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It also doesn't really address the question, why Copland failed, which likely had a lot to do with Apple's management culture rather than the technology they we

• projektfu 8y ago
  In this vein, I think they tried to do too much at once. They should have learned their lesson with the PowerPC. They had two tracks, one was trying to implement a new OS. The other implemented the 68k OS on a simulator. The first track was way late. If Copland could have released just a protected environment at first, and allowed people to start writing for it, they could have added all the rest later.
  • orangecat 8y ago
    If you look at the Copland technical docs, they describe an OS with modern underpinnings but running the Mac UI as a single process on top of it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)#Copland_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)#Cop...). Developers were supposed to put as much functionality as they could into background processes/threads that would benefit from preemptive multitasking and protected memory. Amusingly, classic Mac OS ended up sort of close to that if you squint. It had a "nanokernel" that ran tasks preemptively and even supported multiple CPUs, but like with Copland the entire UI ran as a single "blue" task. The main difference from Copland as far as I can tell is that non-UI tasks were heavily restricted in the OS APIs that they could call; for unsupported APIs they had to send a message to the blue task and wait for a response. More details at http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/pdf/tn2028.pdf http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/tec....