Submitted by Before Apple acquired NeXT for its NeXTStep operating system, it was working on a modern operating system of its own. Named after the popular American composer, Aaron Copland, the OS was a complete rewrite of the existing Mac OS that supported multitasking, protected memory and a brand new look that would eventually be rolled into Mac OS 8 as Platinum. The project stagnated under the leadership of Gil Amelio, and was canceled after it became clear it could not be completed. Read the story at Low End Mac.
Apple’s Mac OS Killer in 1996
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Ah Cynberdog. I still have it on an old machine somewhere. Opendoc. Great ideas that all went bust. Innovative as hell. Just clueless about the economics, and unable to deliver. Thank the Lord for BSD folks, otherwise it would be belly up….
Cyberdog wasn’t too bad a browser actually.
“Add multitasking to the single-tasking Mac OS was a clever hack devised by Andy Hertzfeld”
Gosh, if these wizards that designed the original MacOS were so visionary why didn’t they just put a preemptive scheduler in the kernel in the first place? Other people did it for the 68000 without using “clever hacks”.
Obvious answer: they didn’t know how. They designed a cute 8-bit toy and left Apple to spend (literally) hundreds of millions of dollars trying to drag the OS out of origins. The stipulation of backwards compatibility doomed any project (Taligent, Pink, Copeland) that attempted to bring the MacOS out of the punchcard era.
Don’t read the parent on this! It may damage your mental health and shake some of your most cherished beliefs. This is why it has been marked down to -2.
Do not read this post either, it can be similarly disturbing to nervous people, because it hovers on the border of self referentiality.
The copland was a hack, it only supported a limited protected memory and only for system processes. All applications did not get pre-emptive multitask, and they did not get protected memory. This was done so people could still use the toolbox hack.
…I waited and waited…and waited and waited for Copland.
Read the McWorlds and MacUsers…saw screenshots, waiting for the day that I could upgrade System 7.5, which saddly never came
I got a copy of Copland, but it required too much modding of Sys7.5 to work, plus needed another mac to debug it if it crashed, so I never tried. Copland was going to be the best for it’s day – but it never came along. Too bad…
As for making System 1.0 pre-emptive multitasked…why? did people need it back then? Did they even think of it? Why didn’t people think of Y2K before so they would not continue to code in Y2K problematic ways? the problem is not enough forward thinking
As for making System 1.0 pre-emptive multitasked… why? did people need it back then?
Just ask Amiga folks. The Amiga came out only a few months after the Mac, but had full color, stereo sound, and preemptive multitasking not to be equaled until Windows 95 came out.
Using an Amiga was a joy after using MacOS or Windows 3.x. You could actually do useful work while the floppy was formatting!
The interface was rather more responsive. Menus actually responded in real time, even on puny 7MHz systems. You couldn’t out-type the system either. On MacOS, I could easily be a line ahead of the cursor, even on a 33MHz 68030. That NEVER happened on the Amiga.
it wasn’t equaled with Win95.
Formatting a floppy still slowed Win95 to a crawl.
I remember how, after being used to my old Amiga, seeing all the hype about Win95 and walked into a local store to see what it was about.
Ironically, the salesperson was formatting a floppy, or prepping a boot floppy. I asked if Win95 multitasked. He said “Certainly does!”
“Can you demonstrate it?”
“Sure, just let me finish this floppy. It’ll be a moment. I can’t open another window JUST yet.”
“Oh, that’s all I needed to hear.” I walked off.
I still have the Amiga. From time to time I’ll boot into it, and reminice on what could have been.
Apple did well by going with NeXT. It’s too bad they seem to spend less on research & development these days (as the UI shows in so many places).
Had they been willing to sacrifice a decent bit of backward compatibility with the initial release, they would’ve made it, technically. And it would have been great. As so often, fear and featureism ruined it. Tough, because the amount of slashing-the-past that came when Teh Steve returned was a magnitude greater.
Whether having the greatest OS of the planet would have been commercially more successful than having the greatest salesman of the planet, is of course an entirely different question.
Anyway, aside from a protected driver model and refined OpenDoc, MacOS 8.6 looks pretty much like Copland. It even has the nanokernel. And it’s actually even a bit like Gershwin, where Carbon would’ve been the API.
As seems typical with articles linked to on OSNews, there are several technical inaccuracies with this one, too.
1. While it was not perfect, Windows 3.1 (and I think 3.0 as well) *did* have virtual memory and protection implemented, such that in many cases, one application crashing would not doom all applications currently running. Because of the hardware architecture and the need for backwards compatibility with DOS and its drivers, there were still some gaping holes that every process could access and overwrite, but that was no absolute guarantee that all applications would be hosed if one application crashed. Thus, from a technical standpoint, Windows 3.1 (at least when running in the default protected memory mode) was superior to the Mac OS available at that time, combined with the fact that it also allowed applications to allocate memory as they needed, not notably different from Win32 (Windows NT and succcessors and 95 and successors).
2. While Windows 3.1 implemented cooperative multitasking for running Windows GUI applications in much the same way Mac OS did, Windows 3.1 actually provided full pre-emptive multitasking using the MS-DOS prompts, which used 86 virtual mode (can’t remember the exact name now). You could run 40 DOS applications that were pre-emptively multitasked without a problem, if you had enough RAM and a fast enough CPU at the time to pull it off. If these applications crashed, it didn’t affect the stability of Windows or the other applications, as long as that virtual DOS session didn’t corrupt hardware states or otherwise have access to sensitive data via the virtual device drivers.
3. Even still with Windows 3.1, though you were by then allowed to keep memory permanently allocated without using handles, previous versions (as well as Windows 3.1) allowed you to allocate as much memory as needed, and refer to it via handles, so you only needed to lock it down in a fixed memory address space when you needed it, and when you were done with the memory, you unlocked it. While this was inconvenient to deal with, it did solve the problem of having far more data to work with than RAM to put it in, and this, combined with sharing DLL’s heavily, is a huge reason why you could run as many applications as large as they were in 16-bit Windows with the hardware and RAM capacity of the time. While the Mac OS (IIRC) had something similar for locking resources in memory, you were still allocated a fixed amount of RAM per application to do it in, while Windows did not have such a limiting policy.
Jonathan Thompson
Has anyone used this little gem?
http://web.archive.org/web/20031004074741/http%3A//www.applefri…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX
No, never used it but its a shame it died as well. Another reasonable attemt at bolting a nice GUI onto *NIX. Unfortunatly UNIX license was it’s cancer.
Same could be said about Microsoft Xenix; had Microsoft decided to go down the UNIX route instead of inventing NT, it would be interesting to see how things would have panned out.
http://www.alyon.org/generale/theatre/cinema/affiches_cinema/c/con-…
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