The Computer Chronicles - Mac Clones (1995)

[@ferrreira]

oh dear, the anti-glare filters we used to put in front of our monitors…

[@gblargg]

Now we laugh at glare and make them as glossy as possible.

[@avigdonable]

its an anti-mosquito net.

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

I think they used it to get a good picture of the monitor. They didn't have a screengrabber that streams the desktop, like they do now. Or a vga recorder. They had to literally point a camera at the monitor.

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

@@patrickglaser1560 That was not so hard in the USA, as ntsc is 60Hz and the monitors refreshed at 60Hz. With correct exposure timing the monitors can be recorded flicker-free.

[@medes5597]

It's not an anti glare filter, it's a polarisation filter for the camera.

[@Zedek]

I like how at 2:30 you can see it does nothing simultenaously - it literally stops until the word processor is finished loading up.

[@aris95]

It seems he is running demo not actual operating system?

[@medes5597]

​@@aris95 given that Copland never got beyond the demo stage, that's a safe bet. If I remember right, it turned out this "demo" wasn't actually a demo but was in fact a fake program that was programmed only to do what you saw on screen. It was entirely an illusion because Copland in reality was massively unstable and crashed constantly. They never finished it, they ended up buying NeXTSTeP from Steve Jobs' and bringing him back as CEO. NeXTSTeP became their new operating system.

[@ghmh]

Multitasking was limited too cooperative multitasking

[@MidnightThunderYT]

​@@aris95According to 65scribe, that demo really was faked. The real Copland was an unusable buggy mess mostly filled with lots of ideas that would never work together, and it was canned for this reason, although some of the more developed things were scavenged for Mac OS 7.6.

[@drygnfyre]

Interesting to note that Power Computing had access to the fastest PowerPC chips before anyone else, including Apple. Their clones regularly beat out Apple's own offerings.

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

With which they dug their own grave. It was a dead ringer Apple was not going to let anyone else produce a Mac clone with more power than their own flagship, and for less money. Apple retracted the license for this very reason. Steve Jobs may have been visionary, he was also a greedy pig. Apparently, his only friends were the people who agreed with him, business wise. And he held them by that standard.

[@tjhamerica]

@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 That doesn't make him a greedy pig. Apple needed to pay for their OS development costs and design which is why their products cost more than the clones. That was one of the key strategies needed to save Apple in the late 90s.

[@medes5597]

​@@tjhamerica except the fees from licensing more than covered apples costs and their sales weren't as damaged as Jobs made out - they actually increased apples own sales, people bought the clones and then made a real macintosh their next purchase. Jobs was just obsessed with "closed systems" to the point he lied about sales to justify that approach.

[@realBaronFletcher]

Amazing to look back on this and see how things have unfolded.

[@TheyRiseBand]

Bob is the most 90s thing I’ve ever seen.

[@MirceaD28]

Is the first guy presenting a ... prerecorded presentation? The straight lines the mouse does, the fast typing, the second mouse pointer appearing for short periods of time

[@wsgut123]

MirceaD28 he is. Copland was way to unstable at the time for a live demo

[@runforit420]

William Gutiérrez A Copland install required another Mac connected via serial port to serve as a debugger for Copland to even start up.

[@drygnfyre]

It is. I actually found some Apple-produced Copland demo videos somewhere else on KZbin and sure enough they had the exact same GUI, same search terms, etc. The real Copland was really unstable and apparently would often crash after just a few minutes.

[@weaponofmassconstruction1940]

I don't think he was trying to mislead though... He wasn't using the mouse.

[@medes5597]

It was a short program that ran over system 6, it could only do what you see there. Apple called it "a series of macros" which seems like a way of getting around admitting it was basically a presentation.

[@captainkeyboard1007]

This is the topic that I have been search for in quite a while.

[@Lanceawright]

As an Ex-Radius employee, we got boned hard. Apple switched to supporting PCI cards, while the Radius hardware was the previous Apple NUBUS card standard. As a result, the platform was doomed as Apple left their own proprietary standards, and exposed the Macintosh third party developers to suffer at the hands of PC card manufacturers.

