Taligent Inc. (a

portmanteau A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of words was an American software company. Based on the Pink object-oriented operating system conceived by

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancest ...

in 1988, Taligent Inc. was incorporated as an Apple/IBM partnership in 1992, and was dissolved into IBM in 1998. In 1988, after launching

System 6 System 6 (or System Software 6) is a graphical user interface-based operating system for Macintosh computers, made by Apple Computer It was released in 1988, and is part of the classic Mac OS series. It is a monolithic operating system, with ...

and MultiFinder,

initiated the exploratory project named Pink to design the next generation of the

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. ...

. Though diverging into a sprawling new dream system unrelated to Mac OS, Pink was wildly successful within Apple and a subject of industry hype without. In 1992, the new

AIM alliance The AIM alliance, also known as the PowerPC alliance, was formed on October 2, 1991, between Apple, IBM, and Motorola. Its goal was to create an industry-wide open-standard computing platform based on the POWER instruction set architecture. I ...

spawned an Apple/IBM partnership corporation named Taligent Inc., with the purpose of bringing Pink to market. In 1994,

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

joined the partnership with a 15% stake. After a two-year series of goal-shifting delays, Taligent OS was eventually canceled, but the CommonPoint application framework was launched in 1995 for

AIX Aix or AIX may refer to: Computing * AIX, a line of IBM computer operating systems *An Alternate Index, for a Virtual Storage Access Method Key Sequenced Data Set * Athens Internet Exchange, a European Internet exchange point Places Belgiu ...

with a later beta for

OS/2 OS/2 (Operating System/2) is a series of computer operating systems, initially created by Microsoft and IBM under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci. As a result of a feud between the two companies over how to position OS/2 r ...

. CommonPoint had technological acclaim but an extremely complex learning curve, so sales were very low. Taligent OS and CommonPoint mirrored the sprawling scope of IBM's complementary Workplace OS, in redundantly overlapping attempts to become the ultimate universal system to unify all of the world's computers and operating systems with a single microkernel. From 1993 to 1996, Taligent was seen as competing with

Microsoft Cairo Cairo was the codename for a project at Microsoft from 1991 to 1996. Its charter was to build technologies for a next-generation operating system that would fulfill Bill Gates's vision of "information at your fingertips." Cairo never shipped, alth ...

and

NeXTSTEP NeXTSTEP is a discontinued object-oriented, multitasking operating system based on the Mach kernel and the UNIX-derived BSD. It was developed by NeXT Computer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was initially used for its range of propri ...

, even though Taligent didn't ship a product until 1995 and Cairo never shipped at all. From 1994 to 1996, Apple floated the Copland operating system project intended to succeed System 7, but never had a modern OS sophisticated enough to run Taligent technology. In 1995, Apple and HP withdrew from the Taligent partnership, licensed its technology, and left it as a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM. In January 1998, Taligent Inc. was finally dissolved into IBM. Taligent's legacy became the unbundling of CommonPoint's best compiler and application components and converting them into VisualAge C++ and the globally adopted Java Development Kit 1.1 (especially internationalization). In 1996, Apple instead bought

NeXT Next may refer to: Arts and entertainment Film * ''Next'' (1990 film), an animated short about William Shakespeare * ''Next'' (2007 film), a sci-fi film starring Nicolas Cage * '' Next: A Primer on Urban Painting'', a 2005 documentary film Lit ...

and began synthesizing the classic Mac OS with the NeXTSTEP operating system.

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lap ...

was launched on March 24, 2001, as the future of the Macintosh and eventually the iPhone. In the late 2010s, some of Apple's personnel and design concepts from Pink and from

Purple Purple is any of a variety of colors with hue between red and blue. In the RGB color model used in computer and television screens, purples are produced by mixing red and blue light. In the RYB color model historically used by painters ...

(the first iPhone's codename) would resurface and blend into Google's

Fuchsia ''Fuchsia'' () is a genus of flowering plants that consists mostly of shrubs or small trees. The first to be scientifically described, '' Fuchsia triphylla'', was discovered on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic ...

operating system. Along with Workplace OS, Copland, and

Cairo Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo metr ...

, Taligent is cited as a death march project of the 1990s, suffering from

development hell Development hell, development purgatory, and development limbo are Media industry, media and Software industry, software industry jargon for a project, concept, or idea that remains in development for an especially long time, often moving between d ...

as a result of

feature creep Feature creep is the excessive ongoing expansion or addition of new features in a product, especially in computer software, video games and consumer and business electronics. These extra features go beyond the basic function of the product an ...

and the second-system effect.

History

Development

The entire history of Pink and Taligent from 1988 to 1998 is that of a widely admired, anticipated, and theoretically competitive staff and its system, but is also overall defined by

, second-system effect, empire building, secrecy, and

vaporware In the computer industry, vaporware (or vapourware) is a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is late or never actually manufactured nor officially cancelled. Use of the word has broade ...

Pink team

Apple's cofounders

Steve Wozniak Stephen Gary Wozniak (; born August 11, 1950), also known by his nickname "Woz", is an American electronics engineer, computer programmer, philanthropist, inventor, and entrepreneur, technology entrepreneur. In 1976, with business partner Steve ...

and

Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, industrial designer, media proprietor, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; ...

had departed the company in 1985. This vacuum of entrepreneurial leadership created a tendency to promote low-level engineers up to management and allowed increasingly redundant groups of engineers to compete and co-lead by consensus, and to manifest their own bottom-up corporate culture. In 1988, Apple released

, a major release of the flagship Macintosh operating system, to a lackluster reception. The system's architectural limits, set forth by the tight hardware constraints of its original 1984 release, now demanded increasingly ingenious workarounds for incremental gains such as MultiFinder's cooperative multitasking, while still lacking memory protection and

virtual memory In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a very ...

