Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser

Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser pagetable.com

Apple’s ill-fated Copland operating system is notoriously hard to run on real hardware, and has not previously been available in emulation. Here is the last build, D11E4 from June 1996, in an improved DingusPPC.

162 points•luu•9 days ago•49 comments•

#d11e4 #copland #booting #browser #apple #d11e4 booting #copland d11e4 #apple copland

49 comments

mrkpdl9 days ago

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.

pianoben9 days ago

Oof, that hit me right in the nostalgia - I grew up with that style of Macintosh UI and miss it quite a lot.

(and also, how cool is it that we can run whole computers in our web browsers, just like that!)

wk_end9 days ago

If that hit you in the nostalgia, this is going to outright blow your nostalgia off its feet:

https://infinitemac.org/

frou_dh9 days ago

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!

written-beyond9 days ago

Insane, I've never used those versions of macos before.

codepoet809 days ago

I got this working a few years ago on era-appropriate hardware. It was awful -- unstable and crashy. There were glimpses of what they were trying for, but it was painfully obvious they were a long way from even the stability of 7.5. I'm sure it was a tough call, but whoever decided to axe it made the right one. Besides, if it had succeeded, they might not have bought NeXT and we might not have gotten OS X!

mamp9 days ago

I was at WWDC in 1996. Each presentation showing off a new feature of Copeland required booting a custom build of the binary, and even then it was flakey as hell because it didn't implement proper memory protection. I vividly remember getting a sudden realisation that Copeland was never going to ship.

ndiddy8 days ago

When Apple showed Copland on Computer Chronicles, it was just the Apple guy playing animated mock-up demos and pretending that he was using the computer. I think that shows an incredible lack of confidence, as they weren't even willing to demonstrate the actual OS in a controlled environment. I'm not sure why Computer Chronicles let them get away with this. I would have expected that as a news program, they wouldn't let guests do fake demos. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBRKzJMS6Uw and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXfsAYUjvms&t=242s

tapoxi9 days ago

The decision to axe it and go with NeXT was widely attributed to Ellen Hancock (RIP)

praseodym9 days ago

According to her Wikipedia page she wanted to go for Solaris and was against acquiring NeXT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Hancock#:~:text=was%20ag...

mulderc9 days ago

Based on what has been reported, I don’t think it was all that tough a call to axe it. What to do after that has hard but cancelling Copeland was an obvious decision to make.

MBCook9 days ago

I’d kill to see Project Star Trek but well never see that.

For those who don’t know it was Apple’s port to Intel before they decided that PPC was the way forward after m68k.

parl_match9 days ago

I wouldn't be so pessimistic.

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.

MBCook9 days ago

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.

ranger_danger9 days ago

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.

dmitrygr9 days ago

If retro win2k worked, microslop would not sell another copy of win11/12/whatever

monocasa9 days ago

Seems to work just fine: https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...

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