[@floydjohnson7888]

Wow...and that was long before Apple ditched Motorola CPUs

[@WizzRacing]

Well to be honest. .. They standardized the PCI Bus. After years of the Bus wars. As plenty of people got hung out to dry over it. Not just Apple PC....

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

Business wise it was a good choice, but it does suck that the companies left behind with a pile of useless junk, just get ditched. But that was Steve Jobs. Many see him as visionary, I call him a greedy pig. Apparently his only friends were the people he worked with and that agreed with him, and he held them by that standard.

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

From what I picked up at the time, those PCI macs used reversed registers over the bus so the PC-based firmware on the PCI cards would not work and would need custom firmware for Macs to account for the reversed registers. The same with AGP later on. Came PCI Express, Apple had switched to Intel CPUs and adopted the normal registers for the bus.

[@Lanceawright]

@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 Although to this day, many video cards have to be flashed for Mac Pros to get to the diagnostic boot screen.

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

1995, the year I went online and it changed my life.

[@miata350]

16:46 what was he scribbling on the paper? It didn't appear that he was writing anything important, just scribbling, while glancing at the camera.

[@CaptchaNeon]

OMG theme color changes, password protection and even a search for documents! 😱 who would've thunk?! 😂

[@raven4k998]

yeah password protection made the old lock and key obsolete tech for protecting your computer keeping it secure

[@jonathaningram8157]

I miss how easy it was to change system theme. We waited a decade to have dark theme back.

[@superviewer]

The Copland that never was :) but then came Steve and OS 8 instead and the rest is history!

[@AumchanterPiLetsPlay]

I love testing their predictions with the advantage of hindsight. On the storage one from 1983 this chap is fairly certain that the micro-floppy will never take off.

[@toymachine5980]

And the journalist who thought only journalists would want portables.

[@runforit420]

superviewer Steve Jobs had little to do with OS 8.

[@WizzRacing]

Man the Lotus Notes drove me crazy.... You had to hire someone that specialized just in that... Then you tied a ball and chain to them...

[@NomadicDmitry]

5:01 Dark mode theme back in 1995? That's cool

[@cameraman655]

Loved this show as a kid. Interesting how the Apple analyst got some things right about Apple's future and some wrong, especially the clones. I thought about buying a Umax clone to replace my dying Quadra in 1996, I am glad I held off.

[@runforit420]

At least Gil Amelio was smart enough to hire Ellen Hancock who cancelled Copland after she realized it would never ship.

[@oldtwinsna8347]

Copland was a financial disaster but it could've been much worse and have been the nail in the coffin to take Apple spiraling downwards even faster than they were. Move may have well saved the company.

[@gilramirez12]

Ellen Hancock was a “bozo”, according to Steve Jobs....and I think he was right. If you watch the 1998 episode of this show that interviewed her, you can clearly tell that she was very “out of place” at Apple....she just didn’t “get it”....

[@runforit4203]

@@gilramirez12 Though she made the correct decision to cancel Copland and stop development of it in 1996. From the videos of the developer previews (Paul’s Old Crap channel has videos of the developer builds) it was horrifically buggy and crashed regularly.

[@medes5597]

​​@@gilramirez12 that's because she refused to tell the board what he wanted. He asked her to lie on her reports to justify his new moves as CEO financially. She said no. Suddenly Jobs is telling everyone she's an idiot. Weird coincidence that.

[@alwinter]

Mac OS 8 (Copeland) did not release "in 1996 some time" as mentioned in the video. It released in July of 1997. And not before Steve Jobs returned to Apple and removed the "Themes" feature as seen at 4:45 because it made the OS too inconsistent and less recognizable. Also if I recall correctly this entire feature was adapted from Arlo Rose and Greg Landweber's Kaleidoscope which was a really fun tool for Mac OS 7.

[@blackneos940]

Hackintosh before it was frowned upon by Apple..... :D

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

Before they realised the clones offered way more bang for buck and retracted the cloning license because they also realised it would impact the sales of their own Macs.

