Re: [MacPerl] looking at Mac OS X

[Vicki Brown <vlb@cfcl.com>]

<x-flowed>At 18:28 -0500 1/27/99, Richard Gordon wrote:
> It's been a while, but my recollection is that the MacOS8 name was adopted
> purely as a disingenuous device to kill off the clone licensing and had
> nothing to do with the original schedule for substantive OS enhancements.

Not that anyone told _us_ :-)

The original reason, as presented to and by the Copland team, was 
that Mac OS 8 would be a serious sea change to the MacOS.  That was 
why it was going to have a new major number. For the same reasons 
that System 7 was System 7 and not part of the 6.x line. It was 
radically different. It was a complete redesign and rewrite of the 
system software, from the ground up.

> I also think that Copland was not supposed to be especially radical (as in
> providing protected memory, getting rid of extensions, etc.), but its
> successor, Gershwin, was.

No.  Copland was originally going to be very radical. It was going to 
have memory protection, among other things. And Copland was 
originally going to have No More Extensions.  It was going to be a 
major new OS. Gershwin would follow with more features and 
advancements that didn't get into Copland.

Then Copland started to slip.  And the developers started to protest. 
(You can imagine :-)  And things started to change.

> At this point, I'm not sure if there is a
> meaningful way to correlate one thing to another, but I basically consider
> OS8.5.x to be Copland.

No.  Not Copland as Copland was meant to be or as it was designed. 
OS 8.5 bears many of the Finder changes that Copland was going to 
wear, but inside, in the system code of the OS, it is not Copland.

I was there... I have the scars to prove it ;-}

- Vicki
still not speaking for Apple anymore than I ever did...
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