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133-486: Developed in collaboration with Taligent and its Pink operating system imported from Apple via the AIM alliance , the ambitious Workplace OS was intended to improve software portability and maintenance costs by aggressively recruiting all operating system vendors to convert their products into Workplace OS personalities. In 1995, IBM reported that "Nearly 20 corporations, universities, and research institutes worldwide have licensed

266-468: A flat memory model , Taligent, and OpenDoc . IBM intended for Workplace OS to run on several processor architectures, including PowerPC , ARM , and x86 which would range in size from handheld PDAs to workstations to large 64-bit servers and supercomputers. IBM saw the easy portability of the Workplace OS as creating a simple migration path to move its existing x86 (DOS and OS/2) customer base onto

399-448: A word processor for IBM PC compatible machines and Macintosh computers. Generally, such internal forks will concentrate on having the same look, feel, data format, and behavior between platforms so that a user familiar with one can also be productive or share documents generated on the other. This is almost always an economic decision to generate a greater market share and thus pay back the associated extra development costs created by

532-478: A "preemptive move against Taligent and [Microsoft's] Cairo ". Having given up on seeing Pink go to market soon, Apple publicly announced Copland in March 1994 intended to compete with the upcoming Windows 95. Fork (software development) In software engineering , a project fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating

665-698: A 64-bit operating system in our lifetime." IBM intended shareable objects to eventually reduce the footprint of each personality, scaling them down to a handheld computing profile. At the base of Workplace OS is a fork of the Mach 3.0 microkernel (release mk68) originally developed by Carnegie Mellon University and heavily modified by the Open Software Foundation 's Research Institute. Officially named "IBM Microkernel", it provides five core features: IPC, virtual memory support, processes and threads, host and processor sets, and I/O and interrupt support. On top of

798-548: A branch "forks off" a version of the program. The term was in use on Usenet by 1983 for the process of creating a subgroup to move topics of discussion to. "Fork" is not known to have been used in the sense of a community schism during the origins of Lucid Emacs (now XEmacs ) (1991) or the Berkeley Software Distributions (BSDs) (1993–1994); Russ Nelson used the term "shattering" for this sort of fork in 1993, attributing it to John Gilmore . However, "fork"

931-414: A crippled product. The entire Workplace OS platform was discontinued in March due to very low market demand, including that for enterprise PowerPC hardware. A University of California case study described the Workplace OS project as "one of the most significant operating systems software investments of all time" and "one of the largest operating system failures in modern times". By 1990, IBM acknowledged

1064-430: 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

1197-404: 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

1330-648: A distinct and separate piece of software. The term often implies not merely a development branch , but also a split in the developer community; as such, it is a form of schism . Grounds for forking are varying user preferences and stagnated or discontinued development of the original software. Free and open-source software is that which, by definition, may be forked from the original development team without prior permission, and without violating copyright law. However, licensed forks of proprietary software ( e.g. Unix ) also happen. The word "fork" has been used to mean "to divide in branches, go separate ways" as early as

1463-529: A fork, with examples: Distributed revision control (DVCS) tools have popularised a less emotive use of the term "fork", blurring the distinction with "branch". With a DVCS such as Mercurial or Git , the normal way to contribute to a project, is to first create a personal branch of the repository, independent of the main repository, and later seek to have your changes integrated with it. Sites such as GitHub , Bitbucket and Launchpad provide free DVCS hosting expressly supporting independent branches, such that

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1596-547: A general release packaged for OEMs or retail, beyond this developer preview available only via special order from the development lab. Upon its launch, Joe Stunkard, spokesman for IBM's Personal Systems Products division, said "When and if the Power market increases, we'll increase the operating system's presence as required." On January 26, 1996, an Internet forum statement is made by John Soyring, IBM's Vice President of Personal Software Products: "We are not planning additional releases of

1729-412: A microkernel-based operating system, the evolution to a completely object-oriented world could be staged. Through the historic Apple/IBM partnership, Apple's CEO John Sculley said that the already volume-shipping OS/2 and MacOS would become unified upon the common PowerPC hardware platform to "bring a renaissance to the industry". In late 1991, a small team from Boca Raton and Austin began implementing

