In 1991, Mac OS was getting long in the tooth, and Windows 3.1 was providing the first real competition to Apple's innovative System 7 Mac OS in years. Then-CEO John Sculley focused more on marketing than investing in a new OS to support capabilities such as multitasking and protected memory that were becoming critical as applications got more sophisticated. When Gil Amelio took over in 1994, he made the development of a new OS, which was code-named Copland, a priority. But the engineering team at Apple quickly began expanding the scope, developing a string of technologies such as OpenDoc and QuickDraw GX, but failing to get the core features to work.
Apple demoed Copland at its WWDC show in 1995, but its primitive microkernel didn't even support symmetric multiprocessing and the proto-Copland OS was highly unstable. The promised developer build kept getting delayed, and the few developers who viewed working demos saw how unstable and unsophisticated it actually was. Amelio brought in the respected Ellen Hancock from National Semiconductor to try to save Copland, but her investigations showed it was hopeless, so Amelio killed Copland in summer 1996. The project to save Apple's future looked as if it might hasten its demise instead.
So Amelio tried a Hail Mary and began shopping outside Apple for a replacement. He came close to buying the Be OS from former Apple Mac development chief Jean-Louis Gassée, but Gassée wanted more money than Apple would pay. Amelio then turned to Steve Jobs, hoping to adopt his NextStep OS as the basis for the new Mac OS. Over the Christmas holidays, the deal was done, and just five weeks after that, Jobs ousted Amelio and returned as CEO. NextStep did, in fact, form the basis for the new Mac OS, called Mac OS X, that more than a decade later is considered the best PC OS available.
Related stories:
