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88-833: The StarMax line was discontinued on 11 September 1997 after Apple terminated the Macintosh clone license program that year. The StarMax's termination resulted in strained relations between Motorola and Apple and later Motorola's expulsion from the AIM alliance . Shortly after Gil Amelio was appointed CEO of Apple in February 1996, Motorola Computer Group acquired a license for Mac OS 7.5 to ship with its own computer systems that it plan to release in China later that year. The license also allowed Motorola to sub-license Mac OS to its customers along with motherboards it would sell as OEM . Ultimately Apple terminated

176-430: A desktop operating system on Macintosh hardware, featuring advanced graphics and dynamic internationalized text. Pink engineer Dave Burnard, Ph.D., said it was "a real OS that could demonstrate the core technology" much deeper than System 6 could do. In June 1990, Bill Bruffey abandoned the idea of Pink becoming a new Mac OS. He got permission to create yet another new microkernel named NuKernel , intended explicitly for

264-404: 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

352-445: A heated telephone conversation between Jobs and Motorola CEO Christopher Galvin resulted in the long-favored Apple being demoted to "just another customer", mainly for PowerPC CPUs. In retaliation, Apple and IBM briefly expelled Motorola from the AIM alliance, and forced Motorola to stop making PowerPC CPUs, leaving IBM to design and produce all future PowerPC chips. Motorola was reinstated into

440-489: A joint manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas. Motorola would sell the chips to Apple or anyone else. Executives said the negotiations were stop and go, sometimes seeming to founder and then speeding up as impasses were resolved. The main disagreements occurred when one company or the other thought it was giving away too much technology. Executives said that the technological contributions of both sides were evaluated and that money

528-459: 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++ and

616-543: A new Mac OS. His team of six engineers worked a few months to demonstrate a microkernel-based Mac OS on a Macintosh IIci , which would years later become Copland and the proposed Mac OS 8. In 1990, Pink became the Object Based Systems group with Senior Vice President Ed Birss and a diverse staff of 150, including marketing and secretaries. Meanwhile, the hundreds of personnel in the Blue design group were constrained by

704-403: 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". MacWEEK reported that

792-515: A new desire to port it to this hardware. 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, which would soon result in Workplace OS . In an April 12, 1991, demonstration of Pink and its architecture, IBM was profoundly impressed and its GUTS outline was immediately impacted. By 1993, IBM's ambitious global roadmap would include

880-440: 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. 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

968-527: A period of great opportunity. The alliance's hardware is based on the PowerPC processors—the first of which, the PowerPC 601 , is a single-chip version of IBM's POWER1 CPU. Both IBM and Motorola would manufacture PowerPC integrated circuits for this new platform. The computer architecture base is called "PReP" ( PowerPC Reference Platform ), later complemented with OpenFirmware and renamed "CHRP" ( Common Hardware Reference Platform ). IBM used PReP and CHRP for

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1056-561: A realistic two year timeframe only if the team heavily improved its legacy compatibility code. He pragmatically warned them, "We're going to have enough trouble just reimplementing the Mac." In Apple's contentious corporate culture of consensus, this mandate was soon challenged; David Goldsmith resigned from Pink after making a counter-ultimatum for a complete redesign which obviates all legacy problems, and some other staff escalated their complaints to upward management in agreement with that. Months later,

1144-596: A senior executive finally overrode Ringewald, thus redeveloping Pink from scratch as a new and unique system with no System 6 legacy. 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 named Opus. 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

1232-516: A third party OS, but the nickname "Pink" will always remain industry lore, such as with the developer phone number 408-TO-B-PINK. 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

1320-462: 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 . 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 . The pace of addition [to System 6 and 7]

1408-411: 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 . Upon its launch, CEO Joe Guglielmi soon organized the company into three divisions: a native system group for its self-hosted Pink OS,

1496-641: 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." 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. 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

1584-494: Is that for the past few years [the industry's] hardware has become very fast and that it's traditional OSes that have been slowing [users] down. Taligent CTO, Mike Potel By 1994, the platform consisted of Taligent Object Services (TOS or TalOS), Taligent Application Environment (TAE or TalAE), and the Taligent Development System (TDS or TalDS). The initial plan was to deploy TalAE in early 1994 to help seed

1672-513: The ATI 3D RAGE II+ chip. AIM alliance The AIM alliance , also known as the PowerPC alliance , was formed on October 2, 1991, between Apple , IBM , and Motorola . Its goal was to create an industry-wide open-standard computing platform based on the POWER instruction set architecture . It was intended to solve legacy problems, future-proof the industry, and compete with Microsoft 's monopoly and

