Taligent

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Taligent was an American corporation, initially founded as a joint venture, between Apple Computer, Inc., and IBM Corporation, in March 1992, with Hewlett-Packard (HP) later becoming involved, in 1994.

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.

HP Involvement

HP was not initially one of the founding partners, but announced their plan to join, in January 1994, and purchased a 15% stake in the organisation, with a view to using Taligent's technology, in HP-UX.

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that engineers were working on developing abstractions, around 1991-1992, for this kernel, that was alluded to, in unpublished, internal reports, that were mentioned as references, in the March 1995 Mach paper.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.

C++ Compiler Technology ("CompTech")

According to a blog post, by Rys McCusker, the name "CompTech" refers to the team, responsible for developing, and maintaining the compiler products, rather than the compiler itself, and there was a presumably-abandoned plan, to port Apple's experimental Dylan language compiler, and runtime, to the nascent TalOS.

It is claimed, on Wikipedia, that HP licensed, and released certain Taligent C++ compiler technology, as part of their ANSI C++ compiler, aCC/aC++, in addition to "some graphics libraries", and GDB source code, released as part of Apple Darwin mentions a shared Taligent, and HP-UX runtime ABI specification.

It has also been revealed, in public defect reports, that earlier versions of the HP aC++ Compiler have been used, to compile Taligent-supplied source code.

CommonPoint

CommonPoint was a rebranding, of the development tools, and application runtime environment, as it moved away from being an integrated operating system, wholly-developed by Taligent, to an environment that ran on top of third-party operating systems.

ToDo - Relationship to IBM VisualAge C++ 3.5/4.0, Open Class Libraries, OpenDoc, HP compilers/ABI, products for AIX, and OS/2, DCE, documentation, PinkMake

Due to delays, and quality issues, with some of Taligent's own tooling, and HP's SoftBench 3.0, the TakeFive Sniff+ development tools were licensed, and bundled with early versions of the Taligent Application Environment product, as an emergency replacement.

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 International Classes

The International Classes were jointly-copyrighted, by Taligent, and IBM, and have been used in several third-party products, developed for non-CommonPoint platforms. iPlanet Directory Server (which was since rebranded, several times), was known to be one of these.

Taligent Places for Project Teams

Lotus Notes Log Image 32.png

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.

Taligent WebRunner

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.

Some of the Open Source mathematics library code (e.g. ExpTable, LogTablelD, and some mathematical function-related code, in various audio drivers), in Apple Darwin, for PowerPC is derived from code developed for CommonPoint.

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

Retrieved from "https://wiki.restless.systems/index.php?title=Taligent&oldid=687"