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The story
Founded by Apple Inc. in 1992.1
Development
The history of Pink and Taligent from 1988 to 1998 reflects early admiration and high expectations for both the team and its system. In retrospect, the effort is often characterized by development hell, second-system effects, internal expansion, secrecy, and ultimately vaporware.
Pink team
Apple's cofounders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs had departed the company in 1985. This vacuum of entrepreneurial leadership created a tendency to promote low-level engineers up to management and allowed increasingly redundant groups of engineers to compete and co-lead by consensus, and to manifest their own bottom-up corporate culture. In 1988, Apple released System 6, a major release of the flagship Macintosh operating system, to a lackluster reception. The system's architectural limits, set forth by the tight hardware constraints of its original 1984 release, now demanded increasingly ingenious workarounds for incremental gains such as MultiFinder's cooperative multitasking, while still lacking memory protection and virtual memory. Having committed these engineering triumphs which were often blunted within such a notoriously fragile operating system, a restless group of accomplished senior engineers were nicknamed 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 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 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 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 the nondescript Bubb Road warehouse which was already occupied by the secretly sophisticated Newton project. Pink briefly garnered an additional code name, "Defiant".
Pink system
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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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.
Read the full text
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 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 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 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 the first impression of this sophisticated prototype in 1991:
AIM alliance
On October 2, 1991, the historic AIM alliance was formed and announced by Apple, IBM, and Motorola. It was conceived to cross-pollinate Apple's personal products and IBM's enterprise products, to better confront Microsoft's monopoly, and to design a new grandly unified platform for the computing industry. This alliance spun off two partner corporations: Kaleida Labs to develop multimedia software, and Taligent Inc. to bring Pink to market sometime in the mid-90s.
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 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 various complexities and challenges in 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 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.
Taligent Inc.
On March 2, 1992, Taligent Inc. 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 was to bring Pink to market.
Culture and purpose
Enthusiastically dismissing industry skepticism, he said Taligent would form its own corporate culture, independent of the established cultures and potential failures of its two founding investors and future customers, Apple and IBM. The two were recent allies carrying five other joint initiatives, and a deep rivalry of more than a decade. Dr. Dobb's Journal reflected, "It was fairly surreal for the Apple and IBM employees who went to Taligent and found themselves working for bosses still loyal to the opposition. Not a typical Silicon Valley career move, maybe, but perhaps a portent of other weird twists to come. Ignoring the politics as much as possible, the Taligent programmers buckled down and wrote a lotta lines of code." Commenting on the corporate culture shock of combining free-spirited Apple and formal IBM personnel, Fortune compared the company's cultural engineering challenge as possibly exceeding its software engineering challenge. The openminded but sensible CEO reined it in, saying, "I'm tired of [Apple] folklore... I want some data." Comparing the eager startup Taligent to its billion dollar investors, a leader at Kaleida said "The culture of IBM and Apple is largely about getting more benefits, perks, larger offices, fancier computers, and more employees". Dr. Dobb's Journal would describe the increased abstraction in corporate culture resulting from Hewlett-Packard's upcoming 1994 addition to the partnership: "Now you could be [a former] Apple programmer working for [a former] IBM boss who reported [externally] to HP. Or some combination thereof. Twisteder and twisteder."
Apple and IBM did share a progressive culture of object orientation, as seen in their deep portfolios since 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 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 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 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, 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 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.
Technology
The Pink operating system is now formally named Taligent Object Services (TOS or TalOS) whether hosted natively on its microkernel or non-natively on 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 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 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 the state of Taligent, saying the company and its platform had the broad optimistic support of Borland, WordPerfect, and Novell. Borland CEO Philippe Kahn said "Technically, [Pink] is brilliant, and Taligent is running much faster than I expected." A software venture capitalist expected new entrepreneurs to appreciate the platform's newness and lack of legacy baggage, and the industry expected Apple loyalists to embrace a new culture. Regardless of genuine merit, many in the industry reportedly expected Taligent's success to depend upon wounding Microsoft's monopoly. On January 18, InfoWorld reported, "Taligent draws rave reviews from software developers".
By April 1993, Taligent, Inc. had grown to about 260 employees, mostly from Apple or "some other loose Silicon Valley culture". MacWEEK reported that 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.
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 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 was an IBM RS/6000 model 250 with a PowerPC 601 CPU running AIX, building TalOS natively for the 68k Macintosh.
HP, CommonPoint beta
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 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 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."
From Wikipedia’s article on Taligent, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4