1862-543: 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

1995-403: 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

2128-515: 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

2261-440: 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

2394-535: A new wave of standard reference PowerPC-based systems, such as the PC Power Series and the Power Macintosh. Creating a unique but open and industry-standard reference platform of open-source microkernel, IBM hedged its company-wide operating system strategy by aggressively attempting to recruit other computer companies to adopt its microkernel as a basis for their own operating systems. In January 1991, there

2527-484: A new worldview for the future of computing. IBM sought a new world view of a unified foundation for computing, based upon the efficient reuse of common work. It wanted to break the traditional monolithic software development cycle of producing alphas , then betas , then testing, and repeating over the entire operating system — instead, compartmentalizing the development and quality assurance of individual unit objects. This new theory of unifying existing legacy software and

2660-568: A private demonstration based on last-minute downloads to replace corrupted files and one hour of sleep. The presentation was so well received that the prototype was put on the trade show floor on Thursday, as the first public demonstration of the IBM Microkernel-based system running OS/2, DOS, 16-bit Windows, and UNIX applications. In 1992, IBM ordered Taligent to migrate the Taligent OS from its internally developed microkernel named Opus, onto

2793-540: A proprietary grant in the form of a Contributor License Agreement .) Examples include macOS (based on the proprietary NeXTSTEP and the open source FreeBSD ), Cedega and CrossOver (proprietary forks of Wine , though CrossOver tracks Wine and contributes considerably), EnterpriseDB (a fork of PostgreSQL , adding Oracle compatibility features ), Supported PostgreSQL with their proprietary ESM storage system, and Netezza's proprietary highly scalable derivative of PostgreSQL. Some of these vendors contribute back changes to

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2926-561: 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,

3059-596: 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

3192-664: A single GUI environment to accommodate the secondary personalities. In 1993, IBM intended one release version to be based upon the OS/2 Workplace Shell and another to be based upon the UNIX Common Desktop Environment (CDE). IBM explained the branding: "Workplace OS is the codename for a collection of operating system components including, among others, the IBM Microkernel and the OS/2 personality. Workplace OS/2

3325-746: A single set of technologies, namely the PowerPC microprocessor, the Workplace OS operating system, and the Taligent object model, along with a series of open standards for cross-platform development, network interoperability, etc." On June 30, 1993, a presentation was given at the Boca Programming Center by Larry Loucks, IBM Fellow and VP of Software Architecture of the Personal Software Products (PSP) Division. We have not closed discussion on [Mac OS support]. We're talking with Apple about including

3458-545: A special product request through their IBM representative, who then relayed the request to the Austin research laboratory. The software essentially appears to the user as the visually identical and source-compatible PowerPC equivalent of the mainstream OS/2 3.0 for Intel. Packaged as two CDs with no box, its accompanying overview paper booklet calls it the "final edition" but it is still a very incomplete product intended only for developers. Its installer only supports two computer models,

3591-425: 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

3724-516: 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

3857-464: A whole, in terms of system performance, system design, and corporate personnel organization. IBM had not properly researched and proven the concept of generalizing all these operating system personalities before starting the project, or at any responsible timeframe during it — especially its own flagship AIX. IBM assumed that all the resultant performance issues would be mitigated by eventual deployment upon PowerPC hardware. The Workplace OS product suffered

3990-462: 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]

4123-411: 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,

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4256-744: 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

4389-418: Is sometimes made when the forked software is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the original project, e.g. MariaDB for MySQL or LibreOffice for OpenOffice.org . The BSD licenses permit forks to become proprietary software, and copyleft proponents say that commercial incentives thus make proprietisation almost inevitable. (Copyleft licenses can, however, be circumvented via dual-licensing with

4522-494: 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

4655-450: Is the specific codename for the OS/2 personality. Workplace OS/2 will operate with the IBM Microkernel and can be considered OS/2 for the PowerPC." For the 1995 final preview release, IBM continued, "When we stopped using the name 'Workplace' and started calling the product 'OS/2 for the PowerPC', you might have thought that the 'Workplace' was dead. But the 'Workplace' is far from dead. It has simply been renamed for prime time." Workplace OS/2