1760-623: The PCI version of IBM's RS/6000 platform, which was adapted from existing Micro Channel architecture models, and changed only to support the new 60x bus style of the PowerPC. The development of the PowerPC is centered at an Austin, Texas, facility called the Somerset Design Center. The building is named after the site in Arthurian legend where warring forces put aside their swords, and members of

1848-599: The Wintel duopoly threatened competition industrywide, and the Advanced Computing Environment (ACE) consortium was underway. Phil Hester , a designer of the IBM RS/6000 , convinced IBM's president Jack Kuehler of the necessity of a business alliance . Kuehler called Apple President Michael Spindler , who bought into the approach for a design that could challenge the Wintel -based PC. Apple CEO John Sculley

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1936-579: The Wintel duopoly. The alliance yielded the launch of Taligent , Kaleida Labs , the PowerPC CPU family, the Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) hardware platform standard, and Apple's Power Macintosh computer line. Microsoft's worst nightmare is a conjoined Apple and IBM. No other single change in the dynamics of the IT industry could possibly do as much to emasculate Windows. From

2024-822: The 1980s with the NewWave desktop environment, the Softbench IDE, Distributed Smalltalk, Distributed Object Management Facility (DOMF), and having cofounded the Object Management Group . Taligent's object oriented portfolio was broadened with HP's compilers, DOMF, and intention to integrate TalOS and TalAE into HP-UX . 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

2112-427: The 1980s into the 1990s, the computer industry was moving from a model of just individual personal computers toward an interconnected world, where no single company could afford to be vertically isolated anymore. Infinite Loop says "most people at Apple knew the company would have to enter into ventures with some of its erstwhile enemies, license its technology, or get bought". Furthermore, Microsoft 's monopoly and

2200-457: The AIM alliance completely, leaving IBM and Apple in the alliance. Freescale continued to help IBM design PowerPC chips until Freescale was acquired and absorbed by NXP Semiconductors in 2015. Apple transitioned entirely to Intel CPUs in 2006, due to eventual disappointment with the direction and performance of PowerPC development as of the G5 model, especially in the fast-growing laptop market. This

2288-516: 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 immediately relocating his quintet off the main Apple campus. They used

2376-465: The Gang of Five: Erich Ringewald, David Goldsmith, Bayles Holt, Gene Pope, and Gerard Schutten. The Gang 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. In March 1988, the Gang, their management, and software manager and future Taligent CTO Mike Potel, met at

2464-452: 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, thought to be as futuristic as the Star Trek science fiction series. Erich Ringewald led

2552-476: The IBM Microkernel which was already used as the base for IBM's tandem project, Workplace OS . Its text handling and localization via Unicode was intended to begin enabling the globalization of software development, especially in simplifying Japanese. In January 1993, Taligent's VP of Marketing said the strong progress of native TalOS development could encourage its early incremental release prior to

2640-421: The Mac and IBM desktop computers into the 21st century with shared technology such as PowerPC chips, PowerOpen Unix, and new operating software from Taligent Inc. and Kaleida Labs Inc. Present and future shock aside, that's a lot to digest. CISC microprocessors , including the mainstream Intel x86 products, were considered an evolutionary dead end, and that because RISC was the future, the next few years were

2728-508: The PReP systems. The BeBox , designed to run BeOS , uses some PReP hardware but is overall incompatible with the standard. Kaleida Labs closed in 1995. Taligent was absorbed into IBM in 1998. Some CHRP machines shipped in 1997 and 1998 without widespread reception. Relations between Apple and Motorola further deteriorated in 1998 with the return of Steve Jobs to Apple and his contentious termination of Power Macintosh clone licensing. Reportedly,

Motorola StarMax - Misplaced Pages Continue

2816-501: The Power ISA. Taligent Taligent Inc. (a portmanteau of "talent" and "intelligent") 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. In 1988, after launching System 6 and MultiFinder , Apple initiated

2904-492: The PowerPC to be five years too late to the overall market, "no more than a welcome offering to Apple's own market base", and further hamstrung by the legacy architecture of System 7 . In 1995, IT journalist Don Tennant asked Bill Gates to reflect upon "what trend or development over the past 20 years had really caught him by surprise". Gates responded with what Tennant described as biting, deadpan sarcasm: "Kaleida and Taligent had less impact than we expected." Tennant believed