[@blackneos940]

@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 Yeah, but their market-share would have been a lot today. I get that having pretty much the same Hardware for every new Laptop is great from a compatibility point-of-view, but now with Apple switching to ARM, things just got more confusing... I prefer my PCs to be more like a Motel, where any OS can be installed with ease, even at 3:00 A.M.. Whereas Apple's PCs are more like high-end Hotels, but not many can get in, except for the rich ladies of the evening and MBA-guys.

[@paulmichaelfreedman8334]

@@blackneos940 Yep, that sounds like Steve Jobs.

[@GamesCell]

0:38 - Is there a 1Gb RAM option?

[@SigmaRho2922]

Copland was cancelled in 1996 and was repurposed into Mac OS 8 which was released the following year. Mac OS would release its final classic version called Mac OS 9 in late 1999. The operating system code was rewritten following the release of Mac OS 9 and the next operating system known as Mac OS X would be released in March 2001.

[@tylertyler82]

You mean “NeXT operating system” 😏

[@goodiesguy]

Tim Bajarin and Creative Strategies are still around today!

[@quarterburnt]

Notice his hand never touches the mouse the entire time the “demo” for Copland is running.

[@drygnfyre]

It's a presentation. You can find it on KZbin. It was just a standard presentation because the real Copland was so unstable it often crashed after doing nothing.

[@NDakota79]

Should I sell my M1 Macbook Pro and get that Mac Clone with up to 4gb?

[@JonnyInfinite]

4:50 dark mode.....

[@bernardogaetani]

Quad core 1,5GB SCSI II HDs in 1995 WOW

[@TheyRiseBand]

4 single core cpus.

[@mrbigfellanz]

Back when new Operating systems actually brought along new usabily and features.. not just new colour schemes and more locked down security and more copyright protection.

[@sontodosnarcos]

Or "emojis".

[@tylertyler82]

Updates now are free though. Back then it was $100 for every update.

[@drygnfyre]

@@tylertyler82 Not to mention Mac OS wasn't known for being all that stable back then. Of all the usual KZbin nostalgia comments, that one doesn't even make sense. Given how crash-happy Mac OS was, I don't know if I'd say it was "more usable" "back then."

[@MarioGuzman88]

I like how this is a video demo. Doesn't even move the mouse at all the entire time.

[@wonderpierrot]

Oh man, I really wished we had Copland instead of Mac OS 7.5-9.1. That preemptive multitasking and protective memory was the definite necessities until Mac OS X came around. I had to live with way too many crashes, system bombs and hard freezes back in the day (I still stuck with the Mac despite all that).

[@ferrreira]

As it seems, Copland never became a reality for the end user because of bad project management. Sad

[@runforit420]

We had an indigo iMac G3 with 9.2 and I remember the printer extensions (it had some printer extensions that had to load on startup, not the Chooser extension) would sometimes cause the computer to crash on startup. Then again, until 10.1 Puma, MacOS X was pretty horrible, but, for Apple to release a new OS, was pretty astounding anyhow that users readily accepted 10.0.

[@DataWaveTaGo]

@smakfu Thank you.

[@oldtwinsna8347]

Copland was a failure right from the start. The history actually goes back further to the failed Taligent project. Have to understand how much money Apple burned through those years. The figure goes into hundreds of millions of dollars. It wasn't just a situation of being a bad OS or lacking features, it was totally inoperable.

[@RoastBeefSandwich]

Copland was supposed to be the next Mac OS on the level of OS X. The problem was Copland never worked. For many of the same reasons Vista was a disaster, Copland would have been a disaster if it shipped. The difference is Apple could not have weathered a Vista-level disaster in the mid-90's, they would have died.

[@unnamedchannel1237]

The new sound when you click the menus will keep people interested? More like drive them nuts trying to work out how to disable the annoying sound

[@bri6985]

12 ram slots to get 1.5gb of ram. What a time to be alive

[@FUKYFILM]

Is this whole copland demo just recorded before the show, and the Apple “engineer” just starting those prescripted macros? So not actually interacting with the Copland (as some would say, with the beast)? 😅😅😅 How to prevent Demo from failure level 999

[@saurondp]

I wonder how Sun's cheap computer running that new software called Java is coming along...

