Did it actually "fail" or was it discarded? As a Mac user from back then, I remember copland only from some articles and from macos gadgets that made the classic macos somehow look like copland, i.e. like a weird teeny disco box. It could be that there were a few month were copland was actually released to the wild, but at that time I already ran suse linux.
Copland was a bundle of fail. It would crash doing nothing at all and couldn't run anything of substance. But, typical of Apple's death spiral at the time, it took Ellen Hancock saying a strong, unequivocal "kill it" to get Amelio to do so. I bet Apple would have continued to iterate on it to their doom if that hadn't happened.
Came here to post this, and upvoted you instead. Everything I've read about it indicated that Copland never worked and was an unstable POS that was impossible to develop for.
At one of the Apple developer conferences, people booed and criticized the new OS's unimpressive capabilities during a demo/slideshow, prompting Amelio to come back on stage and promise to "tack on" symmetric multiprocessing. For an OS that was supposedly mere months away from release...
I worked for a Mac vendor at the time, and Copland never got beyond slideware for us. It was ridiculously ambitious: an (Apple developed) microkernel that would have a MacOS classic server, a multiuser next gen MacOS, plus even claims it could be possible to have an NT server on it. Complete UI customizability, etc, etc.
Essentially they were promising something comparable to NT 4, from an organization with a fraction of the team Microsoft used to deliver it.
As mentioned in the article, the main reason for failure was trying to put more modern tech into an operating system that had to support non 32 bit processors like the 68020 which weren't fully 32 bit. Also, I don't believe that the older 68k processors supported virtual memory. Maybe if they had just targeted PowerPC CPU's Apple may have a chance with Copland.
