Apple's cofounders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs 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 System 6, 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. Having committed these engineering triumphs which were often blunted within such a notoriously fragile operating system, Embellishing upon the pink index cards, Pink's overall key design goals were now total object-orientation, memory protection, preemptive multitasking, internationalization, 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. 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." That essential visual design language would be an influence for several years into Copland, Mac OS 8, 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.
AIM alliance
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 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.
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. Moving from a temporary lease at Apple headquarters to an office down the street in Cupertino, the company launched with 170 employees,
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 [Apple] folklore ... 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 [a former] Apple programmer working for [a former] IBM boss who reported [externally] to HP. Or some combination thereof. Twisteder and twisteder." 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. 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. 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 (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.
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 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 reported on the state of Taligent, saying the company and its platform had the broad optimistic support of Borland, WordPerfect, and Novell. Borland CEO Philippe Kahn said "Technically, [Pink] is 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 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". Bedrock would be abruptly discontinued 18 months later with no successor, and leaving Apple with no connection between System 7 and Pink.
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 companiesall 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." 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.
WebRunner is a set of Java- and JavaBeans-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. 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.
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 [over its existing 50,000 installations] in 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 had said "We are almost overwhelmed by the complexity of [CommonPoint]. I don't know if the typical corporate developer is going to be able to assimilate this in their shop."
In March 1995, IEEE Software magazine said "Taligent's very nature could change the contour of the application landscape. ... [I]t'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 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.
Due to the second-system effect and corporate immune response, Wired 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."
Legacy
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. 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), 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.
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
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. Taligent licensed various technologies to Sun which became an enduring 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)