4788-466: The IBM PC Power Series 830 and 850 which have PowerPC 604 CPUs of 100-120 MHz , 16-196 MB of RAM, and IDE drives. Contrary to the product's "Connect" name, the installed operating system has no networking support. However, full networking functionality is described within the installed documentation files, and in the related book IBM's Official OS/2 Warp Connect PowerPC Edition: Operating in

4921-524: The second-system effect , including feature creep , with thousands of global contributing engineers across many disparate business units nationwide. The Workplace OS project had spent four years and $ 2 billion (or 0.6% of IBM's revenue for that period), which the report described as "one of the most significant operating systems software investments of all time" and "one of the largest operating system failures in modern times". Taligent Taligent Inc. (a portmanteau of "talent" and "intelligent")

5054-456: The second-system effect . Many idealistic key assumptions made by IBM architects about software complexity and system performance were never tested until far too late in development, and found to be infeasible. In January 1996, the first and only commercial preview was billed under the OS/2 family with the name " OS/2 Warp Connect (PowerPC Edition) " for limited special order by select IBM customers, as

5187-431: The 14th century. In the software environment, the word evokes the fork system call, which causes a running process to split itself into two (almost) identical copies that (typically) diverge to perform different tasks. In the context of software development, "fork" was used in the sense of creating a revision control " branch " by Eric Allman as early as 1980, in the context of Source Code Control System : Creating

5320-822: 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

5453-405: The 64-bit, object-oriented worldview from AS/400 ). Pleased with the robust, long-term mentality of the microkernel technology and with the progress of the project, the team produced a prototype in mid 1992. The initial internal-development prototypes ran on x86-based hardware and provided a BSD Unix derived personality and a DOS personality. At Comdex in late 1992, the team flew in and assembled

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5586-675: The GUTS project, with the goal of proving the GUTS concept, by first converting the monolithic OS/2 2.1 system to the Mach microkernel, and yielding a demo. To gain shared access to key personnel currently working on the existing OS/2, they disguised the project as the Joint Design Task Force and brought "a significant number" of personnel from Boca, Austin (with LANs and performance), Raleigh (with SNA and other transport services), IBM Research (with operating systems and performance), and Rochester (with

5719-516: 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

5852-465: 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

5985-452: 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

6118-418: The IBM Microkernel and microkernel-based versions of OS/2 Warp. Nearly 20 corporations, universities, and research institutes worldwide have licensed the microkernel, laying the foundation for a completely open microkernel standard." IBM planned a second feature-parity release for x86 and PowerPC in 1996, and version 2.0 of the microkernel was "distributed to microkernel adopters" early that year. This version

6251-544: The IBM Microkernel is a layer of shared services (originally called Personality Neutral Services or PNS) to cater to some or all of the personalities above them. Shared services are endian-neutral, have no user interface, and can serve other shared services. Byte summarizes that shared services "can include not only low-level file system and device-driver services but also higher-level networking and even database services. [Workplace OS's lead architect Paul Giangarra] believes that locating such application-oriented services close to

6384-418: 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

6517-411: The IBM Microkernel. Ostensibly, this would have allowed Taligent's operating system (implemented as a Workplace OS personality) to execute side-by-side with DOS and OS/2 operating system personalities. In 1993, InfoWorld reported that Jim Cannavino "has gone around the company and developer support for a plan to merge all of the company's computing platforms— ES/9000 , AS/400, RS/6000, and PS/2 —around

6650-576: The IBM Power Personal Systems Division had still not yet begun testing its PowerPC hardware with any of its three intended launch operating systems: definitely AIX and Windows NT , and hopefully also Workplace OS. Software demonstrations showed limited personality support, with the dominant one being the OS/2 Workplace Shell desktop, and the DOS and UNIX personalities achieving only fullscreen text mode support with crude hotkey switching between

