Copland (operating system)

Copland is an operating system developed by Apple for Macintosh computers between 1994 and 1996 but never commercially released. It was intended to be released with the name System 8, and later after changing their naming style, Mac OS 8. Planned as a modern successor to the aging System 7, Copland introduced protected memory, preemptive multitasking, and several new underlying operating system features, while retaining compatibility with existing Mac applications. Copland's tentatively planned successor, codenamed Gershwin, was intended to add more advanced features such as application-level multithreading.

Development officially began in March 1994. Over the next several years, previews of Copland garnered much press, introducing the Mac audience to operating system concepts such as object orientation, crash-proofing, and multitasking. In August 1995, David Nagel, a senior vice president, announced at Macworld Expo that Copland would be released in mid-1996. The following May, Gil Amelio stated that Copland was the primary focus of the company, aiming for a late-year release. Internally, however, the development effort was beset with problems due to dysfunctional corporate personnel and project management. Development milestones and developer release dates were missed repeatedly.

Ellen Hancock was hired to get the project back on track, but quickly concluded it could never ship. In August 1996, it was announced that Copland was canceled and Apple would look outside the company for a new operating system. Among many choices, they selected NeXTSTEP and purchased NeXT in 1997 to obtain it. In the interim period, while NeXTSTEP was ported to the Mac, Apple released the much more legacy-oriented Mac OS 8 in 1997 based upon adding components from Copland, and Mac OS 9 in 1999 to transition forward. Mac OS X became Apple's next-generation operating system in 2001.

The Copland development effort has been described as an example of feature creep. In 2008, PC World included Copland on a list of the biggest project failures in information technology history.

Launched in 1984, the Macintosh and its operating system were designed from the start as a single-user, single-tasking system, which allowed the hardware development to be greatly simplified.

The Macintosh lacks multitasking but tries to fake it, and it insists on a complicated user interface but leaves much of the work up to the application. These are serious drawbacks, and it is difficult to imagine elegant repairs for them.

— Adam Brooks Webber, Byte (September 1986)

These limits meant that supporting the multitasking of more than one program at a time would be difficult, without rewriting all of this operating system and application code. Yet doing so would mean the system would run unacceptably slow on existing hardware. Instead, Apple adopted a system known as MultiFinder in 1987, which keeps the running application in control of the computer, as before, but allows an application to be rapidly switched to another, normally simply by clicking on its window. Programs that are not in the foreground are periodically given short bits of time to run, but as before, the entire process is controlled by the applications, not the operating system.