After furious internal debates in the late 1980s, a new project, code-named "Pink," emerged. It was called Pink because, at a meeting in
1988, key Apple engineers and managers settled on a direction for the company by
jotting down ideas on index cards and pinning the cards to the wall in two
groups: blue cards, representing technologies that could be supported as
extensions to the current system software for Macintosh" computers, and pink
cards, representing technologies for a future dream system. The technologies
listed on the blue cards eventually formed the core of System 7, Apple's current
system software. The pink cards listed precursors of Taligent's object-oriented
system software.
IBM's involvement with objects also extended back to the early 1980s and a series
of pioneering projects that were incorporated into software for System/38(tm) and
eventually the AS/400®, one of IBM's most important hardware platforms.
Projects in the late 1980s included work with the object-oriented programming
language Smalltalk, joint research with the company Metaphor/Patriot Partners,
and cross-platform standards like the System Object Model (SOM) and Distributed
System Object Model (DSOM).
Apple and IBM joined forces to form Taligent because they shared an interest in
catalyzing the development of a new generation of applications, based on
object-oriented technology, that would work the same way across an entire
organization, regardless of the underlying hardware platforms. In early 1994
Hewlett-Packard decided that it could also benefit from this approach and became
Taligent's third major investor and partner. Hewlett-Packard had also undertaken
pioneering work in object-oriented technology throughout the 1980s. This included
the development of the NewWave® operating environment and user interface;
cofounding the Object Management Group, an important standards organization for
the industry; early adoption of C++ for use with the SoftBench(tm) development
environment; and, by the 1990s, the release of HP® Distributed Smalltalk. As
it also does for Apple and IBM, the Taligent® approach fits naturally with
Hewlett-Packard's goals in terms of both technology and marketing.
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