17 ms·

Why did Apple's Copland fail when so many 90s OS succeed, dominate world today

128 points by stargrave 8y ago

malvosenior 8y ago
> It’s often said that Apple didn’t take over NeXT, nor did it merge with NeXT — in many important ways, NeXT took over Apple. This is pretty much the answer. NeXT was Jobs' baby and he was happy to deploy all the tech through Apple when he came back. It worked out really well for them. Copland dev was also lagging and pre-Jobs (return) Apple had a decided lack of ability to ship.
bluejekyll 8y ago
> A/UX was very impressive for its time — 1988, before Windows 3.0. It could run both Unix apps and classic MacOS ones, and put a friendly face on Unix, which was pretty ugly in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I realize I really don't know much about A/UX at all. I didn't even know it could run classic MacOS apps. Does anyone have a link to more about the OS? I always assumed it was just a clone of System V, but if it could run classic MacOS apps, that meant it was more than just that.
- protomyth 8y ago
  It was more than a System V licensee, but it only ran on the 68K line of Macs, so it really didn't have a chance and was dead before Copeland.
- ghaff 8y ago
  The Wikipedia article [1] is reasonably thorough. It was a licensed System V with some BSD features (and Apple UI, etc.) added. (Most of the Unixes of that era mixed System V and BSD together to various degrees.) According to the linked article, it ran a few MacOS apps but not many. I actually have an A/UX coffee mug on my shelf complete with a phone number to call for more information (no URL or email :-)) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX
- classichasclass 8y ago
  It can run some. The Finder is basically System 7.0, with all that implies. Some CDEVs and INITs will work in it, and some others will not only not work but (from personal experience) make it impossible to bring up the Mac side. Some Mac apps will balk at what's missing from the OS or are used to playing fast and loose in ways A/UX will prohibit. That said, it is remarkable how the two sides work together. It's not a perfect union because X apps still have to come up in a dedicated X server which runs on the Mac side, so even graphical apps don't come together seamlessly. But even within its limitations it presents a compelling illusion of a unified whole and Commando is a great way to discover command line options.
  - Taniwha 8y ago
    most of the really bad issues were things that were broken in OS7 running VM too - mostly it was people messing with the upper 8 bits of pointers directly rathyer than using the standard handle APIs, but expecting to be able to write directly to hardware devices or 'knowing' about undocumented stuff inside the ROMs was also an issue
- salgernon 8y ago
  There's an emulator that was written to run just a/ux: https://github.com/pruten/shoebill https://github.com/pruten/shoebill You need to track down roms and install media.
- Taniwha 8y ago
  I worked on the original port (did about half the kernel stuff) - it was our standard SystemV with berkeley sockets, and wrote some of Apple specific stuff (kernel event manager, appletalk etc) - one thing I was particularly proud of was on the fly loadable unix device drivers, somewhat ahead of their time - feel free to ask me questions The Mac compatibility stuff (done at Apple) essentially ran in a single unix thread - really a VM for the mac OS7 world - it ran in user mode (mac OS apps usually ran in kernel mode) and emulated exceptions
  - jamesfmilne 8y ago
    Hi Taniwha I’m working on a new Ethernet card for the Mac SE/30, and I’d love to be able to get if working with A/UX 3. https://www.mactothefuture.org/ https://www.mactothefuture.org/ If you had any pointers on how one could write an Ethernet driver for A/UX I’d be very appreciative! :-)
    - Taniwha 8y ago
      oooh .... sadly I haven't had access to kernel source for maybe 30 years, it's been a long time essentially you need to write a BSD style networking driver (of the era, so likely 4.1) along with interrupts/etc I think without source it's going to be really difficult - on the other hand you can use autoconfig to load it into an old kernel, hook up the interrupts and set it running
      - jamesfmilne 8y ago
        Cheers. I'll see what I can dig out of the fossil record about autoconfig ;-)
        Taniwha 8y ago
        autoconfig is essentially a front end like the linux module loading tools, it makes some fake COFF files containing the kernel symbol table and some glue code and links them against the driver(s) you want to load, then it loads the code into kernel space, patches the block/char major tables and calls a driver's init routine Sadly it's not as functional as we would like, I actually wrote it for UniSoft as a way we could sell drivers without building kernels every time, someone at Apple saw it and not only demanded we include it in A/UX but also demanded that they own it .... so I wrote another one for Apple, it worked differently and was barely functional - Apple could have had the original better one for free if they'd dropped the demand that they owned it
