Contributed by Thomas Hormby | osViews This article was syndicated under osViews' Open Content License. May 25, 2005 7:01 AM

Apple began developing a new operating system in 1987. The Macintosh System Software was very pleasant and innovative, but it was not advanced enough to compete with OS/2 or UNIX workstations. The Macintosh System Sofware was somewhat unstable when compared to OS/2, lacked protected memory and had no threaded multitasking.

If Apple was to attract new customers coming from the high-priced PC and UNIX workstations, it would be necessary for it to create a new operating system, and not rest on it's laurels. To make a more stable and polished operating system, it would be necessary to start anew. Two operating systems were created. They were called Blue and Pink, named for the flashcards used in their founding meetings. Blue would become System 7, and Pink would be developed by Taligent. Pink was killed in 1995, and was developed solely by IBM. Beginnning in 1991, however, a new Operating system was being created, called Copland (an American composer). It was an ambitious project, both on the system level and on the user interaction level. The system was expected to offer the advanced features of UNIX with the elegance and ease of Macintosh.

Copland included an innovative interface, which revolved around themes. It was possible to customize every element of the interface. The themes would change according to the logged-on user. Vital to Copland's success, Apple made Copland platform-agnostic. The cloners would be able to run Copland on their machines without having to license the ROM's from Apple. The system offered a viable plethora of new technologies. QuickDraw GX, OpenDoc, PowerPC, Quicktime, OpenTransport, etc...[sic] To benefit from the innovations in the new operating system, developers would have to rewrite their programs. The system would become resistant to crashes and sloppy code. If a program crashed, it would leave the other apps running, intact, the same if a program accessed a restricted or corrupt resource.

Copland was to be 95 percent Power PC native. The system would be able to manage disks up to .25 terabytes. The virtual memory would be completely rewritten in the style of UNIX boxes. The entire operating system would be able to be upgraded without taking sown the system, even without slowing down the computer during the process.

No longer would searches be based only on file attributes and titles, it would actually search (text) document's content. It would record the results in an ordinary window, updated by a background practice, much like BeOS and its traccker. The results would be able to be sorted by types, size and relevance. Many of the new features of Copland were integrated into the traditional Mac OS:

• MacOS 8: platinum interface, presentation by buttons, small Aide, reduction of the windows, window-drawers, multiple copies
• MacOS 8.5: new open dialog boxes, management of the topics, icons in the bar of titles.
• MacOS 9: alert boxes below the application menu, multiple users
• MacOS X: Lack of compatibility for the old applications, preemptive multitasking, virtual memory management, protected memory