Apple Open Collaboration Environment, or AOCE (sometimes OCE), was a collection of messaging-related technologies introduced for the Mac OS in the early 1990s. It included the PowerTalk mail engine, which was the primary client-side interface to the system; the PowerShare mail server for workgroup installations; and a number of additional technologies such as Open Directory, encryption and digital signature support. Original 1984 Mac OS desktop Current 2005 Mac OS X desktop Mac OS, which stands for Macintosh Operating System, is Apple Computer’s name for the first operating systems for Macintosh computers. ... In cryptography, encryption is the process of obscuring information to make it unreadable without special knowledge. ... Digital signature (or public key digital signature) is a type of method for authenticating digital information analogous to ordinary physical signatures on paper, but implemented using techniques from the field of public key cryptography. ...

AOCE/PowerTalk was heavily marketed between 1993 and 1995, but the hardware requirements meant that most users couldn't even install it, let alone use it. Developers were likewise stymied by the complex system, and by users who didn't seem to expect to have to pay for something that was otherwise intended to be "built in". In 1996 Apple Computer quietly dropped their efforts to market AOCE, and the project quickly disappeared. Apple Computer, Inc. ...

History

Development of AOCE started in 1989, largely the "pet project" of Gursharan Sidhu, engineering lead at Apple for LaserWriter, AppleShare and related networking products. At the time, during John Sculley's "don't bother me with technology" era, practically any mid-level manager could arrange to have projects funded. This was proven in this case by Sidhu, who was disrespected within Apple. The Apple LaserWriter was one of the first laser printers available to the mass market. ... The AppleShare protocol is a communications protocol from Apple Computer that allows client applications in a computer to exchange files with and request services from server programs in a computer network. ... The word networking can refer to: the activity of creating, expanding and maintaining networks such as: social networks business networks computer networks For other possible meanings, see network. ... John Sculley (born April 6, 1939) was a president of Pepsi Cola USA until he was named president and CEO of Apple Computer on April 8, 1983. ...

The problems

The project started by taking a "20,000 foot overview" of existing mail systems, and trying to find common concepts and problems. The key conclusion they came to was that e-mail systems were confused about their own purpose; their key task is to provide a mechanism for store-and-forward delivery of things to places, but existing systems invariably delivered e-mail to people. Compare this with the real-world postal service, which will deliver not only mail, but magazines, packages, large parcels, and even (in one example) building materials to a worksite.

They also found that existing e-mail systems shared a number of common problems. They tended to support plain text mail only, and rarely included any support for non-English characters. Support for mobile users was spotty at best, often relying on 3rd party "hacks" that were of dubious reliability. And they were all, without exception, based on a dedicated e-mail server that was typically complex to set up, and often "overkill" for small installations with only a few people in an office.

And finally none of the existing products could give the user what they really wanted: a single universal mailbox and a single universal address book. At the time savvy users would often have mailboxes on their corporate network, online services such as CompuServe or AppleLink, and perhaps a number of BBS systems as well. Each e-mail system used its own standards for collecting and storing information, forcing users to run multiple clients to access the different services. Although a single-mailbox system could be constructed by administrators with the use of e-mail gateways, these tended to be very expensive and technically challenging to maintain. An online service provider is an entity which provides a service online. ... CompuServe, or CIS for short, was the first major commercial online service in the US, dominating the field during the 1980s and remaining a major player through the mid-1990s when it was sidelined by the rise of GUI-based services such as America Online (AOL). ... AppleLink was the name of both Apple Computers online service for its users, and the client software used to access it. ... A bulletin board system or BBS is a computer system running software that allows users to dial into the system over a phone line and, using a terminal program, perform functions such as downloading software and data, uploading data, playing games, reading news, and exchanging messages with other users. ...

The solutions

AOCE aimed to fix all of these issues at the same time. At "one end" of the system, AOCE focused on the underlying delivery and addressing systems, generalizing the e-mail concept so the system could be used to deliver anything from e-mail to word processor documents to print jobs. Addressing was another issue the market was struggling with, so AOCE would offer a single universal addressing mechanism and address book, one that could support not only people's e-mail addresses, but the addresses of things like printers and fax machines as well.

