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Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser

163 points · 49 comments · luu

  1. MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
    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.

    1. parl_match · · focus · HN ↗
      I wouldn't be so pessimistic.

      There are a few copies of late shell builds floating around in private collections that have release predicated on the end of someone's legal liability (shall we euphemistically say). I don't know about complete system images, though.

      And those guys are all getting up there in years.

      1. MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
        Oh really? I had assumed it lost long long ago. Since it never got past internal demo (and use in PPC in some ways) I just didn’t think there would be enough copies of it to not get lost very quickly.
        1. hedgehog · · focus · HN ↗
          It would be sort of interesting, but would it be a lot different from the CHRP version?

          Edit: Yes, and I was never aware of Novell&#x27;s part in all of this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Star_Trek_project#Architecture" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Star_Trek_project#Architecture

        2. CharlesW · · focus · HN ↗
          &gt; Since it never got past internal demo (and use in PPC in some ways)…

          For anyone who might not know, parts of it did forcefully and successfully escape containment. Core Mac Toolbox APIs originally created for Star Trek (like the portable C implementation of QuickDraw 2D) were installed on hundreds of millions of PCs as QTML, which QuickTime for Windows was built on, which was in turn a requirement for iTunes for Windows. QTML on Rhapsody was also the PoC for Carbon for Mac OS X, with ClarisWorks as the guinea pig.

          <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.computerhistory.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;access&#x2F;text&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;102738249-05-01_acc.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.computerhistory.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;access&#x2F;text&#x2F;20... (see page 28)

          1. MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
            Right. I know they used the BIOS rewrite and way of keeping it in memory to base the PPC code on to get a jumpstart because it was already done and useful.

            But it was never released as an x86 version, not even to developers. And by the time OS X went to Intel they were on a totally different codebase so I expect little if any code survived that.

          2. Lammy · · focus · HN ↗
            &gt; Ganatra: I-- this-- it&#x27;s tough, because I don&#x27;t specifically remember-- it&#x27;s not like a presidential assassination or 9&#x2F;11 where, &quot;Where were you the day that Copland was cancelled?

            lmfao

        3. parl_match · · focus · HN ↗
          &gt; Since it never got past internal demo

          it was a joint venture with novell and caldera employees had exposure to the resources, a year or so after the project fell apart.

          &gt; just didn’t think there would be enough copies of it to not get lost very quickly

          a lot more people had exposure to it than you&#x27;d think. it sounds very interesting to us, but honestly, it was probably pretty obvious to everyone involved that it was a bad idea unless apple was serious about dropping ppc

          1. MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
            It wasn’t about dropping PPC. It was a project that was killed because they moved to PPC instead of Intel.
            1. parl_match · · focus · HN ↗
              apple began evaluating ppc in 1991 and it was the stronger choice in the org, from what i&#x27;ve heard. so yes, it was about dropping ppc
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