The Copland development was hampered by many missed deadlines. The system was intended to be a full rewrite of the Mac OS, and Apple hoped to beat Microsoft Windows 95 to market with a development cycle of only one year. Copland was to be followed by Gershwin, which promised memory protection spaces and full preemptive multitasking. Apple intended Copland as a fully modern system, including native PowerPC code, intelligent agents, a microkernel, a customizable interface named Appearance Manager, a hardware abstraction layer, and a relational database integrated into the Finder. It was announced in March 1994 alongside the introduction of the first PowerPC Macs. Starting in 1988, Apple's next-generation operating system, which it originally envisioned to be 'System 8' was codenamed Copland. Its successor, Mac OS 9, was released on October 23, 1999. It features PowerPC native versions of QuickDraw, AppleScript, and the Sherlock search utility. Mac OS 8.5 is the first version of the Mac OS to require a PowerPC processor.

Mac OS 8.1 introduces a new, more efficient file system named HFS Plus. Mac OS 8.0 introduces the most visible changes in the lineup, including the Platinum interface and a native PowerPC multithreaded Finder. As it came at a difficult time in Apple's history, many pirate groups refused to traffic in the new OS, encouraging people to buy it instead. Mac OS 8 is one of Apple's most commercially successful software releases, selling over 1.2 million copies in the first two weeks. Mac OS 8 helped modernize the Mac OS while Apple developed its next-generation operating system, Mac OS X (renamed in 2012 to OS X and then in 2016 to macOS). Released over a series of updates, Mac OS 8 represents an incremental integration of many of the technologies which had been developed from 1988 to 1996 for Apple's overly ambitious OS named Copland. It places a greater emphasis on color than prior versions.

It includes the largest overhaul of the classic Mac OS experience since the release of System 7, approximately six years before. Mac OS 8 is an operating system that was released by Apple Computer, Inc.

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