Section 1.3. Copland

1.3. Copland

To address the need for a more stable operating system, Apple embarked on the development of a new operating system, dubbed Copland, in 1993. With Copland, the focus was on increasing stability, portability, ease-of-use, and performance. Copland was intended to be Apple's stepping stone to a future OS that would include preemptive multitasking and protected memorykeeping applications separate and preventing them from crashing each other or taking the entire system down. Much to the chagrin of Mac users as well as Apple, Copland descended into a death spiral of budget and schedule overruns.

Three years later, in 1996, Copland was cancelled and Apple desperately looked elsewhere for a new foundation for the Mac OS. For a time, it looked like Apple would purchase Be, started by Apple alum Jean-Louis Gassée, and use the technically sophisticated BeOS as the foundation for its next-generation operating system. The BeOS was developed on the PowerPC chip fitting in with Apple's Mac hardware strategy, had impressive multitasking abilities, an advanced filesystem, and provided the memory protection that the Mac OS so desperately needed. The only catch: BeOS was an unfinished work in progress that was unproven in the marketplace.

Several months into negotiations to acquire Be, the two companies were not able to agree on a price. Be wanted $400 million dollars for its unfinished and unproven system, and Apple did not want to take such a risk at that high price. After negotiations fell through late in 1996, Be struggled for several more years and then was eventually acquired by Palm, Inc.

Once again, Apple was left with no direction for its operating system, and many thought that the demise of Apple was near. Then, discussions started with Steve Jobs that led to the purchase in December 1996 of the company that he founded after leaving Apple in 1985: NeXT Computer. With this purchase came the portable and feature-rich NEXTSTEP operating system.