Apple Open Collaboration Environment (AOCE) is a collection of messaging-related technologies introduced for 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. Th ...
in the early 1990s. It includes the PowerTalk mail engine, which is the primary client-side interface to the system, the PowerShare mail server for workgroup installations, and a number of additional technologies such as Open Directory,
encryption
In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding information. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Ideally, only authorized parties can dec ...
, and
digital signature
A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature, where the prerequisites are satisfied, gives a recipient very high confidence that the message was created b ...
support.
AOCE and PowerTalk were heavily marketed between 1993 and 1996, but the hardware requirements meant that most users couldn't even install or use it. Developers were likewise stymied by the complex system, and since the installed base was so small their potential sales were even smaller. In 1996,
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...
quietly dropped its efforts to market AOCE, and the project quickly disappeared.
History
Development of AOCE started in 1989, largely the "pet project" of Apple Fellow Gursharan Sidhu, formerly engineering lead at Apple for
LaserWriter
The LaserWriter is a laser printer with built-in PostScript interpreter sold by Apple, Inc. from 1985 to 1988. It was one of the first laser printers available to the mass market. In combination with WYSIWYG publishing software like PageMaker ...
,
AppleShare, and related
networking
Network, networking and networked may refer to:
Science and technology
* Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects
* Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks
Mathematics
...
products.
Objective
The project started by taking a "20,000 foot overview" of existing mail systems, and trying to find common concepts and problems. Their key conclusion was that email systems were designed for the wrong purpose—to deliver ''email'' to ''people'', when they should instead store and forward ''things'' to ''places''. Compare this with the real-world postal service, which delivers not only mail, but magazines, packages, large parcels, and even (in one example) building materials to a worksite.
The team also found other problems with existing email systems. They tended to support plain text mail only, and rarely supported non-English characters. Support for mobile users was poor, often relying on third party workarounds that were of dubious reliability. And they were all based on a dedicated email server that was typically complex to set up, and often excessive for small installations with only a few people in an office.
Finally, none of the existing products could give the user what they really wanted: a single universal mailbox and a single universal address book. In this pre-Internet era, savvy users often had mailboxes on their corporate network,
online service
An online service provider (OSP) can, for example, be an Internet service provider, an email provider, a news provider (press), an entertainment provider (music, movies), a search engine, an e-commerce site, an online banking site, a health site, ...
s such as
CompuServe
CompuServe (CompuServe Information Service, also known by its initialism CIS) was an American online service provider, the first major commercial one in the world – described in 1994 as "the oldest of the Big Three information services (the oth ...
or
AppleLink
AppleLink was the name of both Apple Computer's online service for its dealers, third-party developers, and users, and the client software used to access it. Prior to the commercialization of the Internet, AppleLink was a popular service for Mac ...
, and perhaps also a number of
Bulletin board system
A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such ...
s (BBSs). Each email system used its own standards for collecting and storing information, forcing users to run multiple clients to access the different services. Although a single-mailbox system could be constructed by administrators with the use of email gateways, these tended to be expensive and technically challenging to maintain.
Solutions
AOCE aimed to fix all of these issues at the same time. At one end of the system, AOCE focuses on the underlying delivery and addressing systems, generalizing the email concept so the system can be used to deliver anything from email to word processor documents to print jobs. Addressing was another issue the market was struggling with, so AOCE offers a single universal addressing mechanism and address book, one that could support not only people's email addresses, but the addresses of things like printers and fax machines as well. These could be looked up in an interface much easier to use than the existing Macintosh solution, the
Chooser.
