About two dozen intrepid souls formed the original skunkworks team charged with developing what became known in industry lore as "Pink." This effort centered on a combination of new ideas that we thought could change the nature of software development. These included object-oriented toolkits; compound documents; pervasive networking and collaboration; innovative user interfaces; advanced graphics, multimedia, text, and imaging; multilingual text capabilities; tools optimized for iterative development; and a design center based on a modern operating system (OS) foundation. Pervading everything was the principle that the entire programming model, as well as the implementation of the system itself, would be fully object oriented and designed around the concept of frameworks: customizable and extensible object designs for all aspects of the system and the applications built with it.
Over time, the project was nurtured and grew at Apple and eventually attracted the attention of IBM, which had strong object-oriented technology interests and history of its own. In early 1992, the two companies created Taligent, Inc., a new company devoted to bringing Pink to market. IBM brought several key elements to the venture: a strong commitment to the enterprise customer, a wealth of OS and object technologies, and multiple hardware and software platforms with which to leverage Taligent's capabilities.
Not long after Taligent was formed, Hewlett-Packard became interested in the undertaking for many of the same reasons. In early 1994, Hewlett-Packard became the third investor in Taligent and provided a further infusion of technology and expertise, particularly in the areas of distributed computing, object-oriented environments, and enterprise solutions.
Taligent started with 170 employees and has since grown to a 400-person company. A major milestone was achieved in the summer of 1994 when we shipped our initial developer release of the CommonPoint application system. In so doing, we expanded our partnership to include those first brave developers who would help us refine our fledgling system into a real product. As I write this in early 1995, we are well on our way to fulfilling our original commitment to deliver the first product release of the CommonPoint system by the mid-1990s and to begin what we hope will be a generational change for our industry.
Mike Potel