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Pink / Taligent / TalOS

uridium

Well-known member
Does anyone know of any Pink distribution media? I've had fun over the years exploring OS/2 Warp Connect (Taligent with OS/2 personality), and have messed around with Copland (..and crashed a lot). I've never seen a dump of Pink before apple went off and joined the AIM alliance that spun out to the Taligent collective. I've found bits and screenshots of Pink and bits for the Jaguar systems. I'd love to explore Pink if anyone knows of an archive? I think it's something that definitely ought be preserved.

Thanks in advance.
 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
Does anyone know of any Pink distribution media? I've had fun over the years exploring OS/2 Warp Connect (Taligent with OS/2 personality), and have messed around with Copland (..and crashed a lot). I've never seen a dump of Pink before apple went off and joined the AIM alliance that spun out to the Taligent collective. I've found bits and screenshots of Pink and bits for the Jaguar systems. I'd love to explore Pink if anyone knows of an archive? I think it's something that definitely ought be preserved.

Thanks in advance.

I’d be interested in seeing screenshots.

Sadly, I think Pink likely never got out of the idea stage. Every developer inside Apple at the time was likely thrown into trying to get Copland working.
 

uridium

Well-known member
Hi MrF,

From what I've read was that Pink came first. It was running at apple and was quite popular around the labs. This was pre-aim alliance so I'm guessing it was potentially even on commodity mac hardware. The whole point of Taligent as I understand it from Apple's perspective was to get Pink ported and running on the Workspace/Taligent/TalOS kernel.

I've a few screen shots..
 

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uridium

Well-known member
Copland came much later after the Taligent fallout and it was absorbed back into IBM. .. from what I've researched over the years.
 

Daniël

Well-known member
Copland came much later after the Taligent fallout and it was absorbed back into IBM. .. from what I've researched over the years.

They're fairly intertwined. Copland effectively was born out of work initially done for Pink/Taligent. There was some overlap from when Copland started and Apple pulled out of Taligent between 1993-1995 (coinciding with the architecture switch from 68k to PPC) it seems, if Wikipedia has got its sources right.

It's interesting to look back at the OS struggle Apple suffered through, badly wanting to shed its legacy code dragging it down, but failing to find a suitable replacement, with Taligent, Copland and to some extent A/UX never managing to step up to the plate. I also find the idea that Apple seriously considered licensing the Windows NT kernel fascinating; Sometimes I wonder if Bootcamp could have arrived a decade earlier if they did, or at least joined the PReP PPC platform.
 

slomacuser

Well-known member
Hi MrF,

From what I've read was that Pink came first. It was running at apple and was quite popular around the labs. This was pre-aim alliance so I'm guessing it was potentially even on commodity mac hardware. The whole point of Taligent as I understand it from Apple's perspective was to get Pink ported and running on the Workspace/Taligent/TalOS kernel.

I've a few screen shots..
Interesting screenshot, neither I saw any before ... do you have more? Where did you got them from?
 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
Hi MrF,

From what I've read was that Pink came first. It was running at apple and was quite popular around the labs. This was pre-aim alliance so I'm guessing it was potentially even on commodity mac hardware. The whole point of Taligent as I understand it from Apple's perspective was to get Pink ported and running on the Workspace/Taligent/TalOS kernel.

I've a few screen shots..

Very interesting screenshot. Thanks for sharing. Like @slomacuser I’d love to see more.

Looks like a blend of BeOS, Copland, OS/2, and maybe even NeXTStep (graphically that is). If they had pulled off making it, I wonder where we’d be today.
 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
They're fairly intertwined. Copland effectively was born out of work initially done for Pink/Taligent. There was some overlap from when Copland started and Apple pulled out of Taligent between 1993-1995 (coinciding with the architecture switch from 68k to PPC) it seems, if Wikipedia has got its sources right.

It's interesting to look back at the OS struggle Apple suffered through, badly wanting to shed its legacy code dragging it down, but failing to find a suitable replacement, with Taligent, Copland and to some extent A/UX never managing to step up to the plate. I also find the idea that Apple seriously considered licensing the Windows NT kernel fascinating; Sometimes I wonder if Bootcamp could have arrived a decade earlier if they did, or at least joined the PReP PPC platform.

