Taligent

» see taligent.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

taligent lived and died before i was online. i had a 486 in ankara without a modem, and the ibm brand meant desktops and thinkpads to me, not object-oriented operating-system research. taligent was one of those pre-web joint ventures whose entire mission was internal to the industry, never facing any consumer who might have used it.

it started march 2 1992 as an apple and ibm corporation, spun out from the apple pink project that had been running since 1988. the working thesis was that unix and the mac os were dead ends and that the next platform would be a purely object-oriented operating system rebuilt from scratch. hewlett-packard bought in january 1994 with fifteen percent of the equity, adding a third pc-hardware parent to a project that already had two.

what the market got was commonpoint. an application framework for aix released july 28 1995. it ran on top of an existing operating system rather than replacing one, because talos, the native object-oriented os originally promised, had been quietly cancelled in may that year. apple and hp withdrew from the joint venture five months later on december 19 1995. ibm dissolved the rest of taligent into its santa teresa laboratory in january 1998 with a final headcount cut of one hundred ninety engineers.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

the 1992 press announcement was one of the loudest of the decade for a company that had not shipped anything. apple was betting its future on it and ibm was betting on the alliance. hp joined two years later so it would not be left out. every industry publication ran a taligent explainer with cartoons of an object-oriented world where drag-and-drop meant something semantic instead of visual. joe guglielmi came from motorola to run it and told the trade press the product would ship in 1995. eventually one product did ship in 1995, but it was not the one anyone had promised.

~ the fall ~

by early 1995 the internal talos codebase was too far behind schedule to be salvageable. management scaled back the ambition repeatedly through the first half of the year. talos was cancelled in may and commonpoint shipped in july as a c++ application framework layered on aix and os/2 rather than a standalone platform. guglielmi resigned in september. apple was out and hp was out. debbie coutant took over in december as a caretaker while ibm negotiated the withdrawal terms and cut about two hundred of the three hundred seventy-five staff on her first day.

~ the long tail ~

the thing that survived taligent was not the framework. it was the international components for unicode work that turned into what became icu, and the compiler pieces that ended up inside visualage c++. some of the object-modeling patterns showed up later as design references inside the java development kit 1.1. the taligent brand was gone by 1998 but you can still find its fingerprints in icu and in the way early java handled locales. that is a strange kind of afterlife for a project whose entire pitch was that it would replace unix and mac os. it did not replace them. it wrote helper libraries for the platforms that killed it.

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