6783-568: The Macintosh OS as one of the personalities in the microkernel. —Lois Dimpfel, IBM's Director of Personal Operating Systems, November 1993 By 1993, IBM reportedly planned two packages of Workplace OS, based on personality dominance: one based on the OS/2 Workplace Shell and another based upon the UNIX Common Desktop Environment (CDE). IBM and Apple were speaking about the possibility of a Mac OS personality. By January 1994,

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6916-537: The New Frontier (1995) — all of which the product's paper booklet warns the user to disregard. The kernel dumps debugging data to the serial console. The system hosts no compiler , so developers are required to cross-compile applications on the source-compatible OS/2 for Intel system, using MetaWare’s High C compiler or VisualAge C++, and manually copy the files via relocatable medium to run them. With an officially concessionary attitude, IBM had no official plans for

7049-519: The Noosphere , stated that "The most important characteristic of a fork is that it spawns competing projects that cannot later exchange code, splitting the potential developer community". He notes in the Jargon File : Forking is considered a Bad Thing—not merely because it implies a lot of wasted effort in the future, but because forks tend to be accompanied by a great deal of strife and acrimony between

7182-460: The OS/2 Warp family on the PowerPC platform during 1996 — as we just released in late December 1995 the OS/2 Warp (PowerPC Edition) product. ... We have just not announced future releases on the PowerPC platform. In no way should our announcement imply that we are backing away from the PowerPC." On November 22, 1995, IBM's developer newsletter said, "Another focus of the 1996 product strategy will be

7315-494: The PowerPC". In 1996, IBM also closed the Power Personal Division responsible for personal PowerPC systems. IBM stopped developing new operating systems, and instead committed heavily to Linux , Java , and some Windows . In 2012, IBM described Linux as the "universal platform" in a way that happens to coincide with many of the essential design objectives of GUTS. Reception was enthusiastically but skeptically mixed, as

7448-545: 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

7581-617: The System Object Model (SOM), a model which had already been delivered as integral to the OS/2 operating system. Sometime later in 1991, as a result of the Apple/IBM business partnership, a small exploratory IBM team first visited the Taligent team, who demonstrated a relatively mature prototype operating system and programming model based entirely on Apple's Pink project from 1987. There, GUTS's goals were greatly impacted and expanded by exposure to these similar goals—especially advanced in

7714-455: 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 the globally adopted Java Development Kit 1.1 (especially internationalization). In 1997, Apple instead bought NeXT and began synthesizing

7847-462: The University of California with key details having been verified by IBM personnel. These researchers concluded that IBM had relied throughout the project's history upon multiple false assumptions and overly grandiose ambitions, and had failed to apprehend the inherent difficulty of implementing a kernel with multiple personalities. IBM considered the system mainly as its constituent components and not as

7980-500: The areas of aggressive object-orientation , and of software frameworks upon a microkernel. IBM's optimistic team saw the Pink platform as being the current state of the art of operating system architecture. IBM wanted to adopt Pink's more object-oriented programming model and framework-based system design, and add compatibility with legacy procedural programming along with the major concept of multiple personalities of operating systems, to create

8113-465: 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

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8246-604: 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

8379-428: The community project, while some keep their changes as their own competitive advantages. In proprietary software , the copyright is usually held by the employing entity, not by the individual software developers. Proprietary code is thus more commonly forked when the owner needs to develop two or more versions, such as a windowed version and a command line version, or versions for differing operating systems, such as

8512-543: The company had been publicly promising since the beginning. One IBM Research Fellow led a team of fewer than ten, to identify and address the problem, which was the fundamentally incompatible byte ordering between the big-endian AIX and the little-endian Workplace OS. This problem is endemic, because though the PowerPC CPU and Workplace OS can perform in either mode, endianness is a systemwide configuration set once at boot time only; and Workplace OS favors OS/2 which comes from

8645-449: 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

8778-564: 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

8911-468: The company to at least consider the rival Windows NT. In April 1994, Byte reported that under lead architect Paul Giangarra, IBM had staffed more than "400 people working to bring [Workplace OS] up on Power Personal hardware". In May 1994, the RISC Systems software division publicly announced the company's first attempt to even study the feasibility of converting AIX into a Workplace OS personality, which

