Taligent

Taligent (a portmanteau of Talent and Intelligent) was the name of an object-oriented operating system, and the company dedicated to producing it. Initially started as a project within Apple to provide a replacement for the Mac OS, it was later spun off into a joint venture with IBM as part of the AIM alliance, with the purpose of building a competing platform to Microsoft Cairo and NeXTSTEP.

The development process never worked, and Taligent is often cited as an example of a project death march. Apple pulled out of the project in 1995 before the code had been delivered, and went on to start the Copland project to replace it. Copland quickly proved even more disastrous than Taligent, while IBM finally delivered a working version known as CommonPoint but it saw little use and quickly disappeared from IBM's catalogs. Taligent was officially dissolved in January 1998.

Pink and Blue

What would eventually become Taligent started in a roundabout way in 1988. After Apple Computer's release of System 6 that year, key engineers met to decide the future direction of the System software. Ideas were written down on index cards and pinned to the wall. Ideas that were simple and could be included in a new version of the existing software were written on blue colored cards, those that were more advanced or took longer to implement were written on pink cards, and "far out" ideas on red cards.