Taligent

In 1988, Apple released System 6, a major release of the flagship Macintosh operating system. The system's architectural limitations, set forth by its original 1984 release, now required increasingly ingenious solutions for incremental gains such as cooperative multitasking, and System 6 had a lackluster reception. A group of accomplished but restless senior engineers nicknamed the Gang of Five — Erich Ringewald, David Goldsmith, Bayles Holt, Gene Pope, and Gerard Schutten — 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.[5]^:96[6]

In March 1988,[lower-alpha 1] 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 cards 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".[5]^:96–97[1]^:6[6] 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.[5]^:96–97

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 relocating the team off the main Apple campus. They used the nondescript Bubb Road warehouse which was already occupied by the secret Newton project.[5]^:97–98[6] Pink briefly garnered an additional code name, "Defiant".[7]^:35

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 MultiFinder, Ringewald was aware that Pink's ambitious features could not be delivered in a two-year timeframe unless the team incorporated legacy compatibility code. He warned that "We're going to have enough trouble just reimplementing the Mac." This mandate was soon challenged; David Goldsmith resigned from the team after making a counter-ultimatum for a complete redesign, while other staff escalated their complaints to upper management. Months later, a senior executive finally overrode Ringewald, thus redeveloping Pink from scratch as a new and unique system with no System 6 legacy.[5]^:97–98[6]

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[5]^:98[6] named Opus.[8][9][10] Going well beyond the features of the original index card plans, Pink's design goals were now complete object-orientation, memory protection, preemptive multitasking, internationalization, and a new graphics library. Many ideas from the red cards would later be absorbed into the project as well. After its first two months, Pink had a staff of about 25.[5]^:97–98

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 warring 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.[5]^:99–100[6] 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."[5]^:99–100[6]

In 1990, Pink became the Object Based Systems group with Senior Vice President Ed Birss and a staff of 150, including marketing and secretaries.[5]^:99–100 Meanwhile, the hundreds of personnel in the Blue design group[6] were continuing work with the existing code base, which required them to refuse many new features, earning them the nickname "Blue Meanies". This group was making significant progress and would release their efforts in 1991 as System 7. RAM chips and hard drives were expensive and most personal computers were resource-constrained, so System 7 already had problems running on existing Macintosh systems. Pink would, therefore, have little room to include backward compatibility for System 7 applications atop itself. This physical and economical constraint is a crucial aspect of the second-system effect.

By late 1989, Pink was a functional prototype of a desktop operating system on Macintosh hardware, featuring advanced graphics and dynamic internationalized text. Engineer Dave Burnard, Ph.D., said it was "a real OS that could demonstrate the core technology" much deeper than System 6 could do.[5]^:99–100 In the early 1990s, Pink's graphical user interface (GUI) was 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."[11] That essential visual design language would be an influence for several years into Copland, Mac OS 8, and CommonPoint.[12] Magazines[13] throughout the early 1990s showed various mock-ups of what Pink would look like. The People, Places, and Things metaphor was widely noted in articles, it would provide the user with tools to move documents around between people and things (like fax machines) as easily as they could print. The system had a component-based document model that 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.[13] An IBM engineer described the first impression of this sophisticated prototype in 1991:

On October 2, 1991, the historic AIM alliance was formed and announced by Apple, IBM, and Motorola. It was conceived to cross-pollinate Apple's personal products and IBM's enterprise products, to better confront Microsoft's monopoly, and to design a new unified platform for the computing industry meant to rival the dominance of Microsoft. This alliance spun off two partner corporations: Kaleida Labs to develop multimedia software, and Taligent Inc. to bring the Pink operating system to market sometime in the mid-90s.[3][7]^:69[16][17]

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 desire to port it to the new chipset.[7]^:69[6] 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,[1]^:9 which would soon result in Workplace OS.[14]^:3–4 Pink was demonstrated to IBM on April 12, 1991. The operating system and the architecture profoundly impressed IBM and its GUTS outline was immediately impacted.[14]^:4[7]^:69 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. There would be no more need to write new major applications. They could instead become smaller additions to Pink's generalized frameworks.[18]^:14–15

Even before the signing of the alliance contract, the very existence of Pink was identified as a potential second-system threat if its seemingly revolutionary aura could prompt customers to delay their adoption of OS/2.[3]

On March 2, 1992, Taligent Inc. was launched as the first product of the AIM alliance.[8][16][17] Moving from a temporary lease at Apple headquarters[16][19] to an office down the street in Cupertino, the company launched with 170 employees,[1]^:xiv most of whom had been re-hired directly from Apple plus CEO Joe Guglielmi.[20] 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.[21] The company's mission was to bring Pink to market.[1]^:xiii

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.[21] 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."[22] 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 reigned it in, saying, "I'm tired of [Apple] folklore ... I want some data."[20] 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".[5]^:289

Apple and IBM did share a progressive culture looking to the future as object orientation. This is seen in their deep software portfolios since the early 1980s. IBM had delivered objects on System/38 and AS/400, and System Object Model (SOM) and Distributed SOM were already integral to 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.[1]^:6,119

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 [about Taligent] or 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 [the two] will fit together."[23] 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.[6] 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.[13]

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.