[@gilramirez12]

Can we all agree, that in the 9 years that Tim Bajarin was featured on this show, that he was almost always spot-on with his industry predictions?!?!?!

[@medes5597]

Definitely more accurate than Paul Schindler who went from claiming IBM Clones were destroying the industry to editing Windows Magazine.

[@wallacelang1374]

I had always wanted to get a Mackintosh Computer, but regardless of whether I could get an actual Apple Mac and/or a clone they were inevitably way out of my price range.

[@AureliusR]

Oh dear god, I hope Bob got rid of that mullet eventually

[@ian_b]

Well to be fair, nobody at any given time knows which of the current fashions of their day will be despised in the future.

[@RapperBC]

@@ian_b and to be even more fair: that's not a mullet

[@CommodoreGreg]

21:23 Nice job with the Sun logo. SMH.

[@JonnyInfinite]

That ponytail

[@HikikomoriDev]

Prerendered Copland.

[@hubzcaps]

Mmmmm newvicon tube cams ....yummmy

[@addisonjames4870]

I am wondering if this was really Copland or a skinned/rigged System 7. Copland was infamously bad. Stories abound of booting it and doing nothing - not even a mouse cursor move - and it would just crash after sitting for a while.

[@TransCanadaPhil]

12:00 expandable to 1.5GB of RAM on 12 DIMM sockets..oohhhhhhh! :-D lol

[@Neodestro]

i remember in 1997 my pc got 32mb of ram lol

[@haniltrivedi741]

New software language “Java” 21:27 ❤️

[@NDakota79]

It's crap, it's gonna ruin performance

[@unitedbolts8053]

16:20 wow... That is a looooong neck right there...

[@andrepow]

Apple is now a $2 trillion mobile phone company that happens to make computers

[@medes5597]

Hey for those of us who do design work, they're a $2 trillion dollar company that makes laptop accessories for Adobe photoshop.

[@sebastianhama5624]

this stuart guy is so cool

[@floydjohnson7888]

I figure someone watching this one arrived at a workable "Dopeland" joke

[@doalwa]

Ah, ORACLE....one rich a-hole called Larry Ellison...

[@c0smicc4nc3r4]

Don't copy that floppy

[@c0smicc4nc3r4]

@Andrew Tarrant nice dude, very niice 👍

[@BenMeddeb]

Our Net master lol

[@andrewbevan4662]

If Americans pronounce Copland (the operating system) as Copeland how do they pronounce Copland the Sylvester Stallone film?

[@oubrioko]

The movie and the operation system are both _names_ , so they are pronounced however their conceivers want them to be pronounced. There is a city spelled: _Worcester_ in Massachusetts, and another city spelled: _Reading_ in Pennsylvania. Contrary to what one might expect given their respective spellings, they are actually pronounced: *_WOO_* - ster & *_RED_* - ing. When it's a name (also called a proper noun), the expected pronunciation norms may not necessarily apply. The inverse is also true. How many different spelings can you think of for a name with the exact same pronunciation? i.e. Kelsey, Kelsi, Kelcie, Kelci, Kelsie, Kelsea . . .

[@coprographia]

Andrew Bevan Cuplund

[@floydjohnson7888]

Short "o", like that in "lock"

[@straightpipediesel]

The movie isn't called "Copland", it is "Cop Land," two separate words. That makes it obvious how you should pronounce it.

[@leeizme]

dark mode in 1995 hahah 5:10

[@PearComputingDevices]

Copland 2020:)

[@LostieTrekieTechie]

It'll be done the same day GNU herd is ready.

[@harryshuman9637]

Hmmmm, new programming language called Java.... I wonder if it will ever catch on....

[@cardbored_]

Yeah, everyone remembers the crazy CGI of... Forrest Gump. 14:10

[@mybigfatpolishlife]

How else do you think they got Tom Hanks into historical footage

[@_modiX]

how macOS's find-files function was better back in the days than it is today.

[@HikikomoriDev]

5:27 yay Gizmo!