9044-477: 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

9177-473: The conception and one year before the cancellation of Workplace OS, IBM announced the results of a very late stage analysis of the project's initial assumptions. This concluded that it is impossible to unify the inherent disparity in endianness between different proposed personalities of legacy systems, resulting in the total abandonment of the flagship plan for an AIX personality. In May 1997, one year after its cancellation, one of its architects reflected back on

9310-425: 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

9443-490: 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

9576-479: The environments. Byte reported that the multiple personality support promised in Workplace OS's conceptual ambitions was more straightforward, foundational, and robust than that of the already-shipping Windows NT. The magazine said "IBM is pursuing multiple personalities, while Microsoft appears to be discarding them" while conceding that "it's easier to create a robust plan than a working operating system with robust implementations of multiple personalities". In 1994,

9709-590: 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

9842-577: 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

9975-399: 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

10108-428: The industry was reportedly shifting away from monolithic development and even application suites, toward object-oriented, component-based, crossplatform, application frameworks. By 1995, Workplace OS was becoming notable for its many and repeated launch delays, with IBM described as being inconsistent and "wishy washy" with dates. This left IBM's own PowerPC hardware products without a mainstream operating system, forcing

10241-461: The industry's dismay that the preceding two years of delays had made the platform "too little, too late", "stillborn", and effectively immediately discontinued. An analyst was quoted, "The customer base would not accept OS/2 and the PowerPC at the same time" because by the time IBM would eventually ship a final retail package of OS/2 on PowerPC machines, "the power/price ratio of the PowerPC processor just wasn't good enough to make customers accept all of

10374-426: 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,

10507-411: The intractable problems of the project's software design and the limits of available hardware. There is no good way to factor multiple existing systems into a set of functional servers without making them excessively large and complex. In addition, the message-passing nature of the microkernel turns out to be a poor match for the characteristics of modern processors, causing performance problems. Finally,

10640-527: 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

10773-454: The larger group, or whoever controls the web site, will retain the full original name and the associated user community. Thus, there is a reputation penalty associated with forking. The relationship between the different teams can be cordial or very bitter. On the other hand, a friendly fork or a soft fork is a fork that does not intend to compete, but wants to eventually merge with the original. Eric S. Raymond , in his essay Homesteading

10906-477: The little-endian Intel x86 architecture. After seven months of silence on the issue, IBM announced in January 1995 that the intractable endianness problem had resulted in the total abandonment of the flagship plan for an AIX personality. In late 1994, as Workplace OS approached its first beta version, IBM referred to the beta product as "OS/2 for the PowerPC". As the project's first deliverable product, this first beta

11039-549: 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

11172-557: 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

11305-517: The microkernel will improve their efficiency by reducing the number of function calls and enabling the service to integrate its own device drivers ." This layer contains the file systems, the scheduler, network services, and security services. IBM first attempted a device driver model completely based in userspace to maximize its dynamic configuration, but later found the need to blend it between userspace and kernelspace , while keeping as much as possible in userspace. The Adaptive Driver Architecture (ADD)

11438-538: The microkernel, laying the foundation for a completely open microkernel standard." At the core of IBM's new unified strategic direction for the entire company, the project was intended also as a bellwether toward PowerPC hardware platforms, to compete with the Wintel duopoly. With protracted development spanning four years and $ 2 billion (or 0.6% of IBM's revenue for that period), the project suffered development hell characterized by workplace politics , feature creep , and

11571-624: The new way of building all new software, was nicknamed the Grand Unified Theory of Systems or GUTS. Coincidentally, Apple already had a two-year-old secret prototype of its microkernel -based object-oriented operating system with application frameworks, named Pink . The theory of GUTS was expanded by Pink, yielding Workplace OS. IBM described its new microkernel architecture as scalable, modular, portable, client/server distributed, and open and fully licensable both in binary and source code forms. This microkernel-based unified architecture