2992-545: 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". The Blue group would receive

3080-511: The alliance contract, with the expectation that neither would launch any products until the mid-90s. Since 1988, Apple had already created a next-generation operating system, codenamed "Pink"; and Taligent Inc. was incorporated to bring Pink to market as the ultimate crossplatform object-oriented OS and application frameworks. Kaleida was to create an object-oriented, cross-platform multimedia scripting language which would enable developers to create entirely new kinds of applications that would harness

3168-548: The alliance in 1999. The PowerPC is the clearest intended success that came out of the AIM alliance. From 1994 to 2006, Apple used PowerPC chips in almost every Macintosh . PowerPC also has had success in the embedded market, and in video game consoles : GameCube , Wii , Wii U , Xbox 360 , and PlayStation 3 . After being reinstated into the AIM alliance, Motorola helped IBM to design some laptop PowerPC chips with IBM's manufacturing. In 2004, Motorola spun off its Semiconductor production as Freescale Semiconductor , and left

3256-537: The basis of its ongoing future dialog which promised to "change the landscape of computing in the 90s". In 1992, the earth shook: IBM and Apple clasped hands and pronounced themselves allies. From this union sprang Taligent ... developing nothing less than a universal operating system. On October 2, 1991, the historic AIM alliance was officially formed with a contract between Apple CEO John Sculley, IBM Research and Development Chief Jack Kuehler, and IBM Vice President James Cannavino. Kuehler said "Together we announce

3344-604: The commercial pragmatism of maintaining their billion-dollar legacy operating system, which required them to refuse many new features, which earned them the infamous nickname " Blue Meanies ". This group had well established the evolution of System 6 which would be released in 1991 as System 7 . RAM chips and hard drives were extremely expensive so most personal computers were critically resource constrained, and System 7 would already barely fit onto existing Macintosh systems. Pink would therefore be hard-pressed to include backward compatibility for System 7 applications atop itself, assuming

3432-449: 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

3520-564: The company remained on schedule or ahead through 1993 into 1994. 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. Bedrock would be abruptly discontinued 18 months later with no successor, and leaving Apple with no connection between System 7 and Pink. [Taligent engineer Tom Chavez's] theory

3608-477: 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

Motorola StarMax - Misplaced Pages Continue

3696-425: The early 1980s. IBM had delivered objects on System/38 and AS/400, partnered with Patriot Partners, 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 . Within one month of its founding, there

3784-490: 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. An IBM engineer described

3872-418: The enterprise and Apple intended to become a prime customer for the new POWER hardware platform. Considering it to be critically poorly communicated and confusing to the outside world at this point, industry commentators nonetheless saw this partnership as an overall competitive force against Microsoft's monopoly and Intel's and Microsoft's duopoly. IBM and Motorola would have 300 engineers to codevelop chips at

3960-449: The explanation to be that "Microsoft's worst nightmare is a conjoined Apple and IBM. No other single change in the dynamics of the IT industry could possibly do as much to emasculate Windows." Efforts by Motorola and IBM to popularize PReP and CHRP failed when Apple, IBM, and Taligent all failed to provide a single comprehensive reference operating system for server and personal markets—mainly Taligent's OS or IBM's Workplace OS. Windows NT

4048-457: 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

4136-590: The first impression of this sophisticated prototype in 1991: [Pink] had proven that an operating system ... could, in fact, be built on a microkernel. ... This microkernel then exported C++ interfaces, providing an object-oriented "wrapper". ... All the code that traditionally had resided in a kernel was implemented in system frameworks. This was not a monolithic kernel, but a collection of object-oriented servers performing specific kernel-type tasks. There were frameworks for file systems, for device drivers, for databases, for networking, and so on. But they all resided outside

4224-577: 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 OS—while 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

4312-611: The globally adopted Java Development Kit 1.1 (especially internationalization). 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) would resurface and blend into Google's Fuchsia operating system. Along with Workplace OS , Copland , and Cairo , Taligent

4400-399: 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." Apple and IBM did share a progressive culture of object orientation, as seen in their deep portfolios since

4488-426: The integration of advanced TalAE features into pre-existing platform-native applications. CEO Joe Guglielmi reported on TalAE gaining the ongoing outside interest of IBM, but suffering relative uninvolvement from Apple—possibly due to Apple's failure to deliver a mainstream OS capable of running it. On April 18, 1994, InfoWorld reported Taligent's future plans for its SDK to be distributed. In November 1994 at Comdex,