. Having committed these engineering triumphs which were often blunted within such a notoriously fragile operating system, a restless group of accomplished senior engineers were nicknamed the Gang of Five: Erich Ringewald, David Goldsmith, Bayles Holt, Gene Pope, and Gerard Schutten. The Gang gave an ultimatum that they should either be allowed to break from their disliked management and take the entrepreneurial and engineering risks needed to develop the next generation of the Macintosh operating system, or else leave the company. In March 1988, the Gang, their management, and software manager and future Taligent CTO Mike Potel, met at the Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa. To roadmap the future of the operating system and thus of the organizational chart, ideas were written on colored

index card An index card (or record card in British English and system cards in Australian English) consists of card stock (heavy paper) cut to a standard size, used for recording and storing small amounts of discrete data. A collection of such cards e ...

s and pinned to a wall. Ideas that were incremental updates to the existing system were written on blue colored cards, those that were more technologically advanced or long-term were written on pink cards, and yet more radical ideas were on red cards because they "would be pinker than Pink". The Blue group would receive the Gang's former management duo, along with incremental improvements in speed, RAM size, and hard drive size. Pink would receive the Gang, with Erich Ringewald as technical lead, plus preemptive multitasking and a componentized application design. Red would receive speech recognition and voice commands, thought to be as futuristic as the ''

Star Trek ''Star Trek'' is an American science fiction media franchise created by Gene Roddenberry, which began with the eponymous 1960s television series and quickly became a worldwide pop-culture phenomenon. The franchise has expanded into vari ...

'' science fiction series. Erich Ringewald led the Gang of Five as the new Pink group, located one floor below the Apple software headquarters in the De Anza 3 building, to begin a feasibility study with a goal of product launch in two years. Remembering the small but powerful original Macintosh group, he maintained secrecy and avoided the micromanagement of neighboring senior executives, by immediately relocating his quintet off the main Apple campus. They used the nondescript Bubb Road warehouse which was already occupied by the secretly sophisticated Newton project. Pink briefly garnered an additional code name, "Defiant".

Pink system

The Pink team was faced with the two possible architectural directions of either using legacy System 6 code or starting from scratch. Having just delivered the System 6 overhaul in the form of MultiFinder, Ringewald was adamant that Pink's intense ambitions were deliverable within a realistic two year timeframe only if the team heavily improved its legacy compatibility code. He pragmatically warned them, "We're going to have enough trouble just reimplementing the Mac." In Apple's contentious corporate culture of consensus, this mandate was soon challenged; David Goldsmith resigned from Pink after making a counter-ultimatum for a complete redesign which obviates all legacy problems, and some other staff escalated their complaints to upward management in agreement with that. Months later, a senior executive finally overrode Ringewald, thus redeveloping Pink from scratch as a new and unique system with no System 6 legacy. The Pink team numbered eleven when the six-person kernel team within Apple's Advanced Technology Group (ATG) was merged into Pink to begin designing its new microkernel named Opus. Embellishing upon the pink index cards, Pink's overall key design goals were now total

object-orientation {{Broad-concept article Object-oriented or object-orientation is a software engineering concept, in which concepts are represented as " objects". Object-oriented topics include: * Object-oriented analysis and design * Object-oriented design * Objec ...

, memory protection, preemptive multitasking,

internationalization In economics, internationalization or internationalisation is the process of increasing involvement of enterprises in international markets, although there is no agreed definition of internationalization. Internationalization is a crucial strateg ...

, and advanced graphics. Many ideas from the red cards would later be adopted. After its first two months, Pink had a staff of about 25. By October 1988, the Gang of Five had become only one Bayles Holt, because Gene Pope, Gerard Schutten, and Erich Ringewald then exited the sprawling Pink. The former leader held "grave doubts" over the feasibility of this "living, breathing, money-consuming thing" which was "out of control". Meanwhile, the remaining group and all of Apple were enamored and doubtless of Pink's world-changing vision, trying to join its staff of more than 100 by April 1989. It was a flourishing project that drained personnel from various other departments. All groups outside of Blue became defensively secretive in a company-wide culture of empire-building. Pink's secretive and

turf war A turf war is a fight over territory or resources, or may refer to: Music * ''Turf Wars'', a 2007 album by the Canadian band Daggermouth * "Turf War", a song on the 2001 album '' Filmtracks 2000'' by American composer Bill Television * '' Turf ...

ring culture didn't share source code or product demonstrations, even with the next generation Jaguar workstation design group, until so ordered by CEO John Sculley, and only then under extreme security and monitoring. Throughout Apple, the project and the system were considered successful, but from April 1989 and on into the 1990s, the running joke had always been and would always be, "When is Pink going to ship? Two years." By late 1989, Pink was a functional prototype of a desktop operating system on Macintosh hardware, featuring advanced graphics and dynamic internationalized text. Pink engineer Dave said it was "a real OS that could demonstrate the core technology" much deeper than System 6 could do. In June 1990, Bill Bruffey abandoned the idea of Pink becoming a new Mac OS. He got permission to create yet another new microkernel named

NuKernel NuKernel is a microkernel which was developed at Apple Computer during the early 1990s. Written from scratch and designed using concepts from the Mach 3.0 microkernel, with extensive additions for soft real-time scheduling to improve multimedia p ...