11704-411: 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

11837-508: 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

11970-476: The other drawbacks" of migrating to a new operating system alone. In 2013, Ars Technica retrospectively characterized the years of hype surrounding Workplace OS as supposedly being "the ultimate operating system, the OS to end all OSes ... It would run on every processor architecture under the sun, but it would mostly showcase the power of POWER. It would be all-singing and all-dancing." In January 1995, four years after

12103-403: The products it is already selling. Tough problem. Very little of the new platform that IBM is developing will be ready for mission-critical deployment until 1995 or 1996. So the company has to dance hard for two and maybe three years to keep already disaffected customers on board." In 1994, an extensive analysis by Byte reported that the multiple personality concept in Workplace OS's beta design

12236-407: 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

12369-410: 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

12502-409: 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,

12635-446: 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

12768-417: The shared services, another layer of userspace servers called personalities provide DOS , Windows , OS/2 (Workplace OS/2), and UNIX (WPIX) environments. The further hope was to support OS/400 , AIX , Taligent OS , and MacOS personalities. Personalities provide environment subsystems to applications. Any one personality can be made dominant for a given version of the OS, providing the desktop user with

12901-678: The software industry to be in a state of perpetual crisis. This was due to the chaos from the inordinate complexity of software engineering inherited by its legacy of procedural programming practices since the 1960s. Large software projects were too difficult, fragile, expensive, and time-consuming to create and maintain; they required too many programmers, who were too busy with fixing bugs and adding incremental features to create new applications. Different operating systems were alien to each other, each of them running their own proprietary applications. IBM envisioned "life after maximum entropy" through "operating systems unification at last" and wanted to lay

13034-429: 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

13167-476: The successor groups over issues of legitimacy, succession, and design direction. There is serious social pressure against forking. As a result, major forks (such as the Gnu-Emacs / XEmacs split, the fissioning of the 386BSD group into three daughter projects, and the short-lived GCC/EGCS split) are rare enough that they are remembered individually in hacker folklore. David A. Wheeler notes four possible outcomes of

13300-519: 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

13433-401: The technical, social and financial barriers to forking a source code repository are massively reduced, and GitHub uses "fork" as its term for this method of contribution to a project. Forks often restart version numbering from numbers typically used for initial versions of programs like 0.0.1, 0.1, or 1.0 even if the original software was at another version such as 3.0, 4.0, or 5.0. An exception

13566-433: 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

13699-548: The ultimate possible GUTS model. GUTS defined [theoretical] operating system components similar to Taligent's [already existing] operating environment, only the components [in GUTS] were defined procedurally ... From the concept of shared services and Taligent's concept of object-oriented system frameworks, an object model evolved that represents the new, faster, and more reliable way of building operating systems. What's more, because procedural and object-oriented components can coexist in

13832-499: 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.

13965-459: The upcoming first release, though still a developer preview. The announcement predicted it to have version 1.0 of the IBM Microkernel with the OS/2 personality and a new UNIX personality, on PowerPC. Having been part of the earliest demonstrations, the UNIX personality was now intended to be offered to customers as a holdover due to the nonexistence of a long-awaited AIX personality, but the UNIX personality

14098-403: The use of fine-grained objects complicated the design and further reduced the performance of the system. Based on this experience, I believe that more modest, more targeted operating systems consume fewer resources, offer better performance and can provide the desired semantics with fewer compromises. In September 1997, a case study of the history of the development of Workplace OS was published by

14231-463: The whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this. 3. Derived Works: The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software. In free software, forks often result from a schism over different goals or personality clashes. In a fork, both parties assume nearly identical code bases, but typically only

14364-510: 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

14497-456: The young IT industry was already constantly grappling with the second-system effect , and was now presented with Workplace OS and PowerPC hardware as the ultimate second system duo to unify all preceding and future systems. On November 15, 1993, InfoWorld ' s concerns resembled the Osborne effect : "Now IBM needs to talk about this transition without also telling its customers to stop buying all