Remote users would be supported by native AppleTalk Remote Access, Apple's "standard" solution for supporting the AppleTalk protocol over modems. The system understood that users were not always connected and delivery didn't have to happen until both the sender and recipient were online. Even on a LAN this would be valuable, as many people turn off their computers at night and the mail would have to wait until the next morning for delivery. For security over the potentially "open" phone lines, all communications could be secured using RSA encryption and digital signing, even on the local network. AppleTalk Remote Access, or ARA, was a protocol stack that allowed AppleTalk to be run over modems. ... AppleTalk is a suite of protocols developed by Apple Computer for computer networking. ... A modem (a portmanteau word constructed from modulator and demodulator) is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal (sound) to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. ... A local area network (LAN) is a computer network covering a local area, like a home, office or small group of buildings such as a college. ... In cryptography, RSA is an algorithm for public key encryption. ...

AOCE would normally run peer-to-peer, with user's mail being stored locally on their machine. This allowed them to go mobile, as well as allowing small networks to be set up for zero cost. Users would be able to send documents directly to other users simply by dropping the address on the document, or vice-versa, bypassing a "message" at all -- the document would arrive, by itself, in the other user's mailbox. Delivery of e-mail, or anything else for that matter, would be handled entirely by plug-ins, allowing the user to collect mail from all of their sources and collect it into their single inbox. An optional server could be installed for performance and maintenance needs for those sites that required it.

In other words, AOCE was suffering from the second-system effect, where engineers spend considerable time designing a system that does everything. Invariably these projects fail as the demands are not only incredibly difficult to meet, but often fail to meet real user needs. Often the ideas themselves are good, but buried inside unusable implementations. In computing, the Second-system effect or sometimes, more euphoniously, second-system syndrome is when one is designing the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful system, there is a tendency to become grandiose in ones success and design an elephantine feature-laden monstrosity. ...

By early 1993 the "client side" of AOCE was nearing completion. Apple started a pre-release marketing campaign, telling their larger customers and even 3rd party e-mail vendors that AOCE would soon arrive and change the market completely. The claim was that nothing else would be able to compete with its ease-of-use, power, and lack of maintenance overhead -- all hallmarks of "the Apple way".

AOCE was publicly released in September 1993, part of the System 7 Pro bundle that also included AppleScript utilities. AppleScript is a scripting language devised by Apple Computer, and built into Mac OS. More generally, AppleScript is the word used to designate the Mac OS scripting interface, which is meant to operate in parallel with the graphical user interface. ...

In-use

When the product finally shipped after years of hype, users were dismayed to find that there was basically no way they could install it. An install of the various client-side components required a machine with 2.5MB of RAM minimum, and really needed 4MB to run well. This was the maximum available RAM in many Mac systems of the era. Removing unneeded components did little to address this, and AOCE and the other Apple technology du jour, QuickDraw GX, typically could not be run together because of a lack of memory. While newer machines were able to run AOCE more comfortably, as an e-mail system intended to be run on diverse networks of non-homogeneous machines the requirements greatly impaired market acceptance. Simply downloading and installing separate stand-alone client applications for each mail system the user actually had would use considerably less disk space, and had no constant memory footprint. QuickDraw GX was a replacement for the QuickDraw graphics engine and Printing Manager, initially released in about January 1995. ...

It was equally clear that while PowerTalk was generally an interesting system, a combination of design features made it frustrating to use in the real world. For instance, the addressing system was so deeply embedded into the core of the system that simply typing in a new address was an ordeal. First the user had to click on a button, select the address type, type it in, and then finally click OK to have it appear in the message. Disk usage was also ridiculous; each message was stored as a separate file, requiring 1k or more of space in an era where 40MB and 80MB disks were still common. The result was that only a few hundred letters would be enough to fill the free space on the drive.

Another annoyance was due to the fact that the Mac OS did not require users to log in, and thus the system could not know who a user was. This meant that documents had to be delivered to a user's machine. This, obviously, did not work well in the case where the user had two or more machines, making the concept of a universal mailbox annoying in practice. Backing up e-mail was likewise almost impossible; the mail was spread out over the network, some of it remote and unaccessible.

Even the remote access functionality was doomed by feature interaction. To ensure that all messages were delivered in a reasonable time on a network where machines might appear and disappear at random (when they are turned on and off), AOCE had a 15-minute timeout in which it repeatedly tried to deliver pending messages. However, if the user in question was using a dialup connection on a modem, AOCE would keep the line open for a full 15 minutes before giving up on disconnected user, driving up huge long distance bills to deliver a potentially tiny message.