rayiner 8y ago
Is the premise correct? Almost all 1990s OS projects ultimately failed. Cairo, Taligent, Copland, BeOS. The projects that survived were 1970's/1980's technology: NeXT Step (OS X), Linux, Windows NT.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Tend to agree. All the OS attempts that tried to seriously innovate the desktop failed. Add WinFS and OpenDoc to that list.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    And OS/2.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      It's kind of sad that we are so stuck in the current paradigms. The 90s were definitely much more exciting in terms of innovation.
      - 51lver 8y ago
        No it wasn't. The 90s was just intel and microsoft eating the market and killing innovation from competitors. Wintel easily set us back 20 years.
      - Someone1234 8y ago
        But one could ask what is the current paradigm? For example, you can view it as the desktop stopped evolving, or that we moved to the browser as a virtual machine hypervisor running whatever environment you choose (particularly true with WebAssembly). The 90s were exciting because the desktop was seen as the center of the computing universe; these days the browser is the center and the desktop is a "me too!" paradigm. One could argue we got "stuck" or one could argue that evolution shifted to an internet first paradigm with more security in mind.
        8y ago
webwielder2 8y ago
NeXT was an unintentional Apple skunkworks.
stewbrew 8y ago
Did it actually "fail" or was it discarded? As a Mac user from back then, I remember copland only from some articles and from macos gadgets that made the classic macos somehow look like copland, i.e. like a weird teeny disco box. It could be that there were a few month were copland was actually released to the wild, but at that time I already ran suse linux.
- classichasclass 8y ago
  Copland was a bundle of fail. It would crash doing nothing at all and couldn't run anything of substance. But, typical of Apple's death spiral at the time, it took Ellen Hancock saying a strong, unequivocal "kill it" to get Amelio to do so. I bet Apple would have continued to iterate on it to their doom if that hadn't happened.
  - plushpuffin 8y ago
    Came here to post this, and upvoted you instead. Everything I've read about it indicated that Copland never worked and was an unstable POS that was impossible to develop for. At one of the Apple developer conferences, people booed and criticized the new OS's unimpressive capabilities during a demo/slideshow, prompting Amelio to come back on stage and promise to "tack on" symmetric multiprocessing. For an OS that was supposedly mere months away from release...
- rodgerd 8y ago
  I worked for a Mac vendor at the time, and Copland never got beyond slideware for us. It was ridiculously ambitious: an (Apple developed) microkernel that would have a MacOS classic server, a multiuser next gen MacOS, plus even claims it could be possible to have an NT server on it. Complete UI customizability, etc, etc. Essentially they were promising something comparable to NT 4, from an organization with a fraction of the team Microsoft used to deliver it.
- vondur 8y ago
  As mentioned in the article, the main reason for failure was trying to put more modern tech into an operating system that had to support non 32 bit processors like the 68020 which weren't fully 32 bit. Also, I don't believe that the older 68k processors supported virtual memory. Maybe if they had just targeted PowerPC CPU's Apple may have a chance with Copland.
walrus01 8y ago
Anyone who ever used MacOS X v10.0 (or the server preview of it) around the year 2000/2001, and had previously used a NeXT from the command line, could immediately tell that it was the NeXT OS with a MacOS-resembling veneer of GUI on top of it.
- robterrell 8y ago
  Rhapsody! I have the box and CD installer somewhere. It was 100% NeXT with the classic Mac OS gui chrome bitmaps. A vertiginous uncanny valley.
  - amyjess 8y ago
    > It was 100% NeXT with the classic Mac OS gui chrome bitmaps. A vertiginous uncanny valley. From Nathan Lineback's screenshot gallery: http://toastytech.com/guis/rhap.html http://toastytech.com/guis/rhap.html http://toastytech.com/guis/osxsv.html http://toastytech.com/guis/osxsv.html
    - zapzupnz 8y ago
      Yellow Box on Windows was even weirder, since it had three themes: Windows, OPENSTEP, and Mac OS. The Mac OS theme was faithful in every detail except font rendering, looked really bizarre.
- marssaxman 8y ago
  It wasn't even a particularly convincing resemblance; remember when the Apple logo was in the middle of the menu bar for a while?
