13 May
2013
13 May
'13
9:03 p.m.
On May 13, 2013, at 5:57 PM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
On 5/13/13 3:32 PM, Guy Sotomayor wrote:
Oh, they were seriously paranoid about the source and ideas. I remember that I was
presenting at
the 3rd Mach USENIX symposium and they were in the audience. When I got back home I got
dressed
down by my division President (at IBM that's *huge* deal). I had no idea what was
going on. I talked
to the IBM Fellow who was in charge of the project about this since he was in the audience
during my talk.
He took care of it (no secrets had been disclosed...he would have dealt with me at the
conference if I had).
But after that I had no contact with the Taligent folks (much to my relief). They were a
pain to deal with.
TTFN - Guy
I remember a friend of mine at IBM took the
Taligent source code (which was all C++) and ran it
through a program he wrote to graph the object relationships.
At least IBM got to see it. Internally NO ONE outside of the Pink group was allowed to
look at it.
We had two people who were cleared to look at it (Phil Goldman, and Erich Ringwald who
both were
original members of the Pink microkernel team that came to RISC Products) and they had to
go over
there in a locked room with no network and no removable storage on the machines. Now,
imagine trying
to write drivers when you can't look at the kernel code, and there is no published
driver API.
Fortunately, they went away to Taligent before the our prototype was ready so I worked on
other things
besides drivers for them. By that point, people inside Apple were glad to be rid of them.