AOCE normally store users' email on each personal computer, as opposed to a server. This not only allows the user to read mail offline, but also removes the need for a single machine with huge storage space. Small networks can be set up simply by installing the standard client software; the machines discover each other on
AppleTalk
AppleTalk is a discontinued proprietary suite of networking protocols developed by Apple Computer for their Macintosh computers. AppleTalk includes a number of features that allow local area networks to be connected with no prior setup or the ...
and communicate directly. AOCE understands that users are not always connected to the network, so outbound mail is cached on the sender's machine until both the sender and recipient are online. Even on a
LAN
Lan or LAN may also refer to:
Science and technology
* Local asymptotic normality, a fundamental property of regular models in statistics
* Longitude of the ascending node, one of the orbital elements used to specify the orbit of an object in sp ...
this is valuable, as many users turn off their computers at night and the mail would must wait until the next morning for delivery.
Since the mail is stored locally, users with
laptop computer
A laptop, laptop computer, or notebook computer is a small, portable personal computer (PC) with a screen and alphanumeric keyboard. Laptops typically have a clam shell form factor with the screen mounted on the inside of the upper l ...
s are able to read and compose mail while mobile. Everything automatically updates upon reconnection to the office LAN.
AppleTalk Remote Access
AppleTalk Remote Access, or ARA, was a protocol stack that allowed AppleTalk to be run over modems. It became a fairly major product for Apple Computer in the early to mid-1990s when their first portable and laptop computers were available (and ve ...
, Apple's standard implementation of AppleTalk over
modem
A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by modulating one or more c ...
s, provides remote sync.
For security over the potentially open phone lines, all communications can be secured using
RSA
RSA may refer to:
Organizations Academia and education
* Rabbinical Seminary of America, a yeshiva in New York City
*Regional Science Association International (formerly the Regional Science Association), a US-based learned society
*Renaissance S ...
encryption and digital signing, even on the local network. Additionally, the
Keychain
A keychain (also key fob or keyring) is a small ring or chain of metal to which several keys can be attached. The length of a keychain allows an item to be used more easily than if connected directly to a keyring. Some keychains allow one or b ...
stores various login credentials in an encrypted file. This allows the users to use a different username and password on the various systems, placing them in the keychain database for secure storage. This requires only a single password for the keychain; AOCE can retrieve the credentials for a particular service on demand.
Users can share documents directly simply by dropping the address on the document, or vice versa, bypassing a message at all – the document would arrive automatically in the other user's mailbox. Delivery of email (which in this scenario is nothing more than a text document in a specialized format), or of anything else, was handled entirely by plugins, allowing the user to collect mail from all of their sources into a single inbox.
An optional server can be installed for performance and maintenance needs for those sites that required it. In this case any attempted delivery would be intercepted immediately by the server, thereby avoiding delays if the recipient was not online. The server then delivers the message on behalf of the sender when the recipient connects online.
The AOCE project suffered from what is known as
second-system effect
The second-system effect or second-system syndrome is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems, due to inflated expectations and overconfidence.
The phrase was first used by Fred ...
, where engineers spend considerable time designing a system that does everything. Invariably these projects fail as the demands are not only incredibly difficult to meet, but often fail to meet real user needs. Often the ideas themselves are good, but buried inside unusable implementations.
Release
By early 1993 the client side of AOCE was nearing completion, which was then referred to as PowerTalk. Apple started a pre-release marketing campaign, telling larger customers and even third party email vendors that AOCE would soon arrive and change the market completely. Their claim was that nothing else would be able to compete with its usability, power, and lack of maintenance overhead – all hallmarks of the Apple way.
The system was first widely shown at the
Macworld Expo
Macworld/iWorld was an information technology trade show with conference tracks dedicated to the Apple Macintosh platform. It was held annually in the United States during January. Originally ''Macworld Expo'' and then ''Macworld Conference & Expos ...
in Boston in mid-1993. At the show the developers found that the choice of naming was unwise, due to confusion between PowerTalk and Apple's new
voice recognition system,
PlainTalk
PlainTalk is the collective name for several speech synthesis (MacinTalk) and speech recognition technologies developed by Apple Inc. In 1990, Apple invested a lot of work and money in speech recognition technology, hiring many researchers in th ...
.