The Pink operating system is now named Taligent Object Services (TOS or TalOS) whether hosted natively on its microkernel or non-natively on a third party OS, but the nickname will always remain industry lore,[1] such as with the developer phone number 408-TO-B-PINK.[24] The entire graphics subsystem is 3D, including the 2D portions which are actually 3D constructs.[25][9] It is based extensively on object-oriented frameworks from the kernel upward, including device drivers, the Taligent IO system, and ensembles.[26] 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.[1]^:119[9][10][18]^:14–15[27]

By April 1993, the company had grown to about 260 employees, mostly from Apple or "some other loose Silicon Valley culture".[20]

On June 23, 1993, Apple preannounced MacApp's direct successor, the new object-oriented crossplatform SDK codenamed Bedrock. 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.[28] Bedrock would be abruptly discontinued 18 months later with no successor, and leaving Apple with no connection between System 7 and Pink.[29]

The platform soon consisted of Taligent Object Services (TOS or TalOS), Taligent Application Environment (TAE or TalAE), and the Taligent Development System (TDS or TalDS).[25][8][1]^:22 The initial plan is to deploy TalAE in early 1994 to help seed the market with a base of applications for TalOS, which is 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.[30] Influenced by the results of the survey effort, Taligent deemphasized its yet-unreleased natively hosted TalOS, to focus on its TalAE application framework programming environment that would run on any modern operating system. Developed mainly upon AIX, the plan was to port to HP-UX, OS/2, Windows NT, and whatever Apple might someday produce as a System 7 successor. Those vendors are intended to port and bundle TalAE directly with their operating systems, and Taligent will port for those who don't.[25][8] 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 initial development environment was an IBM RS/6000 running AIX,[8] with TalOS running as a native operating system on the 68k Macintosh.[25]

In March 1994, the first Taligent technology demonstration was at SFA as a "very fast" and crash-tolerant five-threaded 3D graphics application on a Macintosh IIci.[25] In November 1994, the debut of third-party TalAE applications was on an RS/6000 running AIX to demonstrate prototypes made by seven vendors at Comdex.[31][8]

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 desktop environment, the Softbench IDE, Distributed Smalltalk, and cofounding the Object Management Group.[1]^:6 Taligent's object oriented portfolio was broadened with HP's Distributed Object Management Facility and compilers, and HP's intention to integrate Taligent natively into HP-UX.[32] 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."[32]^:16 NeXTWORLD described it as "[HP covering] all bets in the race for the object market", and Sun CEO Scott McNealy derided the partnership as HP being Taligent's "trophy spouse".[32]^:13 Dobb's described the increased abstraction in corporate culture, "Now you could be [a former] Apple programmer working for [a former] IBM boss who reported [externally] to HP. Or some combination thereof. Twisteder and twisteder."[22]

Also in 1994, TalAE was renamed to CommonPoint, TalDE was renamed to cpProfessional development environment, and Taligent User Interface Builder was renamed to cpConstructor user interface builder.[1]^:22 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,[8] while Taligent considers MacApp to be prerequisite experience for its own platform.[33] 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.[8]

Taligent’s role in the world is to create an environment in which all the applications we buy individually are built directly into the operating system. Because the apps are programmable, you can put together your own custom-made suites. Taligent could mean the end of all applications as we know them. ... The suites are here to battle Taligent.

— John C. Dvorak[34]

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 vaporware product announcements (such as Chicago, Cairo, Daytona, and Snowball) to distract the market's attention from Taligent.[34] 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.[35] Its theoretical newness was often compared to NeXT's older but mature and commercially established platform. Sun Microsystems held exploratory meetings with Taligent before deciding upon building out its object application framework OpenStep in partnership with NeXT as a "preemptive move against Taligent and Cairo".[32] Having given up on seeing Pink go to market, Apple announced Copland in March 1994 in competition with the upcoming Windows 95.[7]^:225

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 only.[36]

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 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 would include Apple, Windows NT, and the yet unreleased Windows 95.[36] 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.[37]

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.[36]

On July 28, 1995, Taligent shipped its first product, CommonPoint 1.1 (originally named TalAE) for AIX. It was initially priced at US$1,500 for only the runtime framework, or US$5,900 for the runtime framework and the software development kit (which requires the US$1,800 Cset++ compiler). The runtime has an overhead of 18MB RAM for each machine[39] and 32 MB total system RAM is recommended.[36] Though essentially on schedule by the company's own PEEK projections last year,[36] some analysts considered it to be "too little, too late" especially compared to NeXT.[38] Several beta test sites were very pleased with the platform.[39][8] Hewlett-Packard wrote a beginner's guide for CommonPoint programmers, saying that its survey showed that experienced C++ framework programmers needed at least three months to even approach their first application.[33]

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 CommonPoint.

By 1995, it was estimated that the three investors had spent more than $100 million on Taligent, Inc.[40]

In September 1995, CEO Joe Guglielmi unexpectedly exited Taligent to become VP of Motorola, intensifying the industry's concerns. Dick Gurino was named the interim CEO in search of a permanent CEO.[40] 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.[41][2][22]

On the same day as receiving 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."[2]

Now, the company's mission became 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.[22] 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."[22]

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.[42]

In February 1997, Taligent started contributing some CommonPoint frameworks to VisualAge for C++ 4.0., which PC Mag said were "unmatched" in "sheer breadth of features".[43] Taligent was at the core of IBM's companywide shift to a Java-based middleware strategy in 1997.[44] Taligent provided all Unicode internationalization support for Java Development Kit 1.1.[22] In 1997, 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 was not fully aware of Taligent's activities.[45]

Apple canceled the unstable Copland in August 1996, which had already been renamed "Mac OS 8". 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.[46] In late 1996, Apple was more desperately scrambling to find any operating system strategy whatsoever beyond System 7 even with a planned announcement of such in December 1997.[7]^:228–229 The company had failed to deliver even a functional developer preview of Copland in two years; and it discarded the successful A/UX and PowerOpen platforms in 1995, and the new AIX-based Apple Network Server of 1996-1997. To build the future Mac OS, the company seriously explored licensing other third party OSes such as Solaris, Windows NT, and TalOS.[7]^:228–229

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, including VisualAge for Smalltalk, and at the recently announced Java porting center that IBM is setting up with Sun Microsystems and Netscape".[47]