, intended explicitly for a new Mac OS. His team of six engineers worked a few months to demonstrate a microkernel-based Mac OS on a

Macintosh IIci The Macintosh IIci is a personal computer designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from September 1989 to February 1993. It is a more powerful version of the Macintosh IIcx, released earlier that year, and shares the same comp ...

— which would years later become Copland and the proposed Mac OS 8. In 1990, Pink became the Object Based Systems group with Senior Vice President Ed Birss and a diverse staff of 150, including marketing and secretaries. Meanwhile, the hundreds of personnel in the Blue design group were constrained by the commercial pragmatism of maintaining their billion-dollar legacy operating system, which required them to refuse many new features, which earned them the infamous nickname " Blue Meanies". This group had well established the evolution of System 6 which would be released in 1991 as System 7. RAM chips and hard drives were extremely expensive so most personal computers were critically resource constrained, and System 7 would already barely fit onto existing Macintosh systems. Pink would therefore be hard-pressed to include backward compatibility for System 7 applications atop itself — assuming the team wanted to do so. This physical and economical constraint is a crucial aspect of the second-system effect. In the early 1990s, Pink's

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, ins ...

(GUI) is based on a ''faux'' 3D motif of isometric icons, beveled edges, non-rectangular windows, and drop shadows. One designer said "The large UI team included interaction and visual designers, and usability specialists." That essential visual design language would be an influence for several years into Copland,

Mac OS 8 Mac OS 8 is an operating system that was released by Apple Computer on July 26, 1997. It includes the largest overhaul of the classic Mac OS experience since the release of System 7, approximately six years before. It places a greater emphasis o ...

, and CommonPoint. Magazines throughout the early 1990s showed various mock-ups of what Pink could look like. The People, Places, and Things metaphor extends beyond the traditional desktop metaphor and provides the user with GUI tools to easily drag documents between people and things, such as fax machines and printers. The component-based document model is similar to what would become OpenDoc. In mid-1991, Apple CEO John Sculley bragged that Apple had written 1.5 million lines of code for Pink. An IBM engineer described the first impression of this sophisticated prototype in 1991:

AIM alliance

On October 2, 1991, the historic AIM alliance was formed and announced by

, IBM, and

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent public companies, Motorola ...

. It was conceived to cross-pollinate Apple's personal products and IBM's enterprise products, to better confront

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

's monopoly, and to design a new grandly unified platform for the computing industry. This alliance spun off two partner corporations: Kaleida Labs to develop multimedia software, and Taligent Inc. to bring Pink to market sometime in the mid-90s. Pink was a massive draw for this alliance, where Apple had been initially approached by two different parts of IBM. One IBM group sought customers for its new POWER CPU hardware, therefore discovering Pink and a new desire to port it to this hardware. The other IBM group sought third party interest in its Grand Unifying Theory of Systems (GUTS) as the solution to the deeply endemic crisis that is software development, which would soon result in Workplace OS. In an April 12, 1991, demonstration of Pink and its architecture, IBM was profoundly impressed and its GUTS outline was immediately impacted. By 1993, IBM's ambitious global roadmap would include the unification of the diverse world of computing by converting Pink to become one of many personalities of Workplace OS, and the ending of the need to write new major applications by instead making smaller additions to Pink's generalized frameworks. Even before the signing of the alliance contract, the very existence of Pink was identified as a potential second-system threat if its revolutionary aura could prompt customers to delay their adoption of OS/2.

Taligent Inc.

On March 2, 1992, Taligent Inc. was launched as the first product of the AIM alliance. Moving from a temporary lease at Apple headquarters to an office down the street in Cupertino, the company launched with 170 employees, most of whom had been re-hired directly from Apple plus CEO Joe Guglielmi. At age 50, he was a 30 year marketing veteran of IBM and former leader of the OS/2 platform up to its soon-launched version 2.0. The company's mission was to bring Pink to market.

=Culture and purpose

= Enthusiastically dismissing industry skepticism, he said Taligent would form its own corporate culture, independent of the established cultures and potential failures of its two founding investors and future customers, Apple and IBM. The two were recent allies carrying five other joint initiatives, and a deep rivalry of more than a decade. ''Dr. Dobb's Journal'' reflected, "It was fairly surreal for the Apple and IBM employees who went to Taligent and found themselves working for bosses still loyal to the opposition. Not a typical Silicon Valley career move, maybe, but perhaps a portent of other weird twists to come. Ignoring the politics as much as possible, the Taligent programmers buckled down and wrote a lotta lines of code." Commenting on the corporate culture shock of combining free-spirited Apple and formal IBM personnel, ''Fortune'' compared the company's cultural engineering challenge as possibly exceeding its software engineering challenge. The openminded but sensible CEO reined it in, saying, "I'm tired of pplefolklore ... I want some data." Comparing the eager startup Taligent to its billion dollar investors, a leader at Kaleida said "The culture of IBM and Apple is largely about getting more benefits, perks, larger offices, fancier computers, and more employees". ''Dr. Dobb's Journal'' would describe the increased abstraction in corporate culture resulting from Hewlett-Packard's upcoming 1994 addition to the partnership: "Now you could be formerApple programmer working for formerIBM boss who reported xternallyto HP. Or some combination thereof. Twisteder and twisteder." Apple and IBM did share a progressive culture of object orientation, as seen in their deep portfolios since the early 1980s. IBM had delivered objects on System/38 and AS/400, partnered with Patriot Partners, and integrated System Object Model (SOM) and Distributed SOM into OS/2 and AIX. Apple had already delivered Lisa, prototyped the fully object-oriented Pink operating system, and delivered object oriented frameworks using MacApp. Both companies had worked with

Smalltalk Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan ...