14630-400: Was also abandoned prior to release. This developer release is the first ever publication of Workplace OS, and of the IBM Microkernel (at version 1.0), which IBM's internal developers had been running privately on Intel and PowerPC hardware. The gold master was produced on December 15, 1995 with availability on January 5, 1996, only to existing Power Series hardware customers who paid $ 215 for

14763-470: 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 the exploratory project named Pink to design the next generation of the classic Mac OS . Though diverging from Macintosh into

14896-452: 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

15029-678: Was an internal presentation to the IBM Management Committee of a new strategy for operating system products. This included a chart called the Grand Unification Theory of Operating Systems (GUTS) which outlined how a single microkernel underlying common subsystems could provide a single unifying architecture for the world's many existing and future operating systems. It was initially based in a procedural programming model, not object-oriented. The design elements of this plan had already been implemented on IBM's RS/6000 platform via

15162-617: 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

15295-402: 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

15428-469: Was described as final, with support for x86 and ARM processors. IBM reportedly tested OS/2 on the never-released x86-compatible PowerPC 615 . At this point, the several-year future roadmap of Workplace OS included IBM Microkernel 2.0 and was intended to subsume the fully converged future of the OS/2 platform starting after the future release of OS/2 version 4, including ports to Pentium , Pentium Pro , MIPS , ARM, and Alpha CPUs. The Workplace OS project

15561-420: Was designed for the creation of layered device drivers, which are easily portable to other hardware and operating system platforms beyond Workplace OS, and which consist of about 5000-8000 lines of device-specific code each. Some shared services are common only to select personalities, such as MMPM serving multimedia only to Windows 3.1 and OS/2 personalities, and which is alien or redundant to other markets. Atop

15694-703: 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

15827-483: 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

15960-480: 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

16093-579: Was finally canceled in March 1996 due to myriad factors: inadequate performance; low acceptance of the PowerPC Reference Platform ; poor quality of the PowerPC 620 launch; extensive cost overruns; lack of AIX, Windows, or OS/400 personalities; and the overall low customer demand. The only mainstream desktop operating system running on PowerPC was Windows NT, which also lacked supply and demand. Industry analysts said that "the industry may have passed by

16226-418: 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

16359-567: Was in use in the present sense by 1995 to describe the XEmacs split, and was an understood usage in the GNU Project by 1996. Free and open-source software may be legally forked without prior approval of those currently developing, managing, or distributing the software per both The Free Software Definition and The Open Source Definition : The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this, you can give

16492-623: Was intended to allow all software to become scalable both upward into supercomputing space and downward into mobile and embedded space. Leveraged upon a single microkernel, IBM wanted to achieve its grand goal of unification by simplifying complex development models into reusable objects and frameworks, and all while retaining complete backward compatibility with legacy and heritage systems. Multiple-library support would allow developers to progressively migrate select source code objects to 64-bit mode, with side-by-side selectable 32-bit and 64-bit modes. IBM's book on Workplace OS says, "Maybe we can get to

16625-412: Was intended to define the future of OS/2, as a 32-bit clean platform and free of internal legacy, with perfect compatibility for source code of OS/2 applications and drivers. IBM originally wanted to prove new development models on Workplace OS/2 and backport them into OS/2 2.1 for x86 until the two platforms were unified—especially the IBM Microkernel, a new graphics subsystem, fully 32-bit system code with

16758-523: 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

16891-404: Was more straightforward, foundational, and robust than that of the already-shipping Windows NT. It said "IBM is pursuing multiple personalities, while Microsoft appears to be discarding them" and conceded that "it's easier to create a robust plan than a working operating system with robust implementations of multiple personalities". Upon the January 1996 developer final release, InfoWorld relayed

17024-433: 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

17157-427: 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

17290-510: Was released to select developers on the Power Series 440 in December 1994. There was a second beta release in 1995. By 1995, IBM had shipped two different releases of an application sampler CD, for use with the beta OS releases. In mid 1995, IBM officially named its planned initial Workplace OS release "OS/2 Warp Connect (PowerPC Edition)" with the code name "Falcon". In October 1995, IBM announced

17423-527: 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

17556-426: 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

17689-411: 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

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