On Jan 5, 2020, at 12:56 AM, Jeffrey S. Worley via
cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Does Talingent Pink sound familiar? OS/2 was
ported to powerPC,
and so
was Netware iirc. The field was quite busy with hopeful Microsoft
killers. OS/2 was to be morphed into a cross-platform o/s, to wean
folks from dos/x86..... Then PPC kills the x86 and we all get a
decent
os. That was the plan anyway. I never saw OS2 for PPC or Netware
for
OS/2, thought I know both to have shipped.
Pink was the C++ operating system project at Apple that became
Taligent. I know a couple of people who did a developer kitchen for
Pink pre-Taligent, and I also know a number of folks who worked on
the Taligent system and tools?and have personally seen a demo of the
Taligent Application Environment running on AIX.
I?ve even seen a CD set for Taligent Application Environment (TalAE)
1.0 on AIX, and I have a beta developer and user documentation set.
Unfortunately my understanding is that the CD sets given to employees
to commemorate shipping TalAE were all *blank*?the rumor I?ve heard
is that IBM considered it too valuable to give them the actual
software that they had worked for years on. (Maybe there were tax
implications because of what IBM valued the license at, and the fact
that it would have to be considered compensation?)
Taligent itself was only one component of IBM?s Workplace/OS
strategy, which was a plan to rebase everything atop Mach so you
could run AIX and OS/2 and Taligent all at once on the same hardware
without quite using virtual machines for it all. The idea is that
Apple would do pretty much the same with Copland and Taligent atop
NuKernel rather than Mach.
It would be really great to actually get the shipping Taligent
environment and tools archived somewhere. While only bits and pieces
of it are still in use?for example, ICU?a lot of important and
influential work was done as part of the project. For example, the
design of most of the unit testing frameworks today actually comes
from *Taligent*, since Kent Beck wrote SUnit to re-create it in
Smalltalk, and JUnit and OCUnit were based on SUnit?s design and
everything else derived from JUnit?
No, you don't. The object model that they used was *seriously*
deranged. When I last looked at it there were >1200 objects and they
were so interdependent that it was nearly impossible to make a change
to one object without the change cascading across a large number of
objects. They were also proud of the fact that on average only 6
*instructions* would be executed between method invocations...so
performance sucked because you were just doing method calls.
Rather than having a standardized "size" method for an object they
actually had code in the object look at the new operator for the
object (e.g. the binary machine code) in order to determine its
size.
As I said, I have scars from my interactions with Taligent.
--
TTFN - Guy