. Within one month of its founding, there was immediate industry-wide confusion about Taligent's purpose and scope. An industry analyst said "IBM and Apple blew it ... they should have announced everything bout Taligentor nothing." Especially regarding Taligent's potential relationship to the Macintosh, Apple reiterated that its existing flagship legacy would continue indefinitely with System 7 and Macintosh hardware. COO Michael Spindler said "The Mac is not dead" and others said that they had never claimed that Pink would supersede the Macintosh. Charles Oppenheimer, Director of Marketing for Macintosh system software, said "We can't say for sure how

he two He or HE may refer to: Language * He (pronoun), an English pronoun * He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ * He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets * He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' in ...

will fit together." The industry was further confused as to the very existence of any Taligent software, not realizing that it was already beyond the concept stage and in fact consisted of volumes of Pink-based software in development by Apple for years. One year later in February 1993, ''Wired'' magazine would assert its suspicion that Apple and IBM's core messengers are maintaining "the big lie"—that Taligent's technology is merely a concept, has no existing software, and is actually years away from production—in order to protect their established multi-billion-dollar core legacy of Macintosh and OS/2 products from a potentially superior replacement and to divert the second system effect. Upon its launch, CEO Joe Guglielmi soon organized the company into three divisions: a native system group for its self-hosted Pink OS, a development tools group, and a complementary products group for application frameworks to be ported to other OSes. Taligent spent much of its first two years developing its operating system 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.

=Technology

= The Pink operating system is now formally named Taligent Object Services (TOS or TalOS) whether hosted natively on its microkernel or non-natively on a third party OS, but the nickname "Pink" will always remain industry lore, such as with the developer phone number 408-TO-B-PINK. The entire graphics subsystem is 3D, including the 2D portions which are actually 3D constructs. It is based extensively on object-oriented frameworks from the kernel upward, including device drivers, the Taligent

input/output In computing, input/output (I/O, or informally io or IO) is the communication between an information processing system, such as a computer, and the outside world, possibly a human or another information processing system. Inputs are the signals ...

(I/O) system, and ensembles. By 1993, IBM discussed decoupling most of TalOS away from its native Opus microkernel, and retargeting most of TalOS onto the IBM Microkernel which was already used as the base for IBM's tandem project, Workplace OS. Its text handling and localization via

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

was intended to begin enabling the globalization of software development, especially in simplifying Japanese. In January 1993, Taligent's VP of Marketing said the strong progress of native TalOS development could encourage its early incremental release prior to the full 1995 schedule for TalAE. Apple's business manager to Taligent

Chris Espinosa Chris Espinosa () is a senior employee of Apple Inc., officially employee number 8. Having joined the company at the age of fourteen in 1976 when it was still housed in Steve Jobs's parents' garage, writing software manuals and coding after school ...

acknowledged the irony of Apple and IBM building competing Taligent-based platforms, which had originated at Apple as Pink. He forecast Apple's adoption of Taligent components into the irreplaceably personal Mac OSwhile empowering its competitiveness with IBM's future Taligent-based general purpose systems, and easing corporate users' migration toward Apple's Enterprise Systems Division's future Taligent-based computers. On January 10, 1993, ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

'' reported on the state of Taligent, saying the company and its platform had the broad optimistic support of

Borland Borland Software Corporation was a computer technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was the development and sale of software development and software deployment product ...

, WordPerfect, and

Novell Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi- platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the le ...

. Borland CEO Philippe Kahn said "Technically, inkis brilliant, and Taligent is running much faster than I expected." A software venture capitalist expected new entrepreneurs to appreciate the platform's newness and lack of legacy baggage, and the industry expected Apple loyalists to embrace a new culture. Regardless of genuine merit, many in the industry reportedly expected Taligent's success to depend upon wounding Microsoft's monopoly. On January 18, ''

InfoWorld ''InfoWorld'' (abbreviated IW) is an information technology media business. Founded in 1978, it began as a monthly magazine. In 2007, it transitioned to a web-only publication. Its parent company today is International Data Group, and its siste ...

'' reported, "Taligent draws rave reviews from software developers". By April 1993, Taligent, Inc. had grown to about 260 employees, mostly from Apple or "some other loose Silicon Valley culture". '' MacWEEK'' reported that the company remained on schedule or ahead through 1993 into 1994. On June 23, 1993, Apple preannounced MacApp's direct successor, the new object-oriented crossplatform SDK codenamed

Bedrock In geology, bedrock is solid rock that lies under loose material ( regolith) within the crust of Earth or another terrestrial planet. Definition Bedrock is the solid rock that underlies looser surface material. An exposed portion of be ...

. Positioned as "the most direct path for migration" from System 7 to Pink, it was intended to provide source code compatibility between System 7, Windows 3.1, Windows NT, OS/2, and Pink. Bedrock would be abruptly discontinued 18 months later with no successor, and leaving Apple with no connection between System 7 and Pink. By 1994, the platform consisted of Taligent Object Services (TOS or TalOS), Taligent Application Environment (TAE or TalAE), and the Taligent Development System (TDS or TalDS). The initial plan was to deploy TalAE in early 1994 to help seed the market with a base of applications for TalOS, which was intended to be launched in 1995, with the whole platform going mainstream in two to five years—surely expecting a modern OS from Apple by 1994 or 1995. Influenced by the results of the survey effort, CEO Joe Guglielmi acknowledged the unavoidable risk of creating its own second-system effect, if the TalAE enhancements could make third party operating systems into competitors of native TalOS. The first internal development environment was an IBM RS/6000 model 250 with a PowerPC 601 CPU running AIX, building TalOS natively for the 68k Macintosh.

