13 May
2013
13 May
'13
1:59 p.m.
On May 13, 2013, at 1:06 PM, madodel <madodel at ptdprolog.net> wrote:
OS/2 for the PPC wasn't written to run on just any PPC hardware. It was written to
run on the hardware that met the standard that IBM, Apple and Motorola setup, CHRP (for
Common Hardware Reference Platform). This was supposed to be the RISC platform that would
crush the Wintel monopoly. They created a whole new company named Taligent to work on the
object oriented operating system for this platform. Does anyone remember "Pink"
which was to be the base platform OS that could run multiple flavors of operating systems?
I don't think Apple ever released any hardware that met the standard and IBM only
released a couple of desktops and 2 models of Thinkpads. Apple abandoned the project and
eventually the PPC completely, then Motorola bailed on Taligent and finally IBM kicked a
very poor version of OS/2 for the Power PC out the door just to say they did and closed
the whole project down. Taligent was absorbed into IBM. Rumor was IBM sank over $500
million into the whole thing (hardware and software development), back when that was still
a lot of money. Supposedly some of the technology they developed for OS/2PPC was
incorporated into OS/2 Warp4, but by then (1996) IBM wasn't promoting its own
operating system any more and were discouraging new sales and encouraging existing OS/2
users to switch to NT.
Taligent was started by Apple and ran on 68K Macs. When IBM came to the party
a joint venture was formed (which resulted in the Taligent name). Pink was what it
was called prior to Taligent.
Taligent was never a big part of the OS/2 for PPC effort. Most of that work had begun
as the IBM Microkernel project. OS/2 for PPC as I recall used no Taligent code.
Taligent was to be part of the application framework. The microkernel used by Pink and
the object model were "toys". Much of the consternation over Taligent at IBM
was fighting
over trying to get fundamental issues addressed (which I won't go into here...it would
take
many hours to compose a sane account).
The rumor is false. IBM sank closer to $2Billion into the Microkernel project alone (ie
just SW).
TTFN - Guy