Taligent
Taligent Inc. (a portmanteau of "talent" and "intelligent")[3][4] was an American software company. Based on the Pink object-oriented operating system conceived by Apple in 1988, Taligent Inc. was incorporated as an Apple/IBM partnership in 1992, and was dissolved into IBM in 1998.
Company type
Partnership
March 2, 1992 in Cupertino, California, United States
January 1998
Dissolved by IBM
1
Erich Ringewald, Mike Potel, Mark Davis
CommonPoint, Places for Project Teams
400[1]: xiv (1995)
Native system, development tools, complementary products
taligent.com at the Wayback Machine (archived March 28, 1997)
In 1988, after launching System 6 and MultiFinder, Apple initiated the exploratory project named Pink to design the next generation of the classic Mac OS. Though diverging from Macintosh into a sprawling new dream system, Pink was wildly successful within Apple. Though having no releases until 1995, it was a subject of industry hype for years. In 1992, the new AIM alliance spawned an Apple/IBM partnership corporation named Taligent Inc., with the purpose of bringing Pink to market. In 1994, Hewlett-Packard 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 with a later beta for OS/2. CommonPoint was technologically acclaimed but had 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 and NeXTSTEP, even though Taligent did not 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++[5][6] and the globally adopted Java Development Kit 1.1 (especially internationalization).[7]
In 1997, Apple instead bought NeXT and began synthesizing the classic Mac OS with the NeXTSTEP operating system. Mac OS X 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 (the first iPhone's codename)[8][9] would resurface and blend into Google's Fuchsia operating system.[10]
Along with Workplace OS, Copland,[11] and Cairo, Taligent is cited as a death march project of the 1990s, suffering from development hell as a result of feature creep and the second-system effect.
History[edit]
Development[edit]
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 development hell, second-system effect, empire building, secrecy, and vaporware.
Legacy[edit]
The founding lead engineer of Pink, Erich Ringewald, departed Apple in 1990 to become the lead software architect at Be Inc. and design the new BeOS.[78] Mark Davis, who had previously cofounded the Unicode Consortium, had at Apple co-written WorldScript, Macintosh Script Manager, and headed the localization of Macintosh to Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese (KanjiTalk),[38] 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,[6] and now helps to choose the emojis for the world's smartphones.[79] Ike Nassi had been VP of Development Tools at Apple, launched MkLinux, served on the boards of Taligent and the OpenDoc Foundation, and worked on the Linksys iPhone.[80]
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 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[7][6][65] 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).[81] The JDK 1.1 received Taligent's JavaBeans Migration Assistant for ActiveX, to convert ActiveX into JavaBeans.[6] Davis's group became the Unicode group at the IBM Globalization Center of Competency in Cupertino.[81][82]
Taligent's own published software was a set of development tools based on Java and JavaBeans, called WebRunner; and a groupware product based on Lotus Notes called Places for Project Teams.[68][69] Taligent licensed various technologies to Sun which are today part of Java, and others to Oracle Corporation and Netscape. HP released the Taligent C++ compiler technology (known within Taligent as "CompTech") as its "ANSI C++" compiler, aCC. HP also released some Taligent graphics libraries.
In the 2010s, some of Apple's personnel and design concepts from Pink and Purple (the first iPhone's codename)[8][9] would resurface and blend into Google's Fuchsia 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".[10]