- dep_b 8y ago
  What's more impressive is that Mojave would be really familiar to those users from the year 2000. If I compare it to the mind-blowing UX changes Windows went through in the same time...and none of them were never really all compassing or guaranteed to stick around for a time.
katuskoti 8y ago
If anyone has watched the very tech-oriented anime "Serial Experiments Lain", Copland OS is used by the protagonist, Lain. I happen to love the anime so I set up my neofetch terminal image (an actual PNG, with w3m) to the logo of Copland OS used in the show.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
simonsays2 8y ago
NT was not based on OS/2. The author is misinformed.
- acdha 8y ago
  Not only was it based on OS/2 it even supported some of the OS/2 APIs for awhile, along with things like the HPFS filesystem: https://web.archive.org/web/20090210125723/http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windowsnt/4/workstation/reskit/en-us/os2comp.mspx?mfr=true https://web.archive.org/web/20090210125723/http://www.micros... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/100108/overview-of-fat-hpfs-and-ntfs-file-systems https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/100108/overview-of-... See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#1990:_Breakup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#1990:_Breakup for more information about how they diverged over time.
  - Aloha 8y ago
    I think it still does support OS/2 console applications.
    - acdha 8y ago
      I thought that was removed in the XP/2003 era: https://web.archive.org/web/20041019061658/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308259 https://web.archive.org/web/20041019061658/http://support.mi...
- lproven 8y ago
  Allow me to enlighten you a little bit. "The family link between OS/2 and Windows NT" https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/54138.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/54138.html "Follow-up: the family links between DOS, OS/2, NT and VMS" https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/54464.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/54464.html There's a citation in that 2nd blog post. Well, there are lots, but the IT Pro Mag one goes into detail about the OS/2 and VMS connection. Enjoy.
- skissane 8y ago
  The statement "NT is based on OS/2 3.x" is misleading. NT isn't based on OS/2 3.x, it was originally meant to be OS/2 3.x, until the IBM-Microsoft divorce. But, despite being originally intended to be OS/2 3.x, there was not much OS/2 1.x/2.x code in it. The main areas of inherited code were HPFS and the OS/2 compatibility subsystem, neither of which ended up being core features, and were dropped in newer releases. Outside of those, there was very minimal code inherited from 1.x/2.x. "NT is based on OS/2 3.x" makes it sound like NT inherited more of the design or implementation of OS/2 1.x/2.x than it actually did.
acqq 8y ago
Some chronology: An end of 1995 article: https://web.archive.org/web/20070610194914/http://www.businessweek.com/1995/51/b345595.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20070610194914/http://www.busine... "APPLE'S COPLAND: NEW! IMPROVED! NOT HERE YET!" "Says one recently departed Apple engineer: ``There's no way in hell Copland ships next year. I just hope it ships in 1997.''" One year later: https://www.cultofmac.com/459054/apple-buys-next/ https://www.cultofmac.com/459054/apple-buys-next/ "December 20, 1996: Apple Computer buys NeXT, the computer company Steve Jobs founded after leaving Cupertino a decade earlier." A little more than two years after that, already 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0 "Mac OS X Server 1.0, released on March 16, 1999,[1] is the first operating system released into the retail market by Apple Computer based on NeXT technology."
sologoub 8y ago
Reading this made me think of how iOS and macOS are evolving - the UIKit and iOS apps on Mac. Strategy feels similar - make things compatible enough and force apps to adapt somewhat. Of course this is a gross oversimplification, but who knows.
lproven 8y ago
Hi. Author of the piece here. It's a repurposed Quora answer; the original question might clarify what I was answering: https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Apple-unable-to-complete-Copland-OS-by-mid-90s-but-Microsoft-with-NT-IBM-with-OS-2-NeXT-and-BeOS-were-able-to-finish-OS-by-1990s/answer/Liam-Proven https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Apple-unable-to-complete-Copla...
st3fan 8y ago
Copland did not fail, it never shipped. It was one option on the table but they picked next step instead.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  I'd argue that never even getting to shippable state is generally a worse failure than spending a few years on the market but never really taking off in any serious way.
