This is my second video about Apple’s Copland operating system, and I plan on doing more coverage on the other builds sometime in the future. Copland, despite being a hilarious failure, is an interesting system to mess around with for fun. This video covers D7E1 which is the earliest leaked build.
Revisiting Apple Copland (D7E1 Build)
Thanks for posting this! As a longtime Mac user, I was following Copland development closely when I was a kid — I was a weirdo and asked my parents for THINK C for Christmas for my Mac Plus when I was a kid. I remember seeing Copland at the Boston Mac World conference in ‘96 and it was a tragedy, but I was still excited at what they could do as some of the concepts for the OS we’re definitely ahead of its time. There are some issues with D7E1 that can be fixed with some hacking to make it a bit more stable. Watching your video has me wishing I never got rid of my PowerMac 7100/66 and the back issues of MacTech magazine — at one point, I had Copland development and documentation CDs but have no idea where they are today. I may have pay a little visit to eBay and Craigslist and see if I can grab the appropriate systems to run Copland again and have some fun with older Mac software. Writing code for System 6 and 7 is a completely different world than writing in SwiftUI today, with so much burden put onto the programmer because of how the OS was designed (like, it’s my responsibility to make sure things multitask properly?!), but it’s reflective of just how limited the original Mac system software was.
The good news is the CD images and archives online probably make up all the copies which ever got out into developer hands, but sadly some of the very final builds right before the project was nuked are likely lost deep into Apple archives.