=HP, CommonPoint beta

= In January 1994, fellow object technology pioneer Hewlett-Packard joined Apple and IBM as the third co-owner of Taligent at 15% holding. HP held deeply vested experience in object technology since the 1980s with the

NewWave NewWave is a discontinued object-oriented graphical desktop environment and office productivity tool for PCs running early versions of Microsoft Windows (beginning with 2.0). It was developed by Hewlett-Packard and introduced commercially in 198 ...

desktop environment, the

Softbench HP Softbench was one of the first plug-in Integrated Development Environment ( IDE) tool based on the UNIX operating system, UNIX tools and the X Window System. The main ideas were: * Tools and data can reside on many different systems across the ...

IDE, Distributed Smalltalk, Distributed Object Management Facility (DOMF), and having cofounded the Object Management Group. Taligent's object oriented portfolio was broadened with HP's compilers, DOMF, and intention to integrate TalOS and TalAE into

HP-UX HP-UX (from "Hewlett Packard Unix") is Hewlett Packard Enterprise's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on Unix System V (initially System III) and first released in 1984. Current versions support HPE Integrity Se ...

. HP had already partnered with Taligent's well-established competitor NeXT to integrate OpenStep into HP-UX, and Taligent had pursued partnerships with both Sun and HP for several months, all serving to improve HP's competitive bargaining in its offer to Taligent. A Taligent engineer reportedly said, "It wasn't that HP was driven by OpenStep to go to Taligent, but that OpenStep allowed them to make a much better deal." ''NeXTWORLD'' summarized that " P coveredall bets in the race for the object market", and Sun CEO Scott McNealy derided the partnership as HP being Taligent's "trophy spouse". ''Dr. Dobb's Journal'' quipped: "Now you could be formerApple programmer working for formerIBM boss who reported xternallyto HP. Or some combination thereof. Twisteder and twisteder." By March 1994, Taligent had reportedly begun shipping code to its three investors, and some parts of TalAE had shipped to developers though without source code by policy. The first public Taligent technology demonstration was at SFA in Atlanta as an "amazingly fast" and crash-tolerant five-threaded 3D graphics application on native TalOS on a

. Also in March 1994 at the PC Forum conference, Taligent gave the first public demonstration of TalAE applications, to an impressed but hesitant reception. A show of hands indicated one out of approximately 500 attendees were actively developing on TalAE, but Taligent reported 60 members in its future second wave of developer program. The frameworks already present allowed the integration of advanced TalAE features into pre-existing platform-native applications. CEO Joe Guglielmi reported on TalAE gaining the ongoing outside interest of IBM, but suffering relative uninvolvement from Applepossibly due to Apple's failure to deliver a mainstream OS capable of running it. On April 18, 1994, ''InfoWorld'' reported Taligent's future plans for its SDK to be distributed. In November 1994 at Comdex, the public debut of third-party TalAE applications was on an RS/6000 running AIX to demonstrate prototypes made by seven vendors. Screenshot of Virtus Navigator on a TalOS desktop In late 1994, TalAE was renamed to CommonPoint, TalDE was renamed to cpProfessional, and Taligent User Interface Builder was renamed to cpConstructor. CommonPoint was being beta tested at 100 sites, with an initial target market of internal corporate developers. TalOS was still scheduled to ship in 1996. Apple considered MacApp's lifespan to have "run its course" as the primary Macintosh SDK, while Taligent considered MacApp to be prerequisite experience for its own platform. Meanwhile, Apple and CILabs had begun an internal mandate for all new development to be based on the complementary and already published OpenDoc. CILabs was committed to publishing its source code, while Taligent was committed against publishing its own. Taligent was now considered to be a venerable competitor in the desktop operating system and enterprise object markets even without any product release, and being late. John C. Dvorak described Taligent as a threat in the desktop market of integrated application suites, particularly to the "spooked" Microsoft which responded with many

product announcements (such as

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...

, Daytona, and

Snowball A snowball is a spherical object made from snow, usually created by scooping snow with the hands, and pressing the snow together to compact it into a ball. Snowballs are often used in games such as snowball fights. A snowball may also be a lar ...

) to distract the market's attention from Taligent. ''ComputerWorld'' described the enterprise computing market as shifting away from monolithic and procedural application models and even application suites, toward object-oriented component-based application frameworks — all in Taligent's favor. Its theoretical newness was often compared to NeXT's older but mature and commercially established platform.

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...

held exploratory meetings with Taligent before deciding upon building out its object application framework

OpenStep OpenStep is a defunct object-oriented application programming interface (API) specification for a legacy object-oriented operating system, with the basic goal of offering a NeXTSTEP-like environment on non-NeXTSTEP operating systems. OpenStep wa ...

in partnership with

as a "preemptive move against Taligent and icrosoft's

". Having given up on seeing Pink go to market soon, Apple publicly announced Copland in March 1994 intended to compete with the upcoming Windows 95. Apple was and will remain the only vendor of a desired target OS which is physically incapable of receiving Taligent's heavy payload due to System 7's critical lack of modern features such as preemptive multitasking. However, Taligent reportedly remains so committed to boosting the industry's confidence in Apple's modernization that it is considering creating a way to hybridize TalOS applications for the nascent System 7, and Apple reportedly intends for the upcoming

Power Macintosh The Power Macintosh, later Power Mac, is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer as the core of the Macintosh brand from March 1994 until August 2006. Described by ''MacWorld'' as "the most important te ...

