In the mid-1990s, Apple worked on an operating system called Copland, which was announced but never released due to project management issues and feature creep. Parts of Copland were eventually included in Mac OS 7.6 and Mac OS 8, but it was so problematic as a whole that Apple removed it before it was finished.
Michael Steil, who works on reverse engineering vintage hardware and software, recently managed to get Copland to work in emulation. He modified the open source Power Mac emulator DingusPPC and said it took 11 patches to get Copland up and running. He has a browser version of Copland that you can try on his website and has shared the fixes needed to get Copland started.
During Copland’s development, Apple released three beta versions. The last beta release was D11E4, which Steil got to work on. He said Copland is “notoriously difficult to run on real hardware” and was not available in emulation before.
After Apple canceled Copland in August 1996, it looked outside the company for a new operating system. This led to the takeover of NeXT in 1997 and the return of Steve Jobs. NeXTSTEP, NeXT’s operating system, was the precursor to Mac OS
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