Taligent, RIP

This is the very first column I wrote for PC Plus, back in May of 1992. The PC had been going for just over a decade, and in the mid-80s had become almost useful, if you were prepared to meet it on its own terms.

But then some terrible things happened -- PC software became wildly over ambitious (remember dBase IV?) and with the arrival of the first version of Windows we lurched into the era of the flakey graphical user interface, teetering pretentiously atop a version of character-based DOS that really hadn't changed since the first PC. IBM and Microsoft had allied awkwardly in the mid-80s to address these problems with OS/2, but by 1990 that alliance had disintegrated.

Customers had to choose between OS/2 and Windows NT. I chose OS/2, and so had a personal interest in IBM's road map, which marched in the direction of a magical new operating system called Taligent. Now read on...

Future 01: Taligent][pcp][8 May 92][chb]

It was one of those formal dinners where the stiff suits from the heavier end of the industry talk about "issues" and "give you their perspective on SAA" without managing to say very much. Not very promising during the aperitif phase, but things began to look up at the dinner table. Mercifully the formal placing put me next to someone who didn't say "Not my product area -- you need to talk to ..." at every turn. He was a Brit, but based out in Austin, Texas. Someone who had ideas of his own and was only too happy to answer my questions directly as best he could. Surprisingly he worked for IBM, and had done for 21 years. And -- miracle upon miracle -- he turned out to be IBM's interface to the Taligent project.

Taligent, as everybody must know by now, is the spin-off company formed from the unholy alliance between Apple and IBM. I knew, of course, that Taligent was working on a new operating system -- object-oriented operating environment would be a better term -- based on a secret Apple project called Pink. Despite the storm of publicity surrounding the coming together of Apple and IBM, very little still is known about what Taligent is setting out to do, and how it's going to do it. The convergence of OS/2 and the Mac operating system? The death knell of Windows and NT? In a landscape of vapourware, Taligent is so far a distant will-o-the-wisp somewhere on the four year horizon.

What I hadn't appreciated was that Taligent is pretty well an independent force these days, with minimal interference from either Apple or IBM. People have been worrying about how on earth the two computer manufacturers, so antithetical in their approach, could possibly stay in bed together long enough to start a new family.

"We worried about that too," says IBMer Cliff Reeves. He was guarded about detail, but was able to put me in the general picture. "Apart from the question of temperament, the Apple people had some very firm technical ideas, some of them conflicting with ours." So rather than try to manage a mix of oil and water, IBM has agreed to leave well alone, at least as far as the user interface and the immediately underlying layers are concerned. IBM's chief contribution will go into the microkernel, the clockwork at the heart of the operating system.

Most of the Taligent programmers are Apple people. "And we've set it up in a way that makes the company very much their own. They have personal vested interest in how it pans out," says Reeves.

Widely tipped to head the project at its inception was David Liddle, ex-president of Metaphor, the object-oriented company IBM bought a couple of years ago. To everyone's puzzlement Liddle didn't get the job. Taligent was originally promoted as a fusion of Pink with the Metaphor work, but it seems clear now that the heritage from Metaphor will be minimal. Over the steak I probed Reeves on this point, hoping to draw him out on some of the finer points of Taligent. "David Liddle was a technical guy," says Reeves, "and there would have been friction if the Apple tecchies felt he was leaning on them too much."

The technical issue was another stumbling block. Metaphor's approach to o-o was "medium-grained", whereas Pink took the more purist "fine-grained" route, something, I was able to gather from Reeves, that will be carried over to Taligent.

"Granularity" refers to the size you choose to make your objects. If you think of a traditional desktop operating system running, say, a wordprocessor that is handling a document, the wordprocessor/document combination can loosely be thought of as a single very large object taking up the whole operating environment. On the other hand, a purist's object-oriented environment would do away with applications altogether, providing instead a kind of primordial soup of small, primitive, objects that can be fitted together on the fly to create working systems that emulate real-world activity. Between these two extremes lies a spectrum of granularity.

The thing about what we call a "software application" is that you climb inside it, and once there play by its rules. A multi-tasking operating system can switch applications, but you're still inside each one, so the whole system becomes highly modal. You're in Excel mode, or Ami Pro mode or whatever.... Medium-grain o-o systems retain something of this modality, although the enveloping environment can reach in to each application to carry out data transfers and other manipulations.

Hewlett-Packard's excellent NewWave 4.0 is about as good an example of medium-grain object orientation as you're likely to find on the open market today. It sits on top of Windows on top of DOS, so cruelly you could call it a kludge upon a kludge upon a kludge. But it works surprisingly well, wrapping together applications and data and setting them out on a Mac-like desktop that, unlike Windows, allows folders within folders. A key difference from the Mac is that the icons representing the objects are isolated from the filing system, so that you never have to bother about which drive and what directory your apps or data are in. Another feature that lifts it out of the earthbound domain of Windows, the Mac and OS/2, is NewWave's provision for a unifying processing language. The Agent Language, as H-P calls it, can manipulate objects on the desktop and glue them together, giving you to opportunity to build workflow systems that are more than just a collection of applications.

NewWave offers a glimpse of what Taligent will be pitching for. Four years is a very long time in this business, and the new round of technology that includes NT and SunSoft's Solaris should be well in place by then. But Cliff Reeves doesn't think Taligent will have missed its window of opportunity because it will be a revolution. Not, like the Microsoft formula, the same as before but more so. Instead a completely fresh start, designed to pull in the great mass of people who so far have been put off by the sheer computerness of computers.

You've heard all this before, of course -- back in 1984 Steve Jobs called the Mac "the computer for the rest of us". Just over ten years after the Mac, Taligent will be going for a second bite at this particular cherry. Maybe this time we really will escape from the stiff suits and their "SAA perspectives"...