Is the premise correct? Almost all 1990s OS projects ultimately failed. Cairo, Taligent, Copland, BeOS. The projects that survived were 1970's/1980's technology: NeXT Step (OS X), Linux, Windows NT.
If anyone has watched the very tech-oriented anime "Serial Experiments Lain", Copland OS is used by the protagonist, Lain. I happen to love the anime so I set up my neofetch terminal image (an actual PNG, with w3m) to the logo of Copland OS used in the show.
> A/UX was very impressive for its time — 1988, before Windows 3.0. It could run both Unix apps and classic MacOS ones, and put a friendly face on Unix, which was pretty ugly in the late 1980s and early 1990s.<p>I realize I really don't know much about A/UX at all. I didn't even know it could run classic MacOS apps. Does anyone have a link to more about the OS? I always assumed it was just a clone of System V, but if it could run classic MacOS apps, that meant it was more than just that.
Hi. Author of the piece here.<p>It's a repurposed Quora answer; the original question might clarify what I was answering: <a href="https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Apple-unable-to-complete-Copland-OS-by-mid-90s-but-Microsoft-with-NT-IBM-with-OS-2-NeXT-and-BeOS-were-able-to-finish-OS-by-1990s/answer/Liam-Proven" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Apple-unable-to-complete-Copla...</a>
Anyone who ever used MacOS X v10.0 (or the server preview of it) around the year 2000/2001, and had previously used a NeXT from the command line, could immediately tell that it was the NeXT OS with a MacOS-resembling veneer of GUI on top of it.
> <i>It’s often said that Apple didn’t take over NeXT, nor did it merge with NeXT — in many important ways, NeXT took over Apple.</i><p>This is pretty much the answer. NeXT was Jobs' baby and he was happy to deploy all the tech through Apple when he came back. It worked out really well for them. Copland dev was also lagging and pre-Jobs (return) Apple had a decided lack of ability to ship.
<i>The NeXT management discarded Copland, most Apple technologies — OpenDoc, OpenTransport, GameSprockets, basically everything except QuickTime. [...] It took the existing MacOS classic APIs [...] and cut out everything that wouldn’t work on a clean, modern, memory-managed, multitasking OS.</i><p>I've never seen the innards of the above technologies, but to the extent that this passage gives the impression that the technologies that were cut (and one could add QuickDraw 3D and QuickDraw GX to the list) were the <i>least</i> modern and future proof, I think that's exactly backward. It's largely the <i>most</i> modern technologies that were cut, and it's the crufty ancient APIs that made it into Carbon.<p>Something like OpenDoc would probably have been reasonably portable, given that it was based on IBM technologies. OpenTransport was based on System V streams, GameSprockets was based on a QuickTime stack which largely survived for some time.<p>Presumably those decisions were made because the new APIs, gorgeous as they were, didn't have major adoption yet, and Apple desperately needed to focus.
Some chronology:<p>An end of 1995 article:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070610194914/http://www.businessweek.com/1995/51/b345595.htm" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20070610194914/http://www.busine...</a><p>"APPLE'S COPLAND: NEW! IMPROVED! NOT HERE YET!"<p>"Says one recently departed Apple engineer: ``There's no way in hell Copland ships next year. I just hope it ships in 1997.''"<p>One year later:<p><a href="https://www.cultofmac.com/459054/apple-buys-next/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cultofmac.com/459054/apple-buys-next/</a><p>"December 20, 1996: Apple Computer buys NeXT, the computer company Steve Jobs founded after leaving Cupertino a decade earlier."<p>A little more than two years after that, already 1999:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0</a><p>"Mac OS X Server 1.0, released on March 16, 1999,[1] is the first operating system released into the retail market by Apple Computer based on NeXT technology."
Did it actually "fail" or was it discarded? As a Mac user from back then, I remember copland only from some articles and from macos gadgets that made the classic macos somehow look like copland, i.e. like a weird teeny disco box. It could be that there were a few month were copland was actually released to the wild, but at that time I already ran suse linux.
i love this comment to the article about the attempt by atari:<p><i>Atari MiNT! It was an attempt to bolt UNIX semantics on top of TOS, which itself was already a weird mashup of CP/M and DOS. It ran on 68k ST boxes, and was about as bonkers as you'd expect, in ways that I can summarize with the pathname "U:\DEV\NULL".</i>
Reading this made me think of how iOS and macOS are evolving - the UIKit and iOS apps on Mac.<p>Strategy feels similar - make things compatible enough and force apps to adapt somewhat. Of course this is a gross oversimplification, but who knows.
I witnessed all of this since I started using Macs around '84/'85 and programming them around '89. I'm still in mourning about:<p>* Since Classic MacOS (OS 9 and below) didn't have a command line, it had GUIs for tweaking system settings. Better yet, it had a budget for preventing user interface issues in the first place. The user experience on Classic MacOS was simply better than anything we have today, on any platform (including iOS - and yes I realize this is subjective). The flip side is that the platform evolved faster until the late 2000s because developers could tinker more freely. Since the vast majority of users are not programmers, I don't think this was a win. To me, something priceless was lost, that may never be regained even with the incubator of the web pushing the envelope.<p>* I often wish that Apple had made a Linux compatibility layer. That entire ecosystem of software is simply not in the Mac fanbase's radar. This isn't such a huge issue now with containerization, but set everything back perhaps 10-20 years. Apple did little to improve NeXT (to make it something more like BeOS, or the Amiga). We really needed an advanced, modern platform like Copland or A/UX like the article said. But in the end, Steve Jobs knew that didn't really matter to like 99% of users, and he was probably right. Still, I'm in that lucky 1% that sees the crushing burden of console tool incompatibilities and an utter lack of progress in UNIX since the mid 90s.<p>* Much of the macOS GUI runs in a custom Apple layer above FreeBSD (rather than using something like X11). I'm not really convinced that the windowing system is that optimized, because it used to use a representation similar to PDF. So for example, I saw weird artifacts and screen redraws back when I was doing Carbon/Cocoa game programming, especially around the time OpenGL was taking off. Quartz is powerful but I wouldn't say it's performant. A 350 MHz blue & white iMac running OS X had roughly the same Finder speed as an 8 MHz Mac Plus running System 7 or a 33 MHz 386DX running Windows 95. Does anyone know if the windowing system is open source?<p>I could go on, in deeper detail, but it's futile. I think that's what I truly miss most about Classic MacOS. If you ever watch a show like Halt and Catch Fire, there was a feeling back then that regular folks could write a desktop publishing application or a system extension (heck whole games like Lunatic Fringe ran in a screensaver) and you could get Apple's attention and they might even buy you out. But today it's all locked down, we're all just users and consumers.<p>I still love the Mac I guess, and always come back to it after using the various runner ups. But I can't get over this feeling that it stopped evolving sometime just after OS X came out, almost 20 years ago. There is this gaping void where a far-reaching, visionary GUI running on top of a truly modern architecture should be. All we have now is a sea of loose approximations of what that could be. I wish I knew how to articulate this better. Sorry about that.