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.

To date, no copies of this have surfaced.

ToDo - pivot to Mach, relationship to WorkPlace OS

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.