Taligent

Taligent Inc.
Company typePartnership
IndustrySoftware development
FoundedMarch 2, 1992 (1992-03-02) in Cupertino, California, United States
FounderApple and IBM
DefunctJanuary 1998 (1998-01)
FateDissolved by IBM
Headquarters
Cupertino, California
,
United States
Number of locations
1
Key people
Erich Ringewald, Mike Potel, Mark Davis
ProductsCommonPoint, Places for Project Teams
Number of employees
400[1]: xiv  (1995)
ParentApple Inc., IBM, Hewlett-Packard
DivisionsNative system, development tools, complementary products
Websitetaligent.com at the Wayback Machine (archived March 28, 1997)
Footnotes / references
[2][1]

Taligent Inc. (a portmanteau of "talent" and "intelligent")[3][4] was an American software company. Based on the Pink object-oriented operating system conceived by Apple in 1988, Taligent Inc. was incorporated as an Apple/IBM partnership in 1992, and was dissolved into IBM in 1998.

In 1988, after launching System 6 and MultiFinder, Apple initiated the exploratory project named Pink to design the next generation of the classic Mac OS. Though diverging from Macintosh into a sprawling new dream system, Pink was wildly successful within Apple. Though having no releases until 1995, it was a subject of industry hype for years. In 1992, the new AIM alliance spawned an Apple/IBM partnership corporation named Taligent Inc., with the purpose of bringing Pink to market. In 1994, Hewlett-Packard joined the partnership with a 15% stake. After a two-year series of goal-shifting delays, Taligent OS was eventually canceled, but the CommonPoint application framework was launched in 1995 for AIX with a later beta for OS/2. CommonPoint was technologically acclaimed but had an extremely complex learning curve, so sales were very low.

Taligent OS and CommonPoint mirrored the sprawling scope of IBM's complementary Workplace OS, in redundantly overlapping attempts to become the ultimate universal system to unify all of the world's computers and operating systems with a single microkernel. From 1993 to 1996, Taligent was seen as competing with Microsoft Cairo and NeXTSTEP, even though Taligent did not ship a product until 1995 and Cairo never shipped at all. From 1994 to 1996, Apple floated the Copland operating system project intended to succeed System 7, but never had a modern OS sophisticated enough to run Taligent technology.

In 1995, Apple and HP withdrew from the Taligent partnership, licensed its technology, and left it as a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM. In January 1998, Taligent Inc. was finally dissolved into IBM. Taligent's legacy became the unbundling of CommonPoint's best compiler and application components and converting them into VisualAge C++[5][6] and the globally adopted Java Development Kit 1.1 (especially internationalization).[7]

In 1997, Apple instead bought NeXT and began synthesizing the classic Mac OS with the NeXTSTEP operating system. Mac OS X was launched on March 24, 2001, as the future of the Macintosh and eventually the iPhone. In the late 2010s, some of Apple's personnel and design concepts from Pink and from Purple (the first iPhone's codename)[8][9] would resurface and blend into Google's Fuchsia operating system.[10]

Along with Workplace OS, Copland,[11] and Cairo, Taligent is cited as a death march project of the 1990s, suffering from development hell as a result of feature creep and the second-system effect.

  1. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Inside Taligent Technology was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference IBM Subsidiary was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Main Ally was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Metz, Cade (October 3, 2008). "Apple surrenders the Pink (to Microsoft)". The Register. Retrieved February 13, 2019.
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference Taligent show was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference Phoenix in Cupertino was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ Werner, Laura (July 1999). "Getting Java ready for the world: A brief history of IBM and Sun's internationalization efforts". IBM. Retrieved October 27, 2023.
  8. ^ Murtazin, Eldar (June 20, 2010). "Apple's Phone: From 1980s' Sketches to iPhone. Part 3". Mobile-Review. Maxim Antonenko, Olexandr Nikolaychuk, translators. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
  9. ^ Lambert, Terry (December 19, 2016). "Here's what it was like to work on the original iPhone, codenamed 'Project Purple'". Business Insider. Retrieved March 4, 2019.
  10. ^ Matte, Daniel (April 10, 2017). "Open-Source Clues to Google's Mysterious Fuchsia OS". IEEE Spectrum. IEEE. Retrieved March 4, 2019.
  11. ^ Cite error: The named reference Inside the JavaOS was invoked but never defined (see the help page).