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4576-527: The kernel. And in the [Pink] world, these things were objects. In 1992, the earth shook: IBM and Apple clasped hands and pronounced themselves allies. From this union sprang Taligent ... developing nothing less than a universal operating system. MacWorld 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

4664-405: The license in 1997. Reportedly, a heated telephone conversation between Jobs and Motorola CEO Christopher Galvin resulted in the contentious termination of Motorola's clone contract, and the long-favored Apple being demoted to "just another customer" mainly for PowerPC CPUs. Apple later expelled Motorola from the AIM alliance as retaliation, leaving IBM to make all future PowerPC CPUs. The StarMax

4752-549: The market with a base of applications for TalOS, which was 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. Influenced by the results of the survey effort, 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 first internal development environment

4840-557: The market's attention from Taligent. 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. 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

4928-411: The next generation Jaguar workstation design group, until so ordered by CEO John Sculley, and only then under extreme security and monitoring. 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." By late 1989, Pink was a functional prototype of

5016-508: The nondescript Bubb Road warehouse which was already occupied by the secretly sophisticated Newton project. Pink briefly garnered an additional code name, "Defiant". 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 in the form of MultiFinder , Ringewald was adamant that Pink's intense ambitions were deliverable within

5104-532: 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

5192-533: The power of the platform. IBM provided affinity between its own Workplace OS and Taligent, replacing Taligent's microkernel with the IBM Microkernel and adopting Taligent's CommonPoint application framework into Workplace OS, OS/2, and AIX. It's natural that many people saw Apple's alliance with former adversary IBM Corp. as an ominous portent for the independent future of the Macintosh. The sight of Apple and IBM chief executives gripping and grinning on national television wasn't nearly as confusing as their vow to bring

5280-407: The public debut of third-party TalAE applications was on an RS/6000 running AIX to demonstrate prototypes made by seven vendors. In late 1994, TalAE was renamed to CommonPoint, TalDE was renamed to cpProfessional, and Taligent User Interface Builder was renamed to cpConstructor. CommonPoint was being beta tested at 100 sites, with an initial target market of internal corporate developers. TalOS

5368-410: The race is far from over. ... [In 1996,] Cairo will be very close behind, and Taligent will be very far behind. Steve Jobs, 1994 When is Pink going to ship? Two years. — a running joke at Apple 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

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5456-409: The red cards would later be adopted. After its first two months, Pink had a staff of about 25. By October 1988, the Gang of Five had become only one—Bayles Holt—because Gene Pope, Gerard Schutten, and Erich Ringewald had exited the sprawling Pink project. The former leader held "grave doubts" over the feasibility of this "living, breathing, money-consuming thing" which was "out of control". Meanwhile,

5544-446: 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

5632-597: The second decade of personal computing, and it begins today" and Sculley said this would "launch a renaissance in technological innovation", as they signed the foot-high stack of papers comprising the contract. The New York Times called it "an act that a year ago almost no one in the computer world would have imagined possible". It was so sweeping that it underwent antitrust review by the United States federal government. In 1992, Apple and IBM created two new companies called Taligent and Kaleida Labs as had been declared in

5720-429: 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

5808-519: The team wanted to do so. This physical and economical constraint is a crucial aspect of the second-system effect . Pink's graphical user interface (GUI) is 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." That essential visual design language would be an influence for several years into Copland, Mac OS 8 , and CommonPoint. Magazines throughout

5896-507: The three teams that staff the building say the spirit that inspired the name has been a key factor in the project's success thus far. Part of the culture here is not to have an IBM or Motorola or Apple culture, but to have our own. In 1994, Apple delivered its first alliance-based hardware platform, the PowerPC-based Power Macintosh line, on schedule as predicted by the original alliance contract. Infinite Loop considered

5984-433: 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, a restless group of accomplished senior engineers were nicknamed

6072-457: 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

6160-499: The unification of the diverse world of computing by converting Pink to become one of many personalities of Workplace OS, and the ending of the need to write new major applications by instead making smaller additions to Pink's generalized frameworks. 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. On March 2, 1992, Taligent Inc.

