Copland was designed to consist of the Mac OS on top of a microkernel named Nukernel, which would handle basic tasks such as application startup and memory management, leaving all other tasks to a series of semi-special programs known as "servers". For instance, networking and file services would not be provided by the kernel itself, but by servers that would be sent requests through interapplication communications. Copland consists of the combination of Nukernel, various servers, and a suite of application support libraries to provide implementations of the well-known classic Macintosh programming interface.