- atombender 8y ago
  How's that not failure? Copland was intended to be shipped as Mac OS 8. It did not ship. It was canceled, with almost all the money and work put into it (with the exceptions of self-contained tech like QuickTime) being completely wasted. It did not succeed. So it failed.
zackmorris 8y ago
I witnessed all of this since I started using Macs around '84/'85 and programming them around '89. I'm still in mourning about: * Since Classic MacOS (OS 9 and below) didn't have a command line, it had GUIs for tweaking system settings. Better yet, it had a budget for preventing user interface issues in the first place. The user experience on Classic MacOS was simply better than anything we have today, on any platform (including iOS - and yes I realize this is subjective). The flip side is that the platform evolved faster until the late 2000s because developers could tinker more freely. Since the vast majority of users are not programmers, I don't think this was a win. To me, something priceless was lost, that may never be regained even with the incubator of the web pushing the envelope. * I often wish that Apple had made a Linux compatibility layer. That entire ecosystem of software is simply not in the Mac fanbase's radar. This isn't such a huge issue now with containerization, but set everything back perhaps 10-20 years. Apple did little to improve NeXT (to make it something more like BeOS, or the Amiga). We really needed an advanced, modern platform like Copland or A/UX like the article said. But in the end, Steve Jobs knew that didn't really matter to like 99% of users, and he was probably right. Still, I'm in that lucky 1% that sees the crushing burden of console tool incompatibilities and an utter lack of progress in UNIX since the mid 90s. * Much of the macOS GUI runs in a custom Apple layer above FreeBSD (rather than using something like X11). I'm not really convinced that the windowing system is that optimized, because it used to use a representation similar to PDF. So for example, I saw weird artifacts and screen redraws back when I was doing Carbon/Cocoa game programming, especially around the time OpenGL was taking off. Quartz is powerful but I wouldn't say it's performant. A 350 MHz blue & white iMac running OS X had roughly the same Finder speed as an 8 MHz Mac Plus running System 7 or a 33 MHz 386DX running Windows 95. Does anyone know if the windowing system is open source? I could go on, in deeper detail, but it's futile. I think that's what I truly miss most about Classic MacOS. If you ever watch a show like Halt and Catch Fire, there was a feeling back then that regular folks could write a desktop publishing application or a system extension (heck whole games like Lunatic Fringe ran in a screensaver) and you could get Apple's attention and they might even buy you out. But today it's all locked down, we're all just users and consumers. I still love the Mac I guess, and always come back to it after using the various runner ups. But I can't get over this feeling that it stopped evolving sometime just after OS X came out, almost 20 years ago. There is this gaping void where a far-reaching, visionary GUI running on top of a truly modern architecture should be. All we have now is a sea of loose approximations of what that could be. I wish I knew how to articulate this better. Sorry about that.
yarrel 8y ago
Because it wasn't simply copying something from the 1970s like the Linux and NT kernels.
em-bee 8y ago
i love this comment to the article about the attempt by atari: Atari MiNT! It was an attempt to bolt UNIX semantics on top of TOS, which itself was already a weird mashup of CP/M and DOS. It ran on 68k ST boxes, and was about as bonkers as you'd expect, in ways that I can summarize with the pathname "U:\DEV\NULL".
microtherion 8y ago
The NeXT management discarded Copland, most Apple technologies — OpenDoc, OpenTransport, GameSprockets, basically everything except QuickTime. [...] It took the existing MacOS classic APIs [...] and cut out everything that wouldn’t work on a clean, modern, memory-managed, multitasking OS. I've never seen the innards of the above technologies, but to the extent that this passage gives the impression that the technologies that were cut (and one could add QuickDraw 3D and QuickDraw GX to the list) were the least modern and future proof, I think that's exactly backward. It's largely the most modern technologies that were cut, and it's the crufty ancient APIs that made it into Carbon. Something like OpenDoc would probably have been reasonably portable, given that it was based on IBM technologies. OpenTransport was based on System V streams, GameSprockets was based on a QuickTime stack which largely survived for some time. Presumably those decisions were made because the new APIs, gorgeous as they were, didn't have major adoption yet, and Apple desperately needed to focus.

