Editing Taligent (section)

==== Pink team ====
{{quote box
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| text = The pace of addition [to System 6 and 7] was staggering, so much so that Apple never had time to recode the low-level OS and fix some of its shortcomings. By 1990, these shortcomings, including no preemptive multitasking and no memory protection for applications, began to affect the quality of the product. The Mac was the easiest computer to use but also one of the most fragile.
| author = Tom Saulpaugh in 1999, Macintosh system software engineer from June 1985, co-architect of [[Copland (operating system)|Copland]] and [[JavaOS]]<ref name="Inside the JavaOS">{{cite book |last1=Saulpaugh |first1=Tom |last2=Mirho |first2=Charles |date=January 1999 |title=Inside the JavaOS Operating System |series=Java series |publisher=Addison-Wesley |isbn=0-201-18393-5 |oclc=924842439 |page=XI}}</ref>
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Apple's cofounders [[Steve Wozniak]] and [[Steve Jobs]] had departed the company in 1985. This vacuum of entrepreneurial leadership created a tendency to promote low-level engineers up to management and allowed increasingly redundant groups of engineers to compete and co-lead by consensus, and to manifest their own bottom-up corporate culture. In 1988, Apple released [[System 6]], a major release of the flagship Macintosh operating system, to a [[System 6#Reception|lackluster reception]]. The system's architectural limits, set forth by the tight hardware constraints of its [[Macintosh 128k|original 1984 release]], now demanded increasingly ingenious workarounds for incremental gains such as [[MultiFinder]]'s [[cooperative multitasking]], while still lacking [[memory protection]] and [[virtual memory]]. Having committed these engineering triumphs which were often blunted within such a notoriously fragile operating system,<ref name="Inside the JavaOS"/> a restless group of accomplished senior engineers were nicknamed the Gang of Five: Erich Ringewald, David Goldsmith,{{efn|name="n2"}} Bayles Holt, Gene Pope, and Gerard Schutten. The Gang gave an ultimatum that they should either be allowed to break from their disliked management and take the entrepreneurial and engineering risks needed to develop the next generation of the Macintosh operating system, or else leave the company.<ref name="Apple: The Inside Story"/>{{rp|96}}<ref name="Apple's First Stab"/>

In March 1988,{{efn|name="n1"}}<ref name="Taligent's Guide"/>{{rp|XXIII-XXIV}} the Gang, their management, and software manager and future Taligent CTO Mike Potel, met at the Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa. To roadmap the future of the operating system and thus of the organizational chart, ideas were written on colored [[index card]]s and pinned to a wall. Ideas that were incremental updates to the existing system were written on blue colored cards, those that were more technologically advanced or long-term were written on pink cards, and yet more radical ideas were on red cards because they "would be pinker than Pink".<ref name="Apple: The Inside Story"/>{{rp|96–97}}<ref name="Inside Taligent Technology"/>{{rp|6}}<ref name="Apple's First Stab"/> The Blue group would receive the Gang's former management duo, along with incremental improvements in speed, RAM size, and hard drive size. Pink would receive the Gang, with Erich Ringewald as technical lead, plus preemptive multitasking and a componentized application design. Red would receive speech recognition and voice commands, thought to be as futuristic as the ''[[Star Trek]]'' science fiction series.<ref name="Apple: The Inside Story"/>{{rp|96–97}}

Erich Ringewald led the Gang of Five as the new Pink group, located one floor below the Apple software headquarters in the De Anza 3 building, to begin a feasibility study with a goal of product launch in two years. Remembering the small but powerful original Macintosh group, he maintained secrecy and avoided the micromanagement of neighboring senior executives, by immediately relocating his quintet off the main Apple campus. They used the nondescript Bubb Road warehouse which was already occupied by the secretly sophisticated [[Apple Newton|Newton]] project.<ref name="Apple: The Inside Story"/>{{rp|97–98}}<ref name="Apple's First Stab"/> Pink briefly garnered an additional code name, "Defiant".<ref name="Apple Confidential"/>{{rp|35}}