to boot native TalOS as a next-generation alternative to System 7. The second-system effect is uniquely intensified because Apple is beginning to view the architecturally superior TalOS as a competitor against the protractedly weak System 7 which has no successor in sight. ''InfoWorld'' reported this: "Developers and analysts also said that Taligent's fate is closely tied to that of OS/2 and the other as-yet-undelivered operating systems that it is designed to run on top of." This included Apple, Windows NT, and the yet unreleased Windows 95. A 1994 detailed report by INPUT assesses that Taligent's "very risky" future will depend not on its technology, but on support from IBM and major developers, the rapid and cheap development of applications and complex integration tasks, and the ability to create new markets. In June 1994, Taligent shipped its first deliverable, considered to be somewhat late for its three investors and approximately 100 developer companies. It is a prebeta developer preview called the Partners Early Experience Kit (PEEK), consisting of 80 frameworks for AIX and OS/2. It received mixed reviews, with ''InfoWorld'' saying it is "inhibited by a massive footprint, a shortage of development tools, and a mind-boggling complexity". TalDE was scheduled to ship in Q2 1995. At this point, Apple was reportedly "hedging its bets" in formulating a strategy to deliver the second-system TalAE, while remaining primarily devout to System 7. The company intended to soon introduce the PowerOpen platform of PowerPC AIX, which would deliver TalAE for running a hopefully forthcoming class of applications, simultaneously alongside Macintosh Application Services for running legacy System 7 personal applications. In May 1995, Taligent canceled the delayed release of its natively hosted TalOS, to focus on its TalAE application framework programming environment that would run on any modern operating system. Having been developed mainly upon

, the plan was to port TalAE to

Windows NT Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released on July 27, 1993. It is a processor-independent, multiprocessing and multi-user operating system. The first version of Win ...

, and Copland. Those vendors are intended to port and bundle TalAE directly with their operating systems, and Taligent will port for those who don't.

=CommonPoint

= Taligent said that it wants CommonPoint to be the definitive software industry standard, like a local

app store An App Store (or app marketplace) is a type of digital distribution platform for computer software called applications, often in a mobile context. Apps provide a specific set of functions which, by definition, do not include the running of the c ...

in every computer. "Shake n bake" application development in four steps. Each app would have minimal package delivery size because customers already have most of the code in the form of the shared CommonPoint framework. The CommonPoint frameworks are divided into three categories: Application, Domain, and Support. On July 28, 1995, Taligent shipped its first final product, CommonPoint 1.1, after seven years in development as Pink and then TalAE. First released only for its reference platform of

, it was initially priced at for only the runtime framework for users; or for the runtime framework and the software development kit, which further requires the Cset++ compiler because TalDE is still scheduled for a later release. The runtime has an overhead of for each machine and total system RAM is recommended. Though essentially on schedule by the company's own PEEK projections last year, some analysts considered it to be "too little, too late" especially compared to the maturely established NeXT platform. Several PEEK beta test sites and final release customers were very pleased with the platform, though disappointed in the marked lack of crossplatform presence on HP/UX, Mac OS, and Windows NT which strictly limited any adoption of CommonPoint even among enthusiasts. Hewlett-Packard wrote a beginner's guide for CommonPoint programmers to address its steep learning curve, saying that its survey showed that experienced C++ framework programmers needed at least three months to even approach their first application. At its launch, ''InfoWorld'' told CEO Joe Guglielmi that "corporate users don't generally understand what CommonPoint is for" and have trouble differentiating CommonPoint and OpenDoc. IBM reportedly conducted a "full-court press" to analyze and promote customers' awareness of CommonPoint, by training its direct sales and consulting staff, attending industry conferences to make CommonPoint presentations, and "talking with any third-party software vendor and systems integrator who will listen". The CommonPoint beta for OS/2 was released on December 15, 1995. This was coincidentally the same day as the gold master of the Workplace OS final beta, IBM's complementary cousin operating system to TalOS. The final beta of Workplace OS was released on January 5, 1996, in the form of OS/2 Warp Connect (PowerPC Edition) and then immediately discontinued without ever receiving a release of CommonPoint. Meanwhile, at Apple, the one-year-old Copland reached a primitive and notoriously unstable developer preview release, and Apple's frustrated lack of operating system strategy still had not shipped anything physically capable of running any Taligent software.

=New leadership

= By 1995, it was estimated that the three investors had spent more than $100 million on Taligent, Inc., with its closure being predicted by sources of the ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the ...

'' due to the decline of its parent companies and due to the inherent difficulty of anyone in the IT industry remaining committed beyond 18 months. In September 1995, CEO Joe Guglielmi unexpectedly exited Taligent to become VP of Motorola, intensifying the industry's concerns. Dick Gurino, a general manager of a PC and software development division at IBM, was named the interim CEO and tasked with searching for a permanent CEO. In October 1995, Gurino died of a heart attack while jogging, leaving the company without a CEO. On December 19, 1995, founding Taligent employee and Apple veteran Debbie Coutant was promoted to CEO. On that same day it received what would be its final CEO, Taligent Inc. also ended its partnership form. Apple and HP sold out their holdings in the company, making Taligent Inc. a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM alone. While dissolving the partnership, each of the three former partners expressed approval of Taligent's progress. In what they called overall enterprise-wide cost-cutting processes, Apple and HP wanted to simply maintain technology licenses, IBM wanted to use its own redundant marketing and support departments, and Taligent wanted to focus only on technology. In the process, nearly 200 of the 375 employees were laid off, leaving only engineering staff. Apple veteran and Taligent cofounding employee, Mike Potel, was promoted from VP of Technology to CTO, saying, "We're better protected inside the IBM world than we would be trying to duke it out as an independent company that has to pay its bills every day." In November 1996, the final public demonstration of the complete native TalOS was given, titled "The Cutting Edge Scenario". While referring to the original codename of "Pink", Taligent had already officially abandoned the never-published native TalOS in favor of CommonPoint.

