Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser

(pagetable.com)

Comments

ChickeNES 39 minutes ago
> DingusPPC does not take patches written with the help of AI, so maybe someone wants to re-do these fixes based on the explanations in the commit messages. (The patches for this wasm version are on this branch.)

Oh goodie! Another fork for my fork collection :)

mrkpdl 12 hours ago
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.
codepoet80 7 hours ago
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!
pianoben 14 hours ago
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!)

swiftcoder 2 hours ago
Copland is such an interesting glimpse into an alternate future. One where Apple got its early-90s management problems sufficiently under control, to transition classic MacOS into a modern operating system without adopting the full NeXT lineage
MBCook 13 hours ago
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.

lilbigdoot 9 hours ago
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

briandw 11 hours ago
I am so grateful that I can play with Copland. I was the ultimate fan boy back it the day. My first computer was an Apple ][ and we had the first Macintosh at home. All the mac fans were desperate to get a reentrant multithreaded system that didn’t let a rogue application take down the system. That and virtual memory were desperately needed. The UI is what made it all worth it, so clean and comprehensible. You always knew what was where and what felt like complete mastery of the system. MacOSX was a welcome change but it was never as comfortable or friendly or even as responsive as the original. The original mac mouse latency is still better and any system in common use today.
syncurrent 3 hours ago
Maybe we will be able to experience Taligents CommonPoint one day in the browser too.
BoingBoomTschak 13 hours ago
Cool stuff.

What about the enterprise version (https://lain.wiki/images/5/53/CoplandOS.png), though? :^)

g023 11 hours ago
Was so disappointed when they shut that project down in its infancy.
ranger_danger 13 hours ago
What I'd really like to see, is Apple and Microsoft dedicating at least 1 person each (or even just part of their time), to meaningfully engage with the retro community about their company's older operating systems. Maybe fix some old bugs or write/port some newer apps to those OSes... or teach how to code/debug with period-correct software... something, anything, would be most welcome.
platevoltage 11 hours ago
Has anyone gotten it to crash yet?
brcmthrowaway 13 hours ago
Is this qemu in the browser?