What is Taligent? (Was: Re: IBM 850 - Open Firmware or not? and more on the ide byteswapgame...)

At 2:19 PM -0600 3/7/2000, David Monro wrote:
[...]

According to the PREP spec Solaris/PPC was also little-endian!
Presumably they decided PReP machines looked more like PCs than sparcs.
In which case the only OS that the PReP spec mentions which runs
big-endian is AIX. (What was Taligent - something from Apple maybe? The
name in mentioned in the spec, but all the slots in the tables under
that heading are blank, and so is the appendix for it :-))

<http://wais.sensei.com.au/macarc2/semper_fi/1995/9512/455-95dec22.txt>,
search for 'Taligent'

In short, Taligent/Pink was a 'next best thing' OS with the kind of cool
technologies that would make any developer's toes tingle with excitement.

I belive Taligent was actually an independant company, but I think it's
safe to say that there was quite a bit of involvement from both Apple and
IBM.


It's a shame that old dead OSes like Taligent and the like aren't put out
to pasture as opensource, if only so all the Linux/BSD/whatever kernel
hackers can have some sort of refrence as to what an OS that isn't *nix
looks like. Heaven forbid it might inspire some original innovation. ;)


Cheers - Tony :)


--
Tony Mantler         Renaissance Nerd Extraordinaire         eek@escape.ca
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada                       http://www.escape.ca/~eek


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