Taligent

Taligent was an American corporation, founded as a joint venture, between Apple Computer, Inc., IBM Corporation, and later, Hewlett-Packard, in March 1992.

The founding intention was take advanced, object-oriented software technology, developed as part of Apple's ill-fated "Pink" team, that was ostensibly developing a replacement for the legacy Mac OS, and bring it to a wider market.

Initial Product

The company initially sought to release a new operating system (TalOS - variously, Taligent Object System/Taligent Object Services), and associated application development environment (Taligent Application Environment/TalAE), that would have been based on a brand-new, proprietary microkernel, named Opus (or, Opus/2). It is known, that engineers were working on developing abstractions, around 1991-1992, for this kernel, that was alluded to, in unpublished, internal reports, that were mentioned as references, in the March 1995 Mach paper.

To date, no copies of this have surfaced.

Mach Research

In March 1995, a paper was published, detailing the ambitions of Taligent's engineers, in creating new, object-oriented C++ wrappers, for Mach 3 kernel APIs, presumably to replace their older wrappers, for the proprietary Opus/2 microkernel. It is unknown, if this work was later intended to inform any potential port to IBM's grand WorkPlace OS initiative, or if it was simply a way of adapting to the trend of OS developers evaluating Mach, as a "wave of the future" technology.

CommonPoint

ToDo - Relationship to IBM VisualAge, Open Class Libraries, OpenDoc, HP compilers/ABI, products for AIX, and OS/2, DCE, documentation, PinkMake ToDo - Transition, from OS, to application suite/operating environment

CommonPoint, on AIX

The CommonPoint Application System, and associated development tools, were primarily developed, to run on AIX, and ported to other platforms. Very few copies of any versions are known to be available, presumably due to their high IBM-recommended prices.

CommonPoint for AIX Commemorative CDs

The Computer History Museum, in California, USA has a commemorative plaque, seemingly made from a wooden base, wrapped in a metal shell, holding standard jewel CD cases, containing CDs, with retail screen-printing.

The online description claims, that they were issued, for the shipment of CommonPoint(TM) application system, Version 1.0 for AIX, and cpConstructor(TM), Version 1.0 for AIX, but the only official photograph is low-resolution, and does not show both discs. Additionally, it is unknown if these discs actually contain the software, as the museum is presumably unwilling to extract them, from their mount, to examine their contents.

It is rumoured, that the discs may actually be blank, although without access to the physical artefact, and the permission of the Computer History Museum, it is difficult to determine the veracity of this claim.

The Power of Frameworks Book

As part of an initiative, to raise mindshare, and awareness of the CommonPoint products, Taligent released a book (ISBN 0-201-48348-3), that included a CD-ROM, and discussed the development of a simple spreadsheet application, for Windows, and OS/2, as well as a version, that was designed for the CommonPoint APIs.

Used copies of the book, have been found, on eBay, and online stores, of charitable organisations, and the text has been uploaded to the Internet Archive - but, to date, no copies of the contents of the CD have been recovered.

Taligent Places for Project Teams

One of the few mass-market products, that was shipped, by Taligent, was "Places for Project Teams". This was a companion application, to Lotus Notes, for Windows, developed using Delphi, and ActiveX/OLE components (as opposed to the company's own, proprietary framework technology), that would have been sold, for a relatively-low price of $49 per-user (or, $390, for a pack of 10 licenses).

A 30-day trial copy of version 1.0, for Windows was recovered, from the WayBack Machine, and republished, as an Internet Archive artefact, recently. This is confirmed to run, on Windows Server 2003, and Windows NT 4.0, with a 4.x-series version of Lotus Notes.

Legacy

Being developed after the failure of CommonPoint, the developers of Symbian OS took inspiration from Taligent's coding style conventions, in designing their API surface, to have a consistent naming scheme (e.g. using "M", for Mix-in classes, and prefixing Type classes, with "T", amongst other conventions), and several developers from Taligent, later went to work for Symbian, in both its guise as a limited company, and as a non-profit foundation.

Taligent technology was also harvested, to produce the popular International Components for Unicode, which was later adopted by Apple, in a twist of fate, for MacOS/iOS, as well as Google, for Android, and most Linux distributions, and several packages of Sun/Oracle's Java APIs were either developed directly, by Taligent engineers, or were ported, and adapted, from code developed for Taligent products.

It could be argued, that the Genode project, is a spiritual successor, to CommonPoint, in trying to define a framework, for a microkernel-agnostic operating system, although its developers have not publicly stated this being one of their intentions.

Additional References

• Design Goals of Object-Oriented Wrappers for the Mach Microkernel - Stephen Kurtzman, and Kayshav Dattatri, for Taligent, Inc. (IEEE - Paywall Warning)
• Symbian OS C++ for Mobile Phones, Volume 3 : Application Development for Symbian OS v9 - Richard Harrison, and Mark Shackman (Google Books Preview)