Gather 'round, kiddies, and stretch your minds wa-a-a-ay back to the Dawn of Time. Back in those dark days, Apple's next-generation operating system strategy relied heavily on an OS called Copland, which was to be a stepping stone on the path to a fully modern Mac OS. Copland died an ignominious death a couple of years ago, when the Amelio Dynasty finally killed it after realizing that it would never be stable enough to work-- and even if it did, it would provide severely limited backwards compatibility and still wouldn't yield all the goodies like full pre-emptive multitasking and all those other great buzzwords we've come to love so much. Enter the second Jobs Era, when Amelio bought NeXT to replace Copland and brought Steve on board in the role of consultant, and the rest is history.

However, when Steve looked at what had previously been known as Copland, he didn't toss it out completely; sure, it was a piece of crap, but it was a piece of crap that had cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, and its parts were more than the sum of its whole. Individual chunks were salvaged for use in the Mac OS: the Platinum look surfaced in Mac OS 8, Navigation Services are destined for next month's 8.5 release, etc. Unfortunately, the one "gee whiz" feature that would generate the most popular interest and the attention of the press has apparently been thrown on the back burner once again. Themes, the architecture that allows the configuration of the user interface based on predefined styles, have been yanked from the latest Mac OS 8.5 betas, apparently due to continued instability. Reality has more. Yes, friends, we'll have to wait still longer for those High-Tech and Gizmo themes we've been seeing since all those "Sneak Preview of Copland" articles several years ago. The latest prediction for this long-awaited Copland holdover is that it will finally ship with Mac OS 8.6 next year; in the meanwhile, it's Kaleidoscope or nothing.

Incidentally, while it has been previously assumed that Copland was named after famed composer Aaron Copland (and a few free thinkers out there maintain that it was actually named for drummer Stuart Copeland of the Police), in recent months we've uncovered the truth: Copland is actually named after Cop Land, that Sylvester Stallone movie from last year that also vanished without much of a trace. See how it all falls into place, now?