Taligent

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Taligent was the name of an object-oriented operating system and the company dedicated to producing it. Initially started as a project within Apple Computer to produce a replacement for the Mac OS, it was later spun-off into a joint venture with IBM in order to build a competing platform to Microsoft Cairo and NeXTSTEP. Taligent disappeared in the late 1990s.

1 Pink and Blue
2 Taligent
3 Death of the project
4 External links

[edit] Pink and Blue

What would eventually become Taligent started in a roundabout way in 1988. After Apple Computer's latest effort to develop a new Macintosh had culminated in the Macintosh II, a new version of the Mac OS had been developed to support it, System 5.0. At this point, the OS developers had a meeting in which they decided what they should be doing in the future, and started writing down their ideas on index cards. Ideas that were simple and could be included in a new version of the existing software were written on blue colored cards, those that were more "far out" were written on pink cards.

And so was born Pink, which would slowly develop into a quest for a new operating system that would be the best in the world. The idea was to produce an object-oriented OS on top of a new microkernel, which was likely inspired by what Steve Jobs was doing at NeXT Computer. Unlike NeXT, however, the Apple team would use the C++ programming language, which was rapidly becoming the "next big language" while NeXT's Objective-C was becoming a niche player. Additionally the system would run existing Mac OS programs as well, much like the eventual architecture of NeXT-based Mac OS X.

By this time, however, the team writing the system based on the blue cards (now known as the "Blue Meanies") were well advanced on what would be released in 1991 as System 7. The problem was that System 7 was so large it would barely fit into any existing Macintosh, meaning that if Pink were going to run Mac OS programs by emulating System 7, it would basically have no room left over for itself.

Meanwhile, corporate immune response within Apple essentially doomed Pink. To those working on Blue, Pink was seen as a project that might steal mind share from their own work. As the turf war grew, engineers started to abandon Pink to work on Blue, and whole projects were brought into one group or another in a huge flurry of empire-building.

Magazines throughout the early 1990s showed various mock-ups of what Pink would be like. One true innovation of the system was the People, Places and Things metaphor that attempted to provide the user with tools to easily move documents around between people and things (like fax machines) as easily as they could print them using current technologies. The system also added a component-based document model that was similar to Apple's OpenDoc. This concept was missing from OpenStep, which modeled a document as merely "a file on the disk."

Apple continued to talk about Pink as if it were to be the future Mac OS, but by 1993 or so it was clear they were no longer serious.

[edit] Taligent

As development dragged on, Apple eventually entered the AIM alliance with IBM and Motorola. IBM had extensive experience in object-oriented programming, notably their well-respected VisualAge Smalltalk programming system. They also had experience in microkernel design as a side-effect of their Mach based Workplace OS efforts.

Pink was then spun off from Apple as a joint project known as Taligent. The original Apple team was expanded with the addition of a very small number of IBM engineers, as well as a new CEO from IBM, Joe Guglielmi (apparently to the distaste of many of the Apple people).

During its first year, Taligent was persuaded by IBM to replace its internally developed object-oriented microkernel, called Opus, with the microkernel that IBM was using as the base for IBM's Workplace OS. The change in underlying technology had both positive and negative aspects. On the positive side, Pink would become a personality on top of the IBM Workplace OS. This would create easy migration paths between OS/2, AIX, Mac OS, and Pink by allowing any combination of operating system personalities to run simultaneously on a single computer. On the negative side, this created issues over how to integrate Taligent's object-oriented device-driver model with Workplace OS's procedural device-driver model.

Taligent spent much of its first two years developing their operating system (sometimes referred to as TalOS) and simultaneously trying to find a market for it. They started a large project surveying potential customers, only to find little interest in a new OS. It is a point of controversy whether the lack of interest was real or the survey fell prey to question-framing problems and political issues with investors. If asked the question "Do you want a new OS?", there were few who would say yes. The survey did, however, show there was sufficient support for the benefits TalOS would bring.

Influenced by the results of the survey effort, Taligent changed its focus from creating an object-oriented operating system, to creating an object-oriented programming environment that would run on any modern operating system. It was thought this approach would preserve much of the benefit of the higher levels of the system while freeing Taligent from the OS wars. Because of the portability and modularity provided by the C++/object-oriented approach, this change in direction, while not trivial, was relatively easy to implement. The result was CommonPoint. CommonPoint consisted of more than a hundred object-oriented frameworks and nearly two thousand classes. It ran on top of AIX, HP-UX, OS/2, Windows NT, and a new Apple OS kernel called NuKernel. This made CommonPoint appear comparable to OpenStep.

The combination of C++ and IBM and Apple's names on the project suggested that it might prove to be more successful than OpenStep. Early in 1994, Hewlett-Packard became a Taligent partner as well, which was odd considering that HP decided in the same year to produce OpenStep on their platforms. Several existing OpenStep customers stated they would move to Taligent as soon as it was ready. The first versions of CommonPoint shipped for AIX and OS/2 in mid-1995, but were met with a lukewarm response in terms of sales.

By 1995, Apple still didn't have an OS capable of running CommonPoint, and while work continued on the fabled Copland (which was designed to run CommonPoint), it was fairly clear to all involved that Apple had lost all interest in Taligent. Financial concerns at HP also caused their interest to wane. In early 1995 Guglielmi left Taligent for Motorola, and founding board member Dick Guarino became the new CEO. Guarino, though also from IBM, started Taligent on a new course as an object technology supplier in an effort to remain an independent company.

[edit] Death of the project

In the fall of 1995 Guarino died of a heart attack one Sunday afternoon while jogging, and that loss spelled the end of Taligent as a joint venture. There was a reduction in force at the end of 1995 when it was decided that Taligent would become a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM, focusing on developing technology and leaving the marketing to IBM.

IBM used parts of CommonPoint to create the Open Class class libraries for VisualAge for C++. IBM spawned an open source project called International Components for Unicode from part of this effort. Taligent also created a set of Java- and JavaBeans-based development tools called WebRunner, a groupware product based on Lotus Notes called Places for Project Teams, and licensed various technologies to Sun which are today part of Java, as well as to Oracle Corporation and Netscape. After two years as a wholly owned subsidiary, Taligent was dissolved in January 1998 and the engineering teams became IBM employees.

[edit] External links

History of the Apple Macintosh Operating Systems
Classic Mac OS (History): System 6 · System 7 · Mac OS 8 · Mac OS 9
Mac OS X (History): Public Beta · v10.0 · v10.1 · v10.2 · v10.3 · v10.4 · v10.5
Mac OS X Server: Rhapsody · Mac OS X Server 1.0 · Mac OS X Server
Other OS projects: A/UX · Taligent · Copland · MkLinux · Darwin