Actually OpenDoc was later, and technologically different, but yes, it was clearly part of the same family of ideas. OpenDoc more or less extended them, obviously in an attempt to compete with Microsoft's monolithic apps and in an effort to woo small developers, in some ways rather like is happening today with the iphone/ipad.

What surprised me about the line quoted in relation to Apple Events and so forth (how Apple clearly thought that this was going to be a really big thing) applies even more to OpenDoc (which was going to be key in Copland). Almost everybody just used standalone software products, yet Apple was determined to promote & work at a different model of software use.

Was it, do you suppose, their version of what increasing reliance on networks might mean? Like a version of "cloud" computing, you would not need the software on your machine in an organization, because it could be running somewhere else in an Appletalk network?

Actually, I think it was a brilliant idea. Shame it didn't work.