Commenters explore what Copland reveals about OS design history
3 Sep 21 8:52 PM · 2d ago · 5 comments · 1 source · development 3 of 3
Multiple Hacker News users reflect on Copland as a historical artifact, noting design decisions that persisted across decades and considering the alternate future if Apple had shipped it instead of acquiring NeXT.
“Copland is such an interesting glimpse into an alternate future. One where Apple got its early-90s management problems sufficiently under control, to transition classic MacOS into a modern operating system without adopting the full NeXT lineage.”
swiftcoderpagetable / luu Developer and retrocomputing enthusiastApple Original developer of Copland OS
The whole story articlespostscomments the bright band is this development · numbered dots are the others · click one to jump
What people said 6 voices · verbatim
-
I am so grateful that I can play with Copland. I was the ultimate fan boy back it the day. My first computer was an Apple ][ and we had the first Macintosh at home. All the mac fans were desperate to get a reentrant multithreaded system that didn’t let a rogue application take down the system. That and virtual memory were desperately needed. The…
-
Very cool, I've been using macos so long but am also young enough to forget & finding it surprising just how long that monochrome watch pointer has been around.Its fun playing around and seeing how much has stayed the same in desktops since then, and so far the most surprising thing to me was that a scrollable text area does not re-render the text…
-
One interesting outcome of Apple going with NeXT instead of being able to deliver Copland or failing to agree with Gassé on Be's acquisition, is that both platforms were heavily based on C++, and following Apple's culture, very little UNIX into them.So who knows if Apple would have managed to make it, without Jobs, or the UNIX to sell to Linux…
-
I got this working a few years ago on era-appropriate hardware. It was awful -- unstable and crashy. There were glimpses of what they were trying for, but it was painfully obvious they were a long way from even the stability of 7.5. I'm sure it was a tough call, but whoever decided to axe it made the right one. Besides, if it had succeeded, they…
-
> DingusPPC does not take patches written with the help of AI, so maybe someone wants to re-do these fixes based on the explanations in the commit messages. (The patches for this wasm version are on this branch.)Oh goodie! Another fork for my fork collection :)
-
Copland is such an interesting glimpse into an alternate future. One where Apple got its early-90s management problems sufficiently under control, to transition classic MacOS into a modern operating system without adopting the full NeXT lineage
All 3 developments of Apple's Cancelled Copland OS Now Boots in Browser Emulation →
MastodonHacker NewsNewswires