Copland was Apple’s failed attempt to modernize the classic Mac OS in the mid 1990s. While parts of it would end up in Mac OS 8, the dream of a modern Mac operating system wouldn’t be realized until after Apple bought NeXT.
Copland is a really interesting (and sad) chapter in the Mac’s history. Here are some documents I’ve collected over the years about it.
A digital treasure trove if there ever was one.
I’ll give the Copland team, they were ambitious. They probably could have done it with unlimited time and budget, neither of which they had.
I was pitched into a long career as a left wing activist by the events of 1968. I have spent a large part of my life working to support progressive political and social causes. It was friends of mine that were leading figures in the creation of the women’s movement and gay liberation in the 1970s. Almost all my many friends now are still on the left. I have been a life long atheist. I despise Donald Trump. I have never been paid a penny by the fossil fuel companies.
But apparently I became right wing in 2006 shortly after a visit to Athabasca glacier in the Canadian Rockies. I went up the glacier a left wing, right on sort of guy and I came down a right wing shill for the evil fossil fuel industry.
How did that happen? It happened because my trip up the glacier prompted me to ask a simple question and it was asking that question, and the answers I eventually found, that apparently turned me into a repulsive science denying right winger
The Athabasca glacier spills over and down from the elevated Columbia Ice-field and on the way it drops over over three giant bedrock steps. The glacier flows down the valley like a frozen, slow-moving river. I spent a day at the glacier, first hiking up the valley tracing the old route of the glacier before it retreated and then later riding a snowcat out on to the surface of the glacier. It was pretty wonderful day but I didn’t realise at the time that it was turning me right wing.
As I hiked up the valley towards the leading, and melting, edge of the glacier, I came across date markers showing where the leading edge of the glacier had been in the past. What I noticed, and what piqued my interest, was that the dates for the retreat of the glacier started in the mid-19th century and that the glacier was already retreating when the valley was first mapped by early western explorers. Later in the visitors centre I read that because of a warming climate, the Athabasca Glacier has been receding, melting, for the last 125 years, a fact I found very interesting.
The reason I thought the long history of the Athabasca glacier melting was particularly interesting was because it meant that there must been been a strong natural warming process underway back in the middle of the 19th century well before 95% of the human CO2 had been emitted, before human caused warming had started.
So the question the trip up the glacier prompted was “How have the climate scientists worked out the separated and calculated effects of natural warming and human caused warming?â€
I wondered how the climatologists had separated out the natural warming trend from any man made one and thought it would be interesting to find out more so out of interest when I got home from our holiday I started to investigate the science a bit more. Up until the trip on the glacier I had had thought the case for human caused dangerous warming looked pretty strong, I had watched Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truthâ€, but I had never bothered to explore the issue in any detail.
After the glacier trip I wanted to find out more, and as I started reading the books and the blogs, and increasingly the scientific papers themselves, my interest grew and grew as I realised something was not right. I spent the best part of two years burrowing away into the science and also into the political economy of climatology and global warming.
What I discovered was a big shock, which was that the science upon which the entire theory of dangerous human caused global warming is based is painfully flimsy. The entire ‘proof’ that the recent warming period was caused mostly by human CO2 and not by the natural mechanisms that had caused all the other recent warming epodes is based on models of how the climate work. The model adds up all the things that climatologist think, based on current knowledge, can change climate and when that is done the current models cannot find any other explanation than the CO2. That’s the entire proof. Of course those theories about how the climate works, the theories that say only CO2 can be to blame, are just that – theories – and and as such have to be tested against real world data. The climate models can be used to make predictions about future climate change. All those models, I repeat all, predicted 20 years ago that the amount of CO2 that has been added to atmosphere in the last couple of decades would produce a strong warming signal. All those models, I repeat all, were wrong. Around a quarter to a third of all the CO2 ever added by humans was added in the last twenty years and yet there has been barely any warming for eighteen years. There was some warming between 1975 and 1998 but that warming has more or less stopped since then. Sure there are screaming headlines about ‘hottest years ever!†but the temperature records are to do with thousandths or hundredths of a degree celsius and are small than the error bars. Every year without a strong and clear warming trend further invalidates the current climate models.
The issue of the climate data sets is a big one, and something I investigated for a long time after my trip up the glacier. In summary what I found was that the surface climate historical data sets were poor, patchy and were constantly being ‘adjusted’ by their collectors and custodians all of whom had a deep professional, career and often idealogical stake in the the theory of human caused climate change. The small and closely connected teams that maintain the climate historical data sets are also extraordinarily secretive about the adjustments that are made to the data.
Based on the deep problems with the surface temperature sets I now tend to only really trust the satellite data, and as much as I loathe Donald Trump the possibility that his presidency might lead to a clean up and opening up of the unhealthily closed world of climate data is to be welcomed.
BTW the answer to the question I posed on coming down from the glacier, when I asked “How have the climate scientists worked out the separated and calculated effects of natural warming and human caused warming?â€, is that the climate scientist cannot separate the natural from the man made warming. In fact the scientists have no idea what caused the warming in the 19th and early 20th century, or indeed what caused the preceding and very cold Little Ice Age, or what caused all the well documented warming and cooling episodes stretching back thousands of years. The science is not settled, its hardly started.
If you torture the data long enough, it will confess
Ronald Coase
British economist
Wrong article, isn´t ?
You are free to try to understand by yourself. The way general medias that don’t understand anything about science, don’t care about it, give patronizing lessons about HGW is innerving.