=Unbundling

= In 1997, Taligent's mission as an IBM subsidiary was to unbundle the technology of CommonPoint, and to redistribute it across IBM's existing products or license it to other companies — all with a special overall focus on Java. On September 1, 1997, ''Dr. Dobb's Journal'' observed, "I guess it's easier to develop hot technology when the guys before you have already written most of it. Like inheriting from a rich uncle. And having another rich uncle to sell it for you doesn't hurt, either." The wider mass market debut of CommonPoint technology was in the form of VisualAge C++ 3.5 for Windows, with the bundling of the Compound Document Framework to handle OLE objects. In February 1997, the first comprehensive shipment of CommonPoint technology was its adoption into IBM's well-established VisualAge for C++ 4.0, which ''PC Magazine'' said was "unmatched" in "sheer breadth of features" because "Now, the best of the CommonPoint technology is being channeled into Open Class for VisualAge." This bundled SDK adaptation includes several CommonPoint frameworks: desktop (infrastructure for building unified OCX or OpenDoc components); web (called WebRunner, for making drag-and-drop compound documents for the web, and server CGIs); graphics for building 2D GUI apps; international text for Unicode and localization; filesystems; printing; and unit tests. Through 1997, Taligent was at the core of IBM's companywide shift to a Java-based middleware strategy. Taligent provided all Unicode internationalization support for Sun's 1997 release of Java Development Kit 1.1 through 1.1.4. Taligent was still leasing the same building from Apple, and JavaSoft was located across the street. But its parent IBM, and the related Lotus, were located on the east coast and were not fully aware of Taligent's plans and deliverables. WebRunner is a set of

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

- and

JavaBeans In computing based on the Java Platform, JavaBeans is a technology developed by Sun Microsystems and released in 1996, as part of JDK 1.1. The 'beans' of JavaBeans are classes that encapsulate one or more objects into a single standardized objec ...

-based development tools at $149. In June 1997, Places for Project Teams was launched at $49 per user as a groupware GUI which hides the ugly interface of Lotus Notes. Taligent had several products, licenses, trademarks, and patents. Apple canceled the unstable and unfinished Copland project in August 1996, which had already been presumptively renamed "Mac OS 8", again leaving only a System 7 legacy. Apple's own book ''Mac OS 8 Revealed'' (1996) had been the definitive final roadmap for Copland, naming the platform's competitors and allies, and yet its 336 pages contain no mention of Pink or Taligent. In late 1996, Apple was ever more desperately scrambling to find any operating system strategy whatsoever beyond System 7, even after having already planned its upcoming announcement of it to be made in December 1997. The company had failed to deliver even a functional developer preview of Copland in two years; and it discarded the successful

A/UX A/UX is Apple Computer's Unix-based operating system for Macintosh computers, integrated with System 7's graphical interface and application compatibility. Launched in 1988 and discontinued in 1995 with version 3.1.1, it is Apple's first offic ...

and PowerOpen platforms in 1995, and the new AIX-based

Apple Network Server The Apple Network Server (ANS) was a line of PowerPC-based server computers designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from February 1996 to April 1997. It was codenamed "Shiner" and originally consisted of two models, the Network ...

of 1996-1997. To build the future Mac OS, the company seriously explored licensing other third party OSes such as Solaris,

, and TalOS.

=Dissolution

= On September 16, 1997, IBM announced that Taligent Inc. would be dissolved by the end of the year, with its approximately 100 software engineers being "offered positions at IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory to work on key components for IBM's VisualAge for Java programming tools, and at the recently announced Java porting center that IBM is setting up with Sun Microsystems and Netscape". IBM withdrew CommonPoint for OS/2 from the market on August 3, 1999.

Reception

By 1993, one year after incorporation and two years before shipping its first product, Taligent was nonetheless seen as a significant competitor in the industry. ''UnixWorld'' said that "NeXT needs to increase its volume three-fold ver its existing 50,000 installationsin order to build enough momentum to forestall Microsoft and Taligent in the object-oriented software business." In 1994, several PEEK beta test sites were impressed with CommonPoint, including one production success story at American Express which replaced its existing six month legacy application in only six weeks. At first in 1994, they'd said "We are almost overwhelmed by the complexity of ommonPoint I don't know if the typical corporate developer is going to be able to assimilate this in their shop." but in 1995 they concluded the project with, "The CommonPoint frameworks — and I'm not exaggerating — are brilliant in the way they cover the technical issues f that project" Others were disappointed in the marked lack of crossplatform presence on HP/UX, Mac OS, and Windows NT which strictly limited any adoption of CommonPoint even among enthusiasts. In March 1995, ''IEEE Software'' magazine said "Taligent's very nature could change the contour of the application landscape. ... 's clear that Taligent is sitting on, using, and refining what is ostensibly the world's best developed, comprehensive, object-oriented development and system environment." The system was described as virtually "a whole OS of nothing but hooks"which rests upon, integrates deeply with, and "replaces the host's original operating system", leaving "no lowest common denominator". Therefore, any Taligent native application is expected to run just the same on any supported host OS. Any degree of clean portability, especially with native integration, in the software industry was described as a

holy grail The Holy Grail (french: Saint Graal, br, Graal Santel, cy, Greal Sanctaidd, kw, Gral) is a treasure that serves as an important motif in Arthurian literature. Various traditions describe the Holy Grail as a cup, dish, or stone with miracul ...

