Chuck Michalik (IBM product manager for RS/6000 AIX - Austin) came to talk about the technology exchange agreements between Apple, IBM and Motorola. He is likable and disarming; he walked up to the overhead projector with two stacks of foils in hand. "Are there any Apple people in the audience here?" he asked. Three people raised their hands. "Any Motorola people?" Nobody answered. He surveyed the room carefully and asked "Are there any IBM lawyers present? No? Good, I'll use THIS stack."

The purpose of the Alliance is to produce a next-generation PC and operating system. Apple is already working on the OS (code-named "Pink"), and IBM is refining the RS/6000 RISC system for a single-chip implementation by Motorola.

A company has been formed to own the technology, which in turn is owned by IBM, Apple and Motorola. Taligent Corporation will sell back the rights to the hardware to the principals, and will also make chips available to outside manufacturers. When asked if IBM wasn't worried at the prospect of selling the same system as Apple, Chuck replied that IBM felt that there was plenty of opportunity for product differentiation.

Someone else asked the origin of the name "Taligent". Chuck laughed and said "Well, we took TALENT, we took INTELLIGENT, we removed NT and INTEL and got TALIGENT".

As for Pink, the operating system is supposed to be object oriented and is being written entirely in C++. Apple has a lot of design experience in object oriented systems, having done the original Lisa operating system in a proprietary object oriented variant of Pascal (called "Clascal").