Apple-IBM alliance

In 1991, Apple and IBM agreed to do the following:

1. To develop the PowerPC, a single-chip version of IBM's POWER architecture, with IBM and Motorola.

2. To better integrate Macs into IBM enterprise networks.

3. To develop PowerOpen, an industry standard operating system that runs AIX and Mac applications on the PowerPC.

4. To form Taligent to develop and license an object-oriented operating system for the PowerPC, Motorola 68xxx and Intel x86 families with compatibility with AIX, OS/2 and System 7.

5. To form Kaleida Labs to develop and license multimedia software, tools and scripting languages for a diverse variety of computers and consumer electronic gear.

The Results

1. The PowerPC was the major outcome of the alliance, being widely used as the CPU for the Macintosh and certain IBM RS/6000 models.

2. A bit more network integration took place. IBM routers could optionally run Apple protocols to connect to Apple networks, and a Macintosh Token Ring adapter was developed.

3. PowerOpen never happened, and the PowerOpen Association was disbanded. IBM's AIX remained as the Unix for IBM, and Mac OS X (Unix) later became the OS for the Mac.

4. The Taligent OS never came to fruition. Taligent did deliver its CommonPoint application frameworks and development tools and eventually became part of IBM.

5. Kaleida introduced its ScriptX multimedia technology in 1995. It moved into Apple's Multimedia Group when Kaleida closed its doors later in the year.