Many of these problems were intended to be solved with the PowerShare server, which acted as an always-on, always responsive "super-peer". The basic AOCE protocol would notice these machines when attempting delivery, and send to them first, thereby eliminating the delays and centralizing storage and maintenance. Sadly the server was not ready in time for the release, and didn't ship for another year. When it did it was likewise slow and resource hungry, largely a side effect of various features of the Mac OS that made it unsuitable for server applications (not that it was designed for this role).

AOCE had one year in the sun at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in 1995 when it was finally gelling, but by this point almost everyone realized that the market was clearly moving towards SMTP-based internet mail as an almost universal format. By 1996 Apple had given up on AOCE, and started talking about the CyberDog project based on the OpenDoc platform. AOCE quietly disappeared. WWDC 2005, at Moscone Center The Worldwide Developers Conference, commonly abbreviated WWDC, is an annual trade show for Apple developers. ... Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the de facto standard for email transmission across the Internet. ... Cyberdog Cyberdog is an OpenDoc-based suite of internet applications, including email and news readers, a web browser and address book management components. ... OpenDoc was a multi-platform software componentry framework standard for compound documents, inspired by the Xerox Star system and intended as an alternative to Microsofts object linking and embedding (OLE). ...

Given reasonable staffing estimates over that time, it is possible that the project cost anywhere from $50 to $100 million at this point, thereby adding $50-100 to the price of every Mac sold.

Description

AOCE's Open Directory and related software introduced the concept of directory entries (such as business cards) as first-class desktop objects. This was used to create a drag-and-drop metaphor for mail, fax, and other directory-based activities. Each endpoint, a mail server for instance, was driven by a plug-in extension that was driven by a common AOCE-supplied queue and queue viewer. PowerTalk provided a set of standard forms for interacting with the items in the queues, and a common interface for mail, and a universal mailbox. Encryption was supported by a single "keychain" that remembered all your passwords and digital signatures, encrypting them together so only a single password needed to be remembered. For queueing people, see queue area. ...

The system was designed in an era when there were many e-mail formats and services, including online services such as CompuServe and AppleLink, networking standards like X.400 and SMTP (internet mail) and LAN-based servers such as Microsoft Mail and QuickMail. In order to support this diverse environment, AOCE included a robust layered protocol stack that, in theory, could be used with practically any store-and-forward type of environment. This was used within AOCE not only to service mail, but faxes, printing and even directly sending files from one machine to another without enclosing them in a mail message or needing a file server. An online service provider is an entity which provides a service online. ... CompuServe, or CIS for short, was the first major commercial online service in the US, dominating the field during the 1980s and remaining a major player through the mid-1990s when it was sidelined by the rise of GUI-based services such as America Online (AOL). ... AppleLink was the name of both Apple Computers online service for its users, and the client software used to access it. ... In computing, X.400 is a OSI standard developed by the ITU-T (at the time the CCITT) and promulgated by ISO for the exchange of email (at the time called IPMs - Inter Personal Messages). ... Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is the de facto standard for email transmission across the Internet. ... Microsoft Mail was included as an e-mail client in some older versions of Microsoft Office. ... A protocol stack is a particular software implementation of a computer networking protocol suite. ... In telecommunication, the term file server has the following meanings: A high-capacity disk storage device or a computer that hosts files so that they may be accessed or retrieved by other computers on the same network. ...

Adoption of AOCE among 3rd party developers was slow due to a ferociously complicated API. The book documenting the system was larger than all of the books describing the rest of the pre-System 7 Macintosh put together. Adding a simple feature like "mail this document" to an application required wading through hundreds of pages of documentation, and writing a core AOCE component was many times more complex. API redirects here. ...

Several parts of the AOCE engine were useful on their own, notably the Keychain. However in order to get the keychain, you had to install all of AOCE, a cost the users were not willing to pay. Many years later the keychain was finally shipped as a stand-alone component in Mac OS 9. The encryption/signing support is arguably also useful (although not widely used in the "real world"), and it has reappeared in Apple's bundled Mail application starting with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar in August 2002.

Other concepts in AOCE remain intriguing and have yet to appear in other systems. For instance the idea of being able to drag a document onto a user's address (which today would be standardized using a vCard) to directly pass the document on the next time that user appeared on the network seems like an excellent idea. Likewise the concept of peer-to-peer mail is something almