August 22, 1996: Copland Mercifully Terminated

Copland was started in 1994 to address some of the flaws found in the Mac System software. Functionality taken for granted by OS X users (pre-emptive multi-tasking to cite one example) were unavailable in the now Classic Mac OS.

The trouble was that Copland development was moving forward at an impossibly slow pace, the goals were too abstract to be attainable and, in all likelyhood, the product would never ship. Ellen Hancock, having reached the aforementioned conclusions, decided there was only one sensible thing to do. Stop development of Copland and look for an operating system from another vendor. Ellen Hancock stopped development of Copland, inadvertently paving the path to the acquisition of NeXT and the loss of her job in August of 1996.