Bedrock was a joint effort by Apple Computer and Symantec to produce a cross platform programming framework for writing applications on the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms. The project was a failure for a variety of reasons, and after delivering a developer preview version the project was abandoned in late 1993.

History

Background

Bedrock started as an internal effort by Robert Bierman under Gary Hendrix at Symantec in the early 1990s. At the time many of Symantec's products ran on both Mac and Windows, and what would become Bedrock was originally an internal set of tools intended to ease the effort of keeping both platforms up to date. MPW was a command-line driven system that had not been competitively maintained. MacApp 3.0 is a major upgrade from previous versions, being ported from Object Pascal to C++. This left it largely incompatible with the previous version, and caused considerable consternation in the Mac developer community.

Symantec was also the supplier of the then-premier development platform on the Mac, Think C. This is a GUI-based environment which included an application framework of its own, TCL. Think C/TCL had garnered a considerable following in the Mac community, especially during the MacApp 3.0 era. To remain competitive, at some point MPW would have to be replaced with something much more similar to Think.

Throughout this period, Microsoft Windows was first starting its rise in popularity. Cross-platform development systems had been developed, but to this time they tended to be relatively simple, delivering least-common-denominator applications.

At the MacWorld show they announced the conceptnot yet a real productas Bedrock. Bedrock would first be released on the Mac and Windows, with plans to expand it in the future to support Unix, OS/2, Windows NT, and Pink—the OS originated at Apple and now developed at Taligent. It was expected to become "the most direct path for migration" from System 7 to Pink. Allowing a single application source code base to target all of these platforms, Bedrock was intended to become the total successor to MacApp. Seven MacApp engineers at Apple were adding MacApp 3.0 technology and functionality. Even though Bedrock did not yet exist as a product, MacApp was officially deprecated with a maintenance release of 3.0.1, unless Bedrock's schedule would eventually slip.

A developer preview was delivered in early 1993 that includes several demo apps built using the system. These apps look nothing like either Mac or Windows programs, using custom UI widgets for many common tasks like Open File dialog boxes. The demo applications also seem buggy and lacking any visual polish, including spelling and grammar mistakes throughout. The developer preview was released with claims that the product would ship late in 1993, but that this coming release would not yet be of "code quality", and that a true final release could not be expected until some time in 1994.

By the end of 1993, with no further release in sight, rumors abounded of Apple's dissatisfaction with the project and especially with its lack of OpenDoc support. Even in public, Apple was questioning "how we can fit Bedrock into the OpenDoc environment".

In late January 1994, Ike Nassi, Vice President of the Development Products Group within AppleSoft, announced Apple's renewed commitment to use the 18-month-old Bedrock for all native and crossplatform development. He announced an expanded scope to "make Bedrock the tool of choice for OpenDoc part development"though neither Apple nor Symantec would provide any details on how this would be done, and they didn't know whether the first Bedrock release would include OpenDoc functionality at all.

Discontinuation

Apple VP Ike Nassi recalled that once he finally read the business contract between Apple and Symantec governing Bedrock, he emphatically described it as "a terrible, terrible contract" and demanded its immediate termination. Though lobbied "very heavily" in his office by Symantec Vice President Gene Wang and CEO Gordon Eubanks, Nassi ordered Apple to pay a fee to cancel it.

On January 24, 1994 Apple and Symantec finally officially stated that Symantec was no longer actively developing Bedrock. Instead, Symantec granted Apple a "worldwide, perpetual license to distribute and further develop Bedrock. Additionally, Apple granted Symantec a worldwide perpetual license to use specific Apple technology in future Symantec products."

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