128 points by stargrave 8y ago

> It’s often said that Apple didn’t take over NeXT, nor did it merge with NeXT — in many important ways, NeXT took over Apple. This is pretty much the answer. NeXT was Jobs' baby and he was happy to deploy all the tech through Apple when he came back. It worked out really well for them. Copland dev was also lagging and pre-Jobs (return) Apple had a decided lack of ability to ship.

bluejekyll 8y ago

> A/UX was very impressive for its time — 1988, before Windows 3.0. It could run both Unix apps and classic MacOS ones, and put a friendly face on Unix, which was pretty ugly in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I realize I really don't know much about A/UX at all. I didn't even know it could run classic MacOS apps. Does anyone have a link to more about the OS? I always assumed it was just a clone of System V, but if it could run classic MacOS apps, that meant it was more than just that.

protomyth 8y ago
It was more than a System V licensee, but it only ran on the 68K line of Macs, so it really didn't have a chance and was dead before Copeland.
ghaff 8y ago
The Wikipedia article [1] is reasonably thorough. It was a licensed System V with some BSD features (and Apple UI, etc.) added. (Most of the Unixes of that era mixed System V and BSD together to various degrees.) According to the linked article, it ran a few MacOS apps but not many. I actually have an A/UX coffee mug on my shelf complete with a phone number to call for more information (no URL or email :-)) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX
classichasclass 8y ago
It can run some. The Finder is basically System 7.0, with all that implies. Some CDEVs and INITs will work in it, and some others will not only not work but (from personal experience) make it impossible to bring up the Mac side. Some Mac apps will balk at what's missing from the OS or are used to playing fast and loose in ways A/UX will prohibit. That said, it is remarkable how the two sides work together. It's not a perfect union because X apps still have to come up in a dedicated X server which runs on the Mac side, so even graphical apps don't come together seamlessly. But even within its limitations it presents a compelling illusion of a unified whole and Commando is a great way to discover command line options.
- Taniwha 8y ago
  most of the really bad issues were things that were broken in OS7 running VM too - mostly it was people messing with the upper 8 bits of pointers directly rathyer than using the standard handle APIs, but expecting to be able to write directly to hardware devices or 'knowing' about undocumented stuff inside the ROMs was also an issue
salgernon 8y ago
There's an emulator that was written to run just a/ux: https://github.com/pruten/shoebill https://github.com/pruten/shoebill You need to track down roms and install media.
Taniwha 8y ago
I worked on the original port (did about half the kernel stuff) - it was our standard SystemV with berkeley sockets, and wrote some of Apple specific stuff (kernel event manager, appletalk etc) - one thing I was particularly proud of was on the fly loadable unix device drivers, somewhat ahead of their time - feel free to ask me questions The Mac compatibility stuff (done at Apple) essentially ran in a single unix thread - really a VM for the mac OS7 world - it ran in user mode (mac OS apps usually ran in kernel mode) and emulated exceptions
- jamesfmilne 8y ago
  Hi Taniwha I’m working on a new Ethernet card for the Mac SE/30, and I’d love to be able to get if working with A/UX 3. https://www.mactothefuture.org/ https://www.mactothefuture.org/ If you had any pointers on how one could write an Ethernet driver for A/UX I’d be very appreciative! :-)
  - Taniwha 8y ago
    oooh .... sadly I haven't had access to kernel source for maybe 30 years, it's been a long time essentially you need to write a BSD style networking driver (of the era, so likely 4.1) along with interrupts/etc I think without source it's going to be really difficult - on the other hand you can use autoconfig to load it into an old kernel, hook up the interrupts and set it running
    - jamesfmilne 8y ago
      Cheers. I'll see what I can dig out of the fossil record about autoconfig ;-)
      - Taniwha 8y ago
        autoconfig is essentially a front end like the linux module loading tools, it makes some fake COFF files containing the kernel symbol table and some glue code and links them against the driver(s) you want to load, then it loads the code into kernel space, patches the block/char major tables and calls a driver's init routine Sadly it's not as functional as we would like, I actually wrote it for UniSoft as a way we could sell drivers without building kernels every time, someone at Apple saw it and not only demanded we include it in A/UX but also demanded that they own it .... so I wrote another one for Apple, it worked differently and was barely functional - Apple could have had the original better one for free if they'd dropped the demand that they owned it

rayiner 8y ago

Is the premise correct? Almost all 1990s OS projects ultimately failed. Cairo, Taligent, Copland, BeOS. The projects that survived were 1970's/1980's technology: NeXT Step (OS X), Linux, Windows NT.

