, some six years previously. It puts more emphasis on color than previous operating systems...
.
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
Macintosh clone
A Macintosh clone is a personal computer made by a manufacturer other than Apple, using Macintosh ROMs and system software.-Background:...
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
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
as Spotlight
Spotlight (software)
Spotlight is a system-wide desktop search feature of Apple's Mac OS X operating system. Spotlight is a selection-based search system, which creates a virtual index of all items and files on the system. It is designed to allow the user to quickly locate a wide variety of items on the computer,...
, Safari
Safari (web browser)
Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included with the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther". Safari is also the...
, and iChat AV, respectively, although the implementation and user interface for each feature is completely different.
Hardware requirements
According to the documentation included in the developer release, Copland supported the following hardware configurations:- NuBus-based Macintoshes: 6100/60, 6100/60AV (no AV functionality), 6100/66, 6100/66 AV (no AV functionality), 6100/66 DOS (no DOS functionality), 7100/66, 7100/66 AV (no AV functionality), 7100/80, 7100/80 AV (no AV functionality), 8100/80/ 8100/100/ 8100/100 AV (no AV functionality), 8100/110
- Nu-Bus-based Performas: 6110CD, 6112CD, 6115CD, 6117CD, 6118CD
- PCI-based Macintoshes: 7200/70, 7200/90, 7500/100, 8500/120, 9500/120, 9500/132
- Drives formatted with Drive Setup (other initialization software may work; if you have trouble, try reinitializing with Drive Setup 1.0.4 or later).
- For builds up to and including DR1, the installer is set to ensure you have System 7.5 or later on a hard disk 250MB or greater.
- Monitors connected to either built-in video or a card set to 256 colors (8-bit) or Thousands (16-bit).
External links
- Apple's Copland project: An OS for the common man Article covering Copland development
- "A Time Machine trip to the mid-'90s", MacWorld article with screen snaps from Copland
- Apple Copland Reference Documentation