A lot more information on Copland, including installation guides (it runs on early PPC Macs, e.g. the 6100/7100/8100 series), can be found at https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Apple_Copland
I was in high school, and one of the few Mac users at my school when Copland was originally announced--there was really only one other guy a couple years ahead of me who I bonded with over our love of Macs. We got pretty hyped over Copland, sharing each new tidbit of news we managed to scrape up with each other, but then of course it all crashed down and instead of this revolutionary new OS we were promised, Mac OS 8 just felt like a regular version bump from what we already had.
A few years later OS X would come out which was a whole new level of hype. I kind of miss those days when a new operating system was something to get excited about. Now looking at MacOS with its walled-garden lock down and Windows slowly enshittifying with invasive telemetry and user-hostile UX, it feels kind of like a new OS is something to dread. At least we still have a lot of different Linux and BSD distros to play around with, which can still sometimes provide that nostalgic shiny new OS feeling.
A few years later OS X would come out which was a whole new level of hype. I kind of miss those days when a new operating system was something to get excited about. Now looking at MacOS with its walled-garden lock down and Windows slowly enshittifying with invasive telemetry and user-hostile UX, it feels kind of like a new OS is something to dread. At least we still have a lot of different Linux and BSD distros to play around with, which can still sometimes provide that nostalgic shiny new OS feeling.