[@leonardoantonio8756]

haha mac clones, nowadays mac is an intel clone

[@toymachine5980]

Gotta love Bob's ponytail and pushed up jacket sleeves over a T-shirt

[@ezydenias8505]

Tightmouth Corky well there are two things about standalone macos. The awesome thing about Apple is that everything runs awesomely smooth. At least from what I've heard. And that is because the os is optimized to the machine it is running on. So yeah. The thing wird Linux is that it only runs that smooth when you do some optimization work for the machine you are installing it on. Otherwise well. And that was the point for many Apple buyers. It just works. For me, when I was young we always talked about Mac. Thinking about buying a Mac but our games wouldn't play on it. That was a big no go like there was most of the time not the option to buy for Mac. So I was not wanting one just for the games while my brother just was satisfied using Linux for his own stuff. Still is using Linux today. And today I don't use Linux is mostly due to the fact that Photoshop doesn't run on it. Some other tools too which actually now run on Linux. So yeah who wants a Mac when your geeky son can use his Linux on your pc, your tools als work on your windows PC and you can play games? For most people this was just not ideal. So they narrowed there market. And that is the idiotic thing, Apple is the product for the creative people they say. But really I would love to give my grandma an apple because it just runs smooth and is easier to use. So they totally missed the market. I can't even use mac anymore because It probably doesn't come with enough bays for all my graphics cards I need as ab 3d artist.

[@dadude4960]

@@ezydenias8505 have fun with your single usb c and dongling dongles

[@dadude4960]

@@ezydenias8505 have fun with your single usb c and dingling dongles

[@ryanvacation7319]

Your comment was years ago but looks like Apple is back using its own CPU for Macs. Ah, the cyclical nature of history.

[@Cryo837]

Around 1993 I remember being in the office (we had real Macs...not clones) and one of the engineers (from Iran) called all the guys over to proudly show us what he found on the internet....a young blond girl naked, with her legs spread apart. All the guy liked the image but most felt uncomfortable looking at the online photo while at work (even though it was lunchtime). This was before IT departments started clamping down on what type of things employees were looking at. He was never fired because he was "advised" NOT to access adult sites while at work. Very unprofessional to abuse corporate assets.

[@ian_b]

Doesn't seem to me to be any more "abuse of corporate assets" than arguing on Twitter, booking holidays, shopping on Amazon etc.

[@bramvandenbroeck5060]

800 bucks for that stupid golfing accessory??? Wow!

[@VictorEstrada]

How they introduce Java 😂

[@joesalyers]

Dark mode didn't make it to the Mac until 2018 with Mojave! 23 years LATER. Whoever said technology is a fast paced game never tried to use dark mode LOL. No high contrast mode doesn't count!

[@AlexSage]

Windows platform won because pirating was possible. mac was too limited...

[@marklechman2225]

Zoom rects!

[@Appleboy78165]

Honestly I’d say the Mac clone program was one of Apple’s dumbest ideas ever. Thank goodness Steve Jobs killed it

[@coprographia]

CYBERDOG

[@theshadowdirector]

Mac Clones.... Steve Jobs was rolling in his grave, yes I know he wasn't dear yet but that's how bad it was...

[@iamg000]

29 years later 32 cores at 4.1 Ghz Adobe still takes freaking forever ( 2019 Mac clone = Hackintosh ) all hail the Ryzen Master race

[@floydjohnson7888]

If you meant "Adobe Illustrator", I can imagine John Warnock (original lead proggie for Illustrator and original CEO of Adobe Systems) feeling really embarrassed.

[@7c3c72602f7054696b]

I hate these in some way, nostalgia sucks!

[@elgeneralxx]

STEVE CHEIFET POOPED HIS PANTS!!!!!!!

[@elgeneralxx]

@Невада большевик the guy doing the show

[@rpasko3]

Stewart*

[@AbdiPianoChannel]

In these Apple computers are not more than audio production pc and fashion statement. $3000 Windows based gaming laptops are way more powerful than Macbook pro unless the macbook is 8000 bucks or more.

[@timothystevenhoward]

Apple destroying themselves and the PC market jumping on the opportunity. Combine that with Windows 95 as the killer app. Apple was doomed.

[@Weensx]

Nobody gives a shit about mac desktops anymore except the ridiculously priced "pro" that look like a trash bin