maxxxxx 8y ago
Tend to agree. All the OS attempts that tried to seriously innovate the desktop failed. Add WinFS and OpenDoc to that list.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  And OS/2.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    It's kind of sad that we are so stuck in the current paradigms. The 90s were definitely much more exciting in terms of innovation.
    - 51lver 8y ago
      No it wasn't. The 90s was just intel and microsoft eating the market and killing innovation from competitors. Wintel easily set us back 20 years.
    - Someone1234 8y ago
      But one could ask what is the current paradigm? For example, you can view it as the desktop stopped evolving, or that we moved to the browser as a virtual machine hypervisor running whatever environment you choose (particularly true with WebAssembly). The 90s were exciting because the desktop was seen as the center of the computing universe; these days the browser is the center and the desktop is a "me too!" paradigm. One could argue we got "stuck" or one could argue that evolution shifted to an internet first paradigm with more security in mind.
      - 8y ago

webwielder2 8y ago

NeXT was an unintentional Apple skunkworks.

stewbrew 8y ago

Did it actually "fail" or was it discarded? As a Mac user from back then, I remember copland only from some articles and from macos gadgets that made the classic macos somehow look like copland, i.e. like a weird teeny disco box. It could be that there were a few month were copland was actually released to the wild, but at that time I already ran suse linux.

classichasclass 8y ago
Copland was a bundle of fail. It would crash doing nothing at all and couldn't run anything of substance. But, typical of Apple's death spiral at the time, it took Ellen Hancock saying a strong, unequivocal "kill it" to get Amelio to do so. I bet Apple would have continued to iterate on it to their doom if that hadn't happened.
- plushpuffin 8y ago
  Came here to post this, and upvoted you instead. Everything I've read about it indicated that Copland never worked and was an unstable POS that was impossible to develop for. At one of the Apple developer conferences, people booed and criticized the new OS's unimpressive capabilities during a demo/slideshow, prompting Amelio to come back on stage and promise to "tack on" symmetric multiprocessing. For an OS that was supposedly mere months away from release...
rodgerd 8y ago
I worked for a Mac vendor at the time, and Copland never got beyond slideware for us. It was ridiculously ambitious: an (Apple developed) microkernel that would have a MacOS classic server, a multiuser next gen MacOS, plus even claims it could be possible to have an NT server on it. Complete UI customizability, etc, etc. Essentially they were promising something comparable to NT 4, from an organization with a fraction of the team Microsoft used to deliver it.
vondur 8y ago
As mentioned in the article, the main reason for failure was trying to put more modern tech into an operating system that had to support non 32 bit processors like the 68020 which weren't fully 32 bit. Also, I don't believe that the older 68k processors supported virtual memory. Maybe if they had just targeted PowerPC CPU's Apple may have a chance with Copland.

walrus01 8y ago

Anyone who ever used MacOS X v10.0 (or the server preview of it) around the year 2000/2001, and had previously used a NeXT from the command line, could immediately tell that it was the NeXT OS with a MacOS-resembling veneer of GUI on top of it.

robterrell 8y ago
Rhapsody! I have the box and CD installer somewhere. It was 100% NeXT with the classic Mac OS gui chrome bitmaps. A vertiginous uncanny valley.
- amyjess 8y ago
  > It was 100% NeXT with the classic Mac OS gui chrome bitmaps. A vertiginous uncanny valley. From Nathan Lineback's screenshot gallery: http://toastytech.com/guis/rhap.html http://toastytech.com/guis/rhap.html http://toastytech.com/guis/osxsv.html http://toastytech.com/guis/osxsv.html
  - zapzupnz 8y ago
    Yellow Box on Windows was even weirder, since it had three themes: Windows, OPENSTEP, and Mac OS. The Mac OS theme was faithful in every detail except font rendering, looked really bizarre.
marssaxman 8y ago
It wasn't even a particularly convincing resemblance; remember when the Apple logo was in the middle of the menu bar for a while?
dep_b 8y ago
What's more impressive is that Mojave would be really familiar to those users from the year 2000. If I compare it to the mind-blowing UX changes Windows went through in the same time...and none of them were never really all compassing or guaranteed to stick around for a time.

