Apple's Cancelled Copland OS Finally Boots in a Browser
Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser
Apple's ill-fated Copland OS, once meant to replace System 7 with a microkernel design, was cancelled and never emulated. Now the final build, D11E4, boots in an improved DingusPPC emulator running in the browser via WebAssembly. The 11 patches that unlock Copland are available on a GitHub branch, though DingusPPC rejects AI-assisted patches, so someone may want to redo them from the commit messages.
Copland was supposed to replace the old System 7 with a modern microkernel-based system, but was cancelled. Apple instead bought the NeXTSTEP/OpenStep OS, which became Mac OS X.
- codepoet80
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!
- mrkpdl
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.
- lilbigdoot
Very cool, I've been using macos so long but am also young enough to forget & finding it surprising just how long that monochrome watch pointer has been around.
Its fun playing around and seeing how much has stayed the same in desktops since then, and so far the most surprising thing to me was that a scrollable text area does not re-render the text as you move the scroll bar with your mouse
Totally makes sense that it wouldn't be worth the cycles back then, but its one of the few things that was actually surprising to me today
- pianoben
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!)
- MBCook
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.