Editing MacOS version history (section)

===Internal development===
Meanwhile, Apple was facing commercial difficulties of its own. The decade-old [[classic Mac OS|Macintosh System Software]] had reached the limits of its single-user, [[co-operative multitasking]] architecture, and its once-innovative user interface was looking increasingly outdated. A massive development effort to replace it, known as [[Copland (operating system)|Copland]], was started in 1994, but was generally perceived outside Apple to be a hopeless case due to political infighting and conflicting goals. By 1996, Copland was nowhere near ready for release, and the project was eventually cancelled. Some elements of Copland were incorporated into [[Mac OS 8]], released on July 26, 1997.

After considering the purchase of [[BeOS]] — a multimedia-enabled, multi-tasking OS designed for hardware similar to Apple's, the company decided instead to acquire NeXT and use [[OPENSTEP]] as the basis for their new OS. [[Avie Tevanian]] took over OS development, and Steve Jobs was brought on as a consultant. At first, the plan was to develop a new operating system based almost entirely on an updated version of OPENSTEP, with the addition of a virtual machine subsystem — known as the ''Blue Box'' — for running "classic" Macintosh applications. The result was known by the code name [[Rhapsody (operating system)|Rhapsody]], slated for release in late 1998.

Apple expected that developers would port their software to the considerably more powerful OPENSTEP libraries once they learned of its power and flexibility. Instead, several major developers such as [[Adobe Systems|Adobe]] told Apple that this would never occur, and that they would rather leave the platform entirely. This "rejection" of Apple's plan was largely the result of a string of previous broken promises from Apple; after watching one "next OS" after another disappear and Apple's market share dwindle, developers were not interested in doing much work on the platform at all, let alone a re-write.