AFAIU, modern climatology is about computer models, supercomputers running millions lines of code software. It is pretty hard, without dedicating your whole life to get a PHD to really be legitimate to criticize these models. The figures are crazy : 2°C global temperature raise ? No thermometer anywhere, no simple repetable measurement can give a first hand experience of these trends. Only hints, and abusive ways of explaining day to day meteorology with climatology. There is a lot of “Dunning-Kruger” symptoms.
And computer models, satellites are evolving fast. Is the 1000 times faster supercomputer gives more trustworthy results than what computers were able to calculate 20 years ago ?
This is also a generation thing, yougsters use computers, old geologists dig layered strates in the ground.
While there is obvious economical interest from people involved in emitting carbon to deny global warning, I have more difficulty in believing in a global conspiracy of green hippies turned into computer assisted climatologists.
And the billions from the petrol industry have not be enough to deliver credible science against the scientific consensus.
In the end, you have to trust someone, you need to trust that the people building aircraft or nuclear power generators know their jobs. I trust more all the climatologists in the world, even if they are paid by universities, even if being part of the crowd is better for their career.
I would trust them a lot more if they weren’t so very secretive about some of their work.
The collected surface temperature data has to be adjusted to take into account the numerous things that can distort the results (put an air conditioner or new road next to a weather station that has been measuring temperature for decades and you get a spurious warm signal, move a station a couple of hundred meters up a hill and you get a spurious cooling signal, etc).
The problem is that the three centres that compile the historical surface data sets all keep their adjustment algorithms secret, and all three have somewhat surprisingly tended to adjust early 20th century historical data down thus introducing a greater warm curve. There might be good reasons for that (although one would expect the adjustments to be more used to reduce modern day temperature measurements in order to compensate for the growth of human activity and greater heat island affect) but nobody outside of the small connected groups doing the work can check the methods being used.
All three historical climate data centres are run by people who committed to the CO2 driven warming hypothesis a long time ago and as we know confirmation bias is a common problem in science.
The answer is to open the whole process and make it completely transparent, release all the data, publish all the adjustment algorithms and computer code being used. I cant see any reason not to do this, especially as what is at stake is trillions of dollars of costs for proposed climate programs.
Especially as what is at stake is trillions of dollars of costs for proposed climate programs.
Which is exactly why it hasn’t been opened…
That is completely false.
I had high hopes back then, especially for OpenDoc.
I was really hoping for an alternative to the coming OS monopoly, and OS/2 and Copland, along with open standards like OpenDoc, were a big part of that hope. A few years later, as OS/2 and Copland faded away, the first Linux distributions came out, and the open standards movement gained new momentum.
It’s taken many years longer than I hoped, but we are finally in a place where most things can be accomplished without monopolistic vendors. Of course, the battlegrounds shift, and we must always be vigilant.
I was so excited for Copland. They kept me waiting and waiting and waiting… I’m still waiting today. Apple let me down many times. Copland was their biggest let down for me.
They scrapped, what to me at the time, was the greatest thing since 7. I understand now, why they scraped Copland. But for the most part the why was hush-hush for a while. I dragged my feet for a while with OS X. Then Jobs had to go all hippie and try alternative medicine for his pancreas. Leaving us with no new prophet for Apple.
Now X is shit. The newApple company is shit. I gave up on Apple a couple years back. The garbage is too expensive and outdated. 7ate9 were outdated but at least the hardware was descent and moderately affordable for what you got. That’s right 6. Fear the 7.
Just my rant about Copland. RIP Copland.
I never saw it running, but I had a copy of an image to install it. The problem was that it required some kind of elaborate debugger in place on another machine to run… so I never had the time to work out how that worked. There was a server with all these kind of things on it. I forget where or how I got invited to it. It was some obscure fairly Apple specific sharing protocol… Limewire I think? I dunno. It was a PITA to get connected as the clients were pretty crappy, but props to the guy who ran it.
It also had a complete code dump of a version of MacOS classic. Almost entirely in 68000 assembler.
Edited 2016-12-14 09:55 UTC
I remember being soooo excited about Copland and getting more and more anxious as a release kept being postponed. I think I actually had a leaked copy of ‘Copland Technical Overview’ (or something very like it) at the time, I remember sharing it with some friends who ran a mac related business and pouring over the dteails with them.
Most of that stuff above the microkernel made it into OS8 and OS9.
OpenDoc sounded so cool but was replaced by the web. They also had no ability to sell it.
Most of everything else I saw scanning those Copland docs made it into classic MacOS, so they definitely picked the carcass clean.
Don’t forget that it was a resource hog and very late delivering on Windows.
I saw the demo at MacWorld SF… ’95, maybe? That was the last hope for MacOS to stay MacOS, as opposed to mutating into whatever OSX is: completely useless at first, gradually becoming okayish, then neglected and lobotomized into garbage again.
OpenDoc was way ahead of its time: wait ’til it actually works, I thought, so I didn’t get burned by that. I dodged QD3D because hardware didn’t exist yet and I already had a better 3D framework: I only had to toss some preview and import/export code. I didn’t really blame Apple for trying either (well, killing QD3D and saying OpenGL would replace it was kind of insulting.)
I gave up on Apple a while back, after 20+ years as the ultimate Mac bigot. It helped that I never liked iPhones or needed an iPad.
… than it is to the present day! Feel old much?