6248-452: Was an IBM RS/6000 model 250 with a PowerPC 601 CPU running AIX, building TalOS natively for the 68k Macintosh. We used to joke that the [CommonPoint] frameworks were so powerful that you could write any program in three lines of code, but it would take you 6 months to figure out what those three lines were. Stephen Kurtzman, project lead on the IBM Microkernel, and subsequently Kernel Manager at Taligent [NeXT is] ahead today, but

6336-665: Was at SFA in Atlanta as an "amazingly fast" and crash-tolerant five-threaded 3D graphics application on native TalOS on a Macintosh IIci . Also in March 1994 at the PC Forum conference, Taligent gave the first public demonstration of TalAE applications, to an impressed but hesitant reception. A show of hands indicated one out of approximately 500 attendees were actively developing on TalAE, but Taligent reported 60 members in its future second wave of developer program. The frameworks already present allowed

6424-402: Was committed against publishing its own. 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. Taligent

6512-703: Was driven by OpenStep to go to Taligent, but that OpenStep allowed them to make a much better deal." NeXTWORLD summarized that "[HP covered] all bets in the race for the object market", and Sun CEO Scott McNealy derided the partnership as HP being Taligent's "trophy spouse". Dr. Dobb's Journal quipped: "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." By March 1994, Taligent had reportedly begun shipping code to its three investors, and some parts of TalAE had shipped to developers though without source code by policy. The first public Taligent technology demonstration

6600-416: Was even more enthusiastic. On July 3, 1991, Apple and IBM signed a non-contractual letter of intent , proposing an alliance and outlining its long-term strategic technology goals. Its main goal was creating a single unifying open-standard computing platform for the whole industry, made of a new hardware design and a next-generation operating system . IBM intended to bring the Macintosh operating system into

6688-480: 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

6776-415: Was founded in 2004 by IBM and fifteen partners with intent to develop, enable, and promote Power Architecture technology, such as PowerPC , POWER , and software applications. The OpenPOWER Foundation is a collaboration around Power ISA -based products initiated by IBM and announced as the "OpenPOWER Consortium" on August 6, 2013. It has more than 250 members. In 2019, IBM announced its open-sourcing of

6864-418: 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

6952-524: Was launched as the first product of the AIM alliance. Moving from a temporary lease at Apple headquarters to an office down the street in Cupertino, the company launched with 170 employees, most of whom had been re-hired directly from Apple plus CEO Joe Guglielmi. 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. The company's mission

7040-433: 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

7128-427: 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 formally named Taligent Object Services (TOS or TalOS) whether hosted natively on its microkernel or non-natively on

7216-581: Was seen as the end of the AIM alliance as that left IBM as the sole user of PowerPC. Taligent was launched from the original AIM alliance, based originally on Apple's Pink operating system. From Taligent came the CommonPoint application framework and many global contributions to internationalization and compilers, in the form of Java Development Kit 1.1, VisualAge C++, and the International Components for Unicode open source project. Power.org

7304-762: Was sold in four different product lines. In addition, the StarMax 6000 was based on the PowerPC 750 processor, but was never shipped due to the termination of the Macintosh clone program. The StarMax 6000 would have been the first CHRP machine and the first machine with the PowerPC G3 months before Apple released the Power Macintosh G3 . StarMax models numbers were derived using a standard system: (product line) / (CPU speed)(case type) 5000 and 5500 models used an upgraded "Tanzania II" logic board featuring faster system bus speeds and improved integrated graphics based on

7392-527: Was staggering, so much so that Apple never had time to recode the low-level OS and fix some of its shortcomings. By 1990, these shortcomings, including no preemptive multitasking and no memory protection for applications, began to affect the quality of the product. The Mac was the easiest computer to use but also one of the most fragile. Tom Saulpaugh in 1999, Macintosh system software engineer from June 1985, co-architect of Copland and JavaOS Apple's cofounders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs had departed

7480-426: Was still scheduled to ship in 1996. Apple considered MacApp's lifespan to have "run its course" as the primary Macintosh SDK, while Taligent considered MacApp to be prerequisite experience for its own platform. 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

7568-417: Was the only OS with mainstream consumer recognition that had been ported to PowerPC, but there was virtually no market demand for it on this non-mainstream hardware. Although PowerPC was eventually supported by several Unix variants, Windows NT , and Workplace OS (in the form of OS/2 ), these operating systems generally ran just as well on commodity Intel -based hardware so there was little reason to use

7656-411: Was to bring Pink to market. 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

7744-411: Was used to balance the terms, in what negotiators referred to as the "cosmic arithmetic." But how much money is being paid, and which company is paying, is closely guarded information. Between the three companies, more than 400 people had been involved to define a more unified corporate culture with less top-down executive decree. They collaborated as peers and future coworkers in creating the alliance and

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