I think there was nothing really wrong with the NT kernel, and Apple could easily have worked with Microsoft on it. However, Microsoft might have been hesitant, because of what happened between IBM and Microsoft just before (with OS/2).

In some ways I still wonder if Apple’s attempt at Linux on PPC (with MkLinux) was an early effort to create an OS X - like OS based on the Linux kernel (instead of OS X based on Darwin). Basically, an A/UX with Linux instead of the expensive to license UNIX. That would have been really interesting to see play out.
 

uridium

Well-known member
Hi Guys,

This is something I've been researching on and off for a few years. Much as I can tell from a few sites and books:

1) Pink prototypes were running around the apple labs for a while and people seemed excited with it and developed experimental software for it. ~1988/1989 timeframe.
2) Taligent and AIM was formed with the idea of a common core O/S with sub-system service personalities and AIX, OS/2 and Pink were to be ported "to" it .. so Pink existed in some prototype form already.
3) Originally the m88k RISC processor was selected, and they were the second signup to Open88 along with DataGeneral (AViiON/CLARiiON's actually shipped) for the Jaguar system which eventually used PPC.
4) Taligent suffered from feature creep badly (!), was abandoned and the remains absorbed into IBM.
5) The compilers for TalOS were split off to form IBM's XL/ VisualAge suites (C, C++, COBOL, Smalltalk, Fortran, ..$others) which is still sold today.
6) The only TalOS that seemed to shipped in any form was branded "OS/2 Warp Connect" which if I understand this correctly is TalOS + everything except connectivity + OS/2 front end to run on ppc 603e IBM 850 workstations (My old one ended up with Obs .. Hi Obs 🕺).

The image and some of the links that've had a nugget or two:

Roughly Drafted
Apple Gazette
Stardock
icad
LEM

I'm just really curious and wonder if anyone has an archive of it from the Apple days?
 

tcole

Well-known member
Those links are interesting. That Taligent screenshot immediately made me think of BeOS. Then I looked at the Taligent Wikipedia page and found this quote:

"The founding lead engineer of Pink, Erich Ringewald, departed Apple in 1990 to become the lead software architect at Be Inc. and design the new BeOS."
 

uridium

Well-known member
@tcole:

I am not surprised. Didn't know that. I spent a lot of time on The BeOS back in the day. I still feel it would've been a great choice. So many "What-if's"
 

CC_333

Well-known member
BeOS is my favorite defunct OS. Such potential.
Haiku exists as a modern OS with a recreation of BeOS' UI. Although it's not 100% the same, it strives to be at least moderately source and binary compatible with the newest public release of BeOS.

c
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
Haiku is a nice effort, but it just isn't the same. There was something magical about BeOS, especially its multi-processing capability on the hardware of its time. I loved the GUI, too. Especially their icon aesthetics.
 

Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
Not to be a downer, but personally I lump BeOS into roughly the same category as things like OS/2 or, (controversial!), AmigaOS; they were neat at the time but you kinda had to be there.

The only TalOS that seemed to shipped in any form was branded "OS/2 Warp Connect" which if I understand this correctly is TalOS + everything except connectivity + OS/2 front end to run on ppc 603e IBM 850 workstations

Technically the PPC version wasn't *branded* "Warp Connect", or at least wasn't intentionally called that, because the whole point of Warp "Connect" verses the original OS/2 Warp was it came with a bunch of additional network services (which the PPC version lacked entirely). It just so happened they harvested the same wallpapers bundled with the PC version when they panickly slapped together the one version that made it out. :(
 

mihai

Member
The original source of the Taligent screenshot appears to be the portfolio of Robin Silberling, a designer on the project. Her portfolio has a few more images -- it's no longer up but archive.org has a copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20070519194402/http://robinnet.net/resume/Robin_portfolio_Taligent.htm

There are also a few screenshots of later vintage scattered throughout the Taligent User Interface Guidelines docs, e.g. at https://root.cern.ch/TaligentDocs/TaligentOnline/DocumentRoot/1.0/Docs/books/HI/HI_41.html#HEADING70
 
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