katuskoti 8y ago

If anyone has watched the very tech-oriented anime "Serial Experiments Lain", Copland OS is used by the protagonist, Lain. I happen to love the anime so I set up my neofetch terminal image (an actual PNG, with w3m) to the logo of Copland OS used in the show.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

simonsays2 8y ago

NT was not based on OS/2. The author is misinformed.

acdha 8y ago
Not only was it based on OS/2 it even supported some of the OS/2 APIs for awhile, along with things like the HPFS filesystem: https://web.archive.org/web/20090210125723/http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windowsnt/4/workstation/reskit/en-us/os2comp.mspx?mfr=true https://web.archive.org/web/20090210125723/http://www.micros... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/100108/overview-of-fat-hpfs-and-ntfs-file-systems https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/100108/overview-of-... See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#1990:_Breakup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#1990:_Breakup for more information about how they diverged over time.
- Aloha 8y ago
  I think it still does support OS/2 console applications.
  - acdha 8y ago
    I thought that was removed in the XP/2003 era: https://web.archive.org/web/20041019061658/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308259 https://web.archive.org/web/20041019061658/http://support.mi...
lproven 8y ago
Allow me to enlighten you a little bit. "The family link between OS/2 and Windows NT" https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/54138.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/54138.html "Follow-up: the family links between DOS, OS/2, NT and VMS" https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/54464.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/54464.html There's a citation in that 2nd blog post. Well, there are lots, but the IT Pro Mag one goes into detail about the OS/2 and VMS connection. Enjoy.
skissane 8y ago
The statement "NT is based on OS/2 3.x" is misleading. NT isn't based on OS/2 3.x, it was originally meant to be OS/2 3.x, until the IBM-Microsoft divorce. But, despite being originally intended to be OS/2 3.x, there was not much OS/2 1.x/2.x code in it. The main areas of inherited code were HPFS and the OS/2 compatibility subsystem, neither of which ended up being core features, and were dropped in newer releases. Outside of those, there was very minimal code inherited from 1.x/2.x. "NT is based on OS/2 3.x" makes it sound like NT inherited more of the design or implementation of OS/2 1.x/2.x than it actually did.

acqq 8y ago

Some chronology: An end of 1995 article: https://web.archive.org/web/20070610194914/http://www.businessweek.com/1995/51/b345595.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20070610194914/http://www.busine... "APPLE'S COPLAND: NEW! IMPROVED! NOT HERE YET!" "Says one recently departed Apple engineer: ``There's no way in hell Copland ships next year. I just hope it ships in 1997.''" One year later: https://www.cultofmac.com/459054/apple-buys-next/ https://www.cultofmac.com/459054/apple-buys-next/ "December 20, 1996: Apple Computer buys NeXT, the computer company Steve Jobs founded after leaving Cupertino a decade earlier." A little more than two years after that, already 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0 "Mac OS X Server 1.0, released on March 16, 1999,[1] is the first operating system released into the retail market by Apple Computer based on NeXT technology."

sologoub 8y ago

Reading this made me think of how iOS and macOS are evolving - the UIKit and iOS apps on Mac. Strategy feels similar - make things compatible enough and force apps to adapt somewhat. Of course this is a gross oversimplification, but who knows.

lproven 8y ago

Hi. Author of the piece here. It's a repurposed Quora answer; the original question might clarify what I was answering: https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Apple-unable-to-complete-Copland-OS-by-mid-90s-but-Microsoft-with-NT-IBM-with-OS-2-NeXT-and-BeOS-were-able-to-finish-OS-by-1990s/answer/Liam-Proven https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Apple-unable-to-complete-Copla...

st3fan 8y ago

Copland did not fail, it never shipped. It was one option on the table but they picked next step instead.

