You Can Now Try Apple's Unreleased Copland OS in Your Browser

In the mid–1990s, Apple worked on an operating system called Copland, which was announced but never commercially released because of 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 nixed it before it was finished.

Michael Steil, who works to reverse engineer vintage hardware and software, was recently able to get Copland running in emulation. He modified the open-source Power Mac emulator DingusPPC, and he said it took 11 patches to get Copland up and running. He has a browser version of Copland you can try on his website, and shared the patches needed to boot Copland.

During Copland's development, Apple released three beta versions. The last beta was D11E4, which is what Steil got to work. He said Copland is "notoriously hard to run on real hardware," and wasn't previously available in emulation.

After Apple canceled Copland in August 1996, it looked outside the company for a new operating system. That led to the purchase of NeXT in 1997 and the return of Steve Jobs. NeXTSTEP, NeXT's operating system, was the precursor to Mac OS X.