As a long time apple fan, Copland and what may have been occupies far more of my mind than is reasonable. But I never thought I’d actually get a chance to touch it. This is awesome to see.
Using a home PC without an internet connection in the 90s, I would basically do laps of the entire OS, looking at every app/window/dialog, searching for novel stuff. That's what exploring one of these feels like!
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 UI is what made it all worth it, so clean and comprehensible. You always knew what was where and what felt like complete mastery of the system. MacOSX was a welcome change but it was never as comfortable or friendly or even as responsive as the original. The original mac mouse latency is still better and any system in common use today.
There are a few copies of late shell builds floating around in private collections that have release predicated on the end of someone's legal liability (shall we euphemistically say). I don't know about complete system images, though.
Oh really? I had assumed it lost long long ago. Since it never got past internal demo (and use in PPC in some ways) I just didn’t think there would be enough copies of it to not get lost very quickly.
> Since it never got past internal demo (and use in PPC in some ways)…
For anyone who might not know, parts of it did forcefully and successfully escape containment. Core Mac Toolbox APIs originally created for Star Trek (like the portable C implementation of QuickDraw 2D) were installed on hundreds of millions of PCs as QTML, which QuickTime for Windows was built on, which was in turn a requirement for iTunes for Windows. QTML on Rhapsody was also the PoC for Carbon for Mac OS X, with ClarisWorks as the guinea pig.
Right. I know they used the BIOS rewrite and way of keeping it in memory to base the PPC code on to get a jumpstart because it was already done and useful.
But it was never released as an x86 version, not even to developers. And by the time OS X went to Intel they were on a totally different codebase so I expect little if any code survived that.
What I'd really like to see, is Apple and Microsoft dedicating at least 1 person each (or even just part of their time), to meaningfully engage with the retro community about their company's older operating systems. Maybe fix some old bugs or write/port some newer apps to those OSes... or teach how to code/debug with period-correct software... something, anything, would be most welcome.
(and also, how cool is it that we can run whole computers in our web browsers, just like that!)
https://infinitemac.org/
For those who don’t know it was Apple’s port to Intel before they decided that PPC was the way forward after m68k.
There are a few copies of late shell builds floating around in private collections that have release predicated on the end of someone's legal liability (shall we euphemistically say). I don't know about complete system images, though.
And those guys are all getting up there in years.
For anyone who might not know, parts of it did forcefully and successfully escape containment. Core Mac Toolbox APIs originally created for Star Trek (like the portable C implementation of QuickDraw 2D) were installed on hundreds of millions of PCs as QTML, which QuickTime for Windows was built on, which was in turn a requirement for iTunes for Windows. QTML on Rhapsody was also the PoC for Carbon for Mac OS X, with ClarisWorks as the guinea pig.
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... (see page 28)
But it was never released as an x86 version, not even to developers. And by the time OS X went to Intel they were on a totally different codebase so I expect little if any code survived that.
Edit: Yes, and I was never aware of Novell's part in all of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project#Architecture
What about the enterprise version (https://lain.wiki/images/5/53/CoplandOS.png), though? :^)