AOCE was publicly released in September 1993, part of the System 7 Pro bundle that also includes
AppleScript
AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. that facilitates automated control over scriptable Mac applications. First introduced in System 7, it is currently included in all versions of macOS as part of a package of system aut ...
utilities.
Deployment
When the product finally shipped after years of hype, users were dismayed to find that to install it requires a machine with 2.5 MB of RAM minimum, and needed 4 MB to run well. This is the maximum available RAM in many Mac systems of the era. Removing unneeded components do little to address this, and AOCE and the other Apple technology,
QuickDraw GX, typically could not be run together because of a lack of memory. While newer machines were able to run AOCE more comfortably, as an email system intended to be run on diverse networks of non-homogeneous machines the requirements greatly impaired market acceptance. Simply downloading and installing separate stand-alone client applications for each mail system the user actually had would use considerably less disk space, and had no constant memory footprint.
While PowerTalk was generally an interesting system, a combination of design features made it frustrating to use. For instance, the addressing system is so deeply embedded into the core of the system that simply typing in a new address is an ordeal. First the user clicks on a button, selects the address type, types it in, and then finally clicks
OK
to have it appear in the message. Disk usage is also a problem because each message is stored as a separate file, requiring 1 kB or more of space in an era where 40 MB and 80 MB disks are still common. Thus a few hundred messages are enough to fill the free space on the drive. Backing up email was likewise almost impossible as a side-effect of the design; the mail was spread out over the network, some of it remote and inaccessible.
The system could not know who a user was, because the single-user Mac OS 7 does not require users to log in. Thus documents had to be delivered to a user's machine. This does not work well when the user has two or more machines, making the concept of a universal mailbox difficult to achieve in practice.
Even the remote access functionality is doomed by
feature interaction. To ensure that all messages are delivered in a reasonable time on a network where machines might appear and disappear at random (when they are turned on and off), AOCE has a 15-minute timeout in which it repeatedly tries to deliver pending messages. If the user is using a dialup connection on a modem, AOCE keeps the line open for a full 15 minutes before giving up on disconnected user, driving up long distance bills to deliver a potentially tiny message.
Many of these problems were intended to be solved with the PowerShare server, which acts as an always-on, always responsive super-peer. The basic AOCE protocol notices these machines when attempting delivery, and sends to them first, thereby eliminating the delays and centralizing storage and maintenance. The server was not ready in time for the release, and did not ship for another year. When it did it was likewise slow and resource hungry, largely a side effect of various features of the Mac OS that makes it unsuitable for server applications—a role for which it was never designed in the first place.
Cancellation
AOCE had one year at Apple's
Worldwide Developers Conference
The Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is an information technology conference held annually by Apple Inc. The conference is usually held at Apple Park in California. The event is usually used to showcase new software and technologies in t ...
in 1995 when it was finally selling, but by this point, the market was moving toward
SMTP
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typic ...
-based Internet mail as a universal format. By 1996 Apple had given up on AOCE, and started talking about the
CyberDog
Cyberdog was an OpenDoc-based Internet suite of applications, developed by Apple Computer for the Mac OS line of operating systems. It was introduced as a beta in February 1996 and abandoned in March 1997. The last version, Cyberdog 2.0, was ...
project based on the
OpenDoc
OpenDoc is a defunct multi-platform software componentry framework standard created by Apple in the 1990s for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's proprietary Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). It is one of Apple's ea ...
platform. AOCE is not supported in
Mac OS 7.6.
Overview
AOCE's Open Directory and related software introduced the concept of directory entries (such as business cards) as first-class desktop objects. This is used to create a drag-and-drop metaphor for mail, fax, and other directory-based activities. Each endpoint, a mail server for instance, is driven by a plug-in extension that is driven by a common AOCE-supplied
queue __NOTOC__
Queue () may refer to:
* Queue area, or queue, a line or area where people wait for goods or services
Arts, entertainment, and media
*''ACM Queue'', a computer magazine
* ''The Queue'' (Sorokin novel), a 1983 novel by Russian author ...
and queue viewer. PowerTalk provides a set of standard forms for interacting with the items in the queues, and a common interface for mail, and a universal mailbox. Encryption is supported by a single keychain that remembered all your passwords and digital signatures, encrypting them together so only a single password needed to be remembered.
