Copland (operating system)

Copland was the project name for a from scratch neugeschriebenes operating system from Apple, which should be the successor of System 7 ( a non- Unix -based Mac OS version ). Eponym for the project was the contemporary composer Aaron Copland. This name was chosen deliberately to illustrate the new beginning, as all preceding versions of Mac OS project name of classical composers - such as Mozart or Beethoven - possessed. Apple was planning in 1994, the first PowerPC -based Macintosh computers with the operating system Copland equip. The goal was a system based on a microkernel ( Apple likes to call Nanokernel ) builds, pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection dominates. The whole system should be multi-user and system 7 natively work differently on the PowerPC processor.

History

The 1984 advanced Macintosh operating system had some design flaws that could only be corrected by a new development. The system does not support preemptive multitasking, multiuser mode, memory protection nor dynamic memory management so it was very prone to instabilities. Apple launched before the Copland project is already another project to develop a new operating system:

Pink

In 1988, the Project Pink was launched. Pink had a fully object- oriented operating system to the target. In mid-1991 succeeded Apple, the company IBM to convince them of his development at that time, which is why the joint subsidiary Taligent was founded to accomplish Pink together. Soon they realized, however, that the market away from Apple did not need a new operating system, which is why Pink in the runtime environment Talae, ( Taligent Application Environment, later also known as Common Point) was converted. This left the problem persists the outdated operating system from Apple.

Star Trek

Under the code name Star Trek ported Apple employees and Novell operating system Mac OS 7 on x86 processors. The project was launched in the summer of 1992 to life and the end of October there was a fully functional prototype is available. Apparently Star Trek was on 486 systems even more efficient than MacOS 7 to PowerPC. But after Microsoft was Apple Manager Roger Heinen poach, also Dell decided to surrender his computer instead of Star Trek with pre-installed Microsoft Windows.

The project was stopped in favor of Star Trek Copland 1993.

Copland

Copland was launched in March 1994. First, the release date was postponed to the end of 1995, and later on in mid-1996 and late 1997. In November 1995, a beta version for software developers has been published. However, the Copland - development, in which about 500 developers worked and the total of over $ 250 million cost was still not finished and hopelessly in arrears. Apple had to put off with the aged system 7, the Macintosh user. At the same time celebrated Microsoft Windows 95 great success, and the first serious Linux distributions appeared on the market. Inspired by Microsoft's revision of MS -DOS and Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 that did not even took a year of development time, it was decided at Apple in 1997 to stop Copland and integrate as many features of it as possible in a revised system 7. The first innovations from the Copland project were flowing into the version 7.6. In Mac OS 8.0 introduces numerous were integrated.

Next Step

After Apple flirted briefly with Windows NT, it wanted to buy a modern operating system based BeOS by Jean -Louis Gassées company Be, Inc.. Then Apple but finally decided ( after Steve Jobs is said to have phoned Gil Amelio and advised him of BeOS ) to acquire founded by Steve Jobs NeXT. As part of this acquisition, Steve Jobs returned to the year 1996/97 back to Apple, and the operating system NeXTSTEP became the basis for today's Mac OS X. Many of the target in the Copland project targets Apple could achieve with OS X but only in 2001.

Apple worked temporarily because Copland Porting to x86 platform, namely, by the Nukernel would be replaced by Mach 3; a solution that would have been the same run on PowerPC processors. The project was considered the future at Apple in particular by Ike Nassi as Mac OS. The project came to a halt just before Apple decided to take NeXT and use the Mach- based operating system.

Properties

Many features that were planned for Copland fins, later in the Macintosh operating system is Mac OS one, including:

• Balloon help ( from System 7 )
• Context menu ( pop-up ) menus ( Mac OS 8)
• Multiple Copy ( Multithreadingfähigkeit the Finder ) ( Mac OS 8)
• Design themes ( Mac OS 8.5)
• Multi- user capability ( Mac OS 9)
• Preemptive multitasking ( Mac OS X)
• Memory protection ( Mac OS X)
• Dynamic memory management ( Mac OS X)