What (who) is TALOS - definition

Taligent Inc. (a portmanteau of "talent" and "intelligent") was an American software company. Based on the Pink object-oriented operating system conceived by Apple in 1988, Taligent Inc. was incorporated as an Apple/IBM partnership in 1992, and was dissolved into IBM in 1998.

In 1988, after launching System 6 and MultiFinder, Apple initiated the exploratory project named Pink to design the next generation of the classic Mac OS. Though diverging into a sprawling new dream system unrelated to Mac OS, Pink was wildly successful within Apple and a subject of industry hype without. In 1992, the new AIM alliance spawned an Apple/IBM partnership corporation named Taligent Inc., with the purpose of bringing Pink to market. In 1994, Hewlett-Packard joined the partnership with a 15% stake. After a two-year series of goal-shifting delays, Taligent OS was eventually canceled, but the CommonPoint application framework was launched in 1995 for AIX with a later beta for OS/2. CommonPoint had technological acclaim but an extremely complex learning curve, so sales were very low.

Taligent OS and CommonPoint mirrored the sprawling scope of IBM's complementary Workplace OS, in redundantly overlapping attempts to become the ultimate universal system to unify all of the world's computers and operating systems with a single microkernel. From 1993 to 1996, Taligent was seen as competing with Microsoft Cairo and NeXTSTEP, even though Taligent didn't ship a product until 1995 and Cairo never shipped at all. From 1994 to 1996, Apple floated the Copland operating system project intended to succeed System 7, but never had a modern OS sophisticated enough to run Taligent technology.

In 1995, Apple and HP withdrew from the Taligent partnership, licensed its technology, and left it as a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM. In January 1998, Taligent Inc. was finally dissolved into IBM. Taligent's legacy became the unbundling of CommonPoint's best compiler and application components and converting them into VisualAge C++ and the globally adopted Java Development Kit 1.1 (especially internationalization).

In 1996, Apple instead bought NeXT and began synthesizing the classic Mac OS with the NeXTSTEP operating system. Mac OS X was launched on March 24, 2001, as the future of the Macintosh and eventually the iPhone. In the late 2010s, some of Apple's personnel and design concepts from Pink and from Purple (the first iPhone's codename) would resurface and blend into Google's Fuchsia operating system.

Along with Workplace OS, Copland, and Cairo, Taligent is cited as a death march project of the 1990s, suffering from development hell as a result of feature creep and the second-system effect.