to which many aspire and few deliver, citing the fact that Microsoft Word 6.0 for Macintosh still works like a foreign Windows application because the foundation was redundantly ported with each application. In February 1997, at the first comprehensive mass release of Taligent technology in the form of VisualAge C++ 4.0, ''PC Magazine'' said "Now, the best of the CommonPoint technology is being channeled into Open Class for VisualAge. ... Although the technology was lauded by many, the size and complexity of the CommonPoint frameworks proved too daunting for practical purposes. ... For sheer breadth of features, the Taligent frameworks are unmatched. An all-encompassing OOP framework has always proved a difficult ideal to realize, but VisualAge's Open Class Technology Preview is by far the most credible attempt we've seen.". In 2008, ''PCWorld'' named the native Taligent OS as number 4 of the 15 top vaporware products of all time. Due to the second-system effect and corporate immune response, ''

Wired ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San ...

'' writer Fred Davis compared Taligent's relationship with Apple and IBM to a classic Greek tragedy: "A child is born, destined to kill its father and commit even more unspeakable acts against its mother. The parents love their child and are unwilling to kill it, so they imprison it in a secret dungeon. Despite its mistreatment, the child grows stronger, even more intent on committing its destined crimes." In 1995, IT journalist Don Tennant asked

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...

to reflect upon "what trend or development over the past 20 years had really caught him by surprise". Gates responded with what Tennant described as biting, deadpan sarcasm: "Kaleida and Taligent had less impact than we expected." Tennant believed the explanation to be that "Microsoft's worst nightmare is a conjoined Apple and IBM. No other single change in the dynamics of the IT industry could possibly do as much to emasculate Windows."

Legacy

The founding lead engineer of Pink, Erich Ringewald, departed Apple in 1990 to become the lead software architect at

Be Inc. Be Inc. was an American computer company founded in 1990. It is best known for the development and release of BeOS, and the BeBox personal computer. Be was founded by former Apple Computer executive Jean-Louis Gassée with capital from Seymour Cra ...

and design the new

BeOS BeOS is an operating system for personal computers first developed by Be Inc. in 1990. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was positioned as a multimedia platform that could be used by a substantial population of desktop users an ...

Mark Davis Mark Davis may refer to: Entertainers *Mark Davis (talk show host), American radio talk show host *Mark Jonathan Davis (born 1965), American actor/singer and creator of Richard Cheese *Mark Davis, American bassist and founding member for the band ...

, who had previously cofounded the

Unicode Consortium The Unicode Consortium (legally Unicode, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the intentio ...

, had at Apple co-written WorldScript, Macintosh Script Manager, and headed the localization of Macintosh to Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese (KanjiTalk), was Taligent's Director of Core Technologies and architect of all its internationalization technology, and then became IBM's Chief Software Globalization Architect, moved to Google to work on internationalization and Unicode, and now helps to choose the emojis for the world's smartphones. Ike Nassi had been VP of Development Tools at Apple, launched

MkLinux MkLinux (for Microkernel Linux) is an open-source software computer operating system begun by the Open Software Foundation Research Institute and Apple Computer in February 1996, to port Linux to the PowerPC platform, and Macintosh computer ...

, served on the boards of Taligent and the OpenDoc Foundation, and worked on the

Linksys iPhone The Linksys iPhone was a line of internet appliances from Cisco Systems. The first iPhone model – released by Infogear in 1998 – combined the features of a regular phone and a web terminal. The company was later purchased by Cisco and n ...

.Text transcript
/ref> IBM harvested parts of CommonPoint to create the Open Class libraries for VisualAge for C++, and spawned an open-source project called

International Components for Unicode International Components for Unicode (ICU) is an open-source project of mature C/ C++ and Java libraries for Unicode support, software internationalization, and software globalization. ICU is widely portable to many operating systems and environ ...

from part of this effort. Resulting from Taligent's work led by Mark Davis, IBM published all of the internationalization libraries that are in Java Development Kit 1.1 through 1.1.4 along with source code which was ported to C++ and partially to C. Enhanced versions of some of these classes went into ICU for Java (ICU4J) and ICU for C (ICU4C). The JDK 1.1 received Taligent's JavaBeans Migration Assistant for ActiveX, to convert ActiveX into JavaBeans. Davis's group became the Unicode group at the IBM Globalization Center of Competency in Cupertino. Taligent's own published software was a set of development tools based on

and

, called WebRunner; and a groupware product based on Lotus Notes called Places for Project Teams. Taligent licensed various technologies to Sun which are today part of Java, and others to

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...

and

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was on ...

. HP released the Taligent C++ compiler technology (known within Taligent as "CompTech") as its "ANSI C++" compiler, aCC. HP also released some Taligent

graphics Graphics () are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone, to inform, illustrate, or entertain. In contemporary usage, it includes a pictorial representation of data, as in design and manufacture, ...

libraries. In the 2010s, some of Apple's personnel and design concepts from Pink and

(the first iPhone's codename) would resurface and blend into Google's

operating system. Based on an object-oriented kernel and application frameworks, its open-source code repository was launched in 2016 with the phrase "Pink + Purple

Fuchsia".

Publications

The following publications were written by Taligent personnel about its systems and about software engineering methodology.

Whitepapers

* * * * * * *

Books

The ''Taligent Reference Library'' series: * * *

Manuals

Patents

Notes

References

{{IBM Defunct software companies of the United States Companies established in 1992 Companies disestablished in 1998 Apple Inc. operating systems IBM operating systems Former IBM subsidiaries Microkernel-based operating systems Object-oriented operating systems PowerPC operating systems Microkernels Apple Inc. partnerships HP software