The system was designed in an era when there were many email formats and services, including
online service
An online service provider (OSP) can, for example, be an Internet service provider, an email provider, a news provider (press), an entertainment provider (music, movies), a search engine, an e-commerce site, an online banking site, a health site, ...
s such as
CompuServe
CompuServe (CompuServe Information Service, also known by its initialism CIS) was an American online service provider, the first major commercial one in the world – described in 1994 as "the oldest of the Big Three information services (the oth ...
and
AppleLink
AppleLink was the name of both Apple Computer's online service for its dealers, third-party developers, and users, and the client software used to access it. Prior to the commercialization of the Internet, AppleLink was a popular service for Mac ...
, networking standards like
X.400
X.400 is a suite of ITU-T Recommendations that defines the ITU-T Message Handling System (MHS).
At one time, the designers of X.400 were expecting it to be the predominant form of email, but this role has been taken by the SMTP-based Internet e-m ...
and
SMTP
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typic ...
(Internet mail), and LAN-based servers such as
Microsoft Mail
Microsoft Mail (or MSMail/MSM) was the name given to several early Microsoft e-mail products for local area networks, primarily two architectures: one for Macintosh networks, and one for PC architecture-based LANs. All were eventually replaced b ...
and
QuickMail. In order to support this diverse environment, AOCE includes a robust layered
protocol stack
The protocol stack or network stack is an implementation of a computer networking protocol suite or protocol family. Some of these terms are used interchangeably but strictly speaking, the ''suite'' is the definition of the communication protoco ...
that, in theory, can be used with practically any store-and-forward type of environment. This is used within AOCE not only to service mail, but faxes, printing and even directly sending files from one machine to another without enclosing them in a mail message or needing a
file server
In computing, a file server (or fileserver) is a computer attached to a network that provides a location for shared disk access, i.e. storage of computer files (such as text, image, sound, video) that can be accessed by the workstations that are ab ...
.
Adoption of AOCE among third party developers was slow due to a complicated
API
An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...
. The book documenting the system is larger than all of the books describing the rest of the pre-System 7 Macintosh combined. Adding a simple feature like "mail this document" to an application requires wading through hundreds of pages of documentation, and writing a core AOCE component is many times more complex.
Several parts of the AOCE engine are useful on their own, such as the Keychain. However, in order to get the keychain, the user must install all of AOCE, a cost the users were not willing to pay. Many years later the keychain was finally shipped as a stand-alone component in Mac OS 9. The encryption and signing support is arguably also useful (although not widely deployed), and it reappeared in Apple's bundled Mail application starting with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar in August 2002.
Reception
In August 1994, Mel Beckman of ''
MacWorld
''Macworld'' is a website dedicated to products and software of Apple Inc., published by Foundry, a subsidiary of IDG Inc. It started life as a print magazine in 1984 and had the largest audited circulation (both total and newsstand) of Macin ...
'' gave AOCE one star out of five, citing profoundly poor usability, documentation, hardware resource requirements, and telephone technical support. A network administrator of five years, Beckman failed to even properly send email after three dedicated days, saying "setting up and maintaining a PowerShare server is not a chore for the fainthearted" with daily tasks being "odious".
References
External links
Apple Open Collaboration Environment (AOCE)documentation on
Apple Developer Connection
Apple Developer (formerly Apple Developer Connection) is Apple Inc.'s website for software development tools, application programming interfaces (APIs), and technical resources. It contains resources to help software developers write software for ...
AOCE - The next great Macintosh Advantage?
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Apple Inc. services
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