bunderbunder 8y ago
I'd argue that never even getting to shippable state is generally a worse failure than spending a few years on the market but never really taking off in any serious way.
atombender 8y ago
How's that not failure? Copland was intended to be shipped as Mac OS 8. It did not ship. It was canceled, with almost all the money and work put into it (with the exceptions of self-contained tech like QuickTime) being completely wasted. It did not succeed. So it failed.

zackmorris 8y ago

I witnessed all of this since I started using Macs around '84/'85 and programming them around '89. I'm still in mourning about: * Since Classic MacOS (OS 9 and below) didn't have a command line, it had GUIs for tweaking system settings. Better yet, it had a budget for preventing user interface issues in the first place. The user experience on Classic MacOS was simply better than anything we have today, on any platform (including iOS - and yes I realize this is subjective). The flip side is that the platform evolved faster until the late 2000s because developers could tinker more freely. Since the vast majority of users are not programmers, I don't think this was a win. To me, something priceless was lost, that may never be regained even with the incubator of the web pushing the envelope. * I often wish that Apple had made a Linux compatibility layer. That entire ecosystem of software is simply not in the Mac fanbase's radar. This isn't such a huge issue now with containerization, but set everything back perhaps 10-20 years. Apple did little to improve NeXT (to make it something more like BeOS, or the Amiga). We really needed an advanced, modern platform like Copland or A/UX like the article said. But in the end, Steve Jobs knew that didn't really matter to like 99% of users, and he was probably right. Still, I'm in that lucky 1% that sees the crushing burden of console tool incompatibilities and an utter lack of progress in UNIX since the mid 90s. * Much of the macOS GUI runs in a custom Apple layer above FreeBSD (rather than using something like X11). I'm not really convinced that the windowing system is that optimized, because it used to use a representation similar to PDF. So for example, I saw weird artifacts and screen redraws back when I was doing Carbon/Cocoa game programming, especially around the time OpenGL was taking off. Quartz is powerful but I wouldn't say it's performant. A 350 MHz blue & white iMac running OS X had roughly the same Finder speed as an 8 MHz Mac Plus running System 7 or a 33 MHz 386DX running Windows 95. Does anyone know if the windowing system is open source? I could go on, in deeper detail, but it's futile. I think that's what I truly miss most about Classic MacOS. If you ever watch a show like Halt and Catch Fire, there was a feeling back then that regular folks could write a desktop publishing application or a system extension (heck whole games like Lunatic Fringe ran in a screensaver) and you could get Apple's attention and they might even buy you out. But today it's all locked down, we're all just users and consumers. I still love the Mac I guess, and always come back to it after using the various runner ups. But I can't get over this feeling that it stopped evolving sometime just after OS X came out, almost 20 years ago. There is this gaping void where a far-reaching, visionary GUI running on top of a truly modern architecture should be. All we have now is a sea of loose approximations of what that could be. I wish I knew how to articulate this better. Sorry about that.

yarrel 8y ago

Because it wasn't simply copying something from the 1970s like the Linux and NT kernels.

em-bee 8y ago

i love this comment to the article about the attempt by atari: Atari MiNT! It was an attempt to bolt UNIX semantics on top of TOS, which itself was already a weird mashup of CP/M and DOS. It ran on 68k ST boxes, and was about as bonkers as you'd expect, in ways that I can summarize with the pathname "U:\DEV\NULL".

microtherion 8y ago

The NeXT management discarded Copland, most Apple technologies — OpenDoc, OpenTransport, GameSprockets, basically everything except QuickTime. [...] It took the existing MacOS classic APIs [...] and cut out everything that wouldn’t work on a clean, modern, memory-managed, multitasking OS. I've never seen the innards of the above technologies, but to the extent that this passage gives the impression that the technologies that were cut (and one could add QuickDraw 3D and QuickDraw GX to the list) were the least modern and future proof, I think that's exactly backward. It's largely the most modern technologies that were cut, and it's the crufty ancient APIs that made it into Carbon. Something like OpenDoc would probably have been reasonably portable, given that it was based on IBM technologies. OpenTransport was based on System V streams, GameSprockets was based on a QuickTime stack which largely survived for some time. Presumably those decisions were made because the new APIs, gorgeous as they were, didn't have major adoption yet, and Apple desperately needed to focus.