This particular document is mainly about how to use C++ carefully, and much of the advice is surprisingly pertinent and still in use today. This document doesn

This particular document is mainly about how to use C++ carefully, and much of the advice is surprisingly pertinent and still in use today. This document doesn't convey what was unique about Taligent: it pushed one of the earliest open-doc application models, where a document could be composed of components unknown to the application because they came with all the code necessary to edit and manipulate it. It also pushed Apple's Copland team into a HAL that helped the transitions to PowerPC and Objective-C, fwiw. Unfortunately, internet MIME types did a much better job of creating open standards, and by 1996 Java was promising to run code in browsers. NT was clearly going to survive any IBM alternatives, and MS was playing frenemy with Sun/JavaSoft to keep Solaris as a headache for IBM. It's not clear Taligent was ever intended by its funders as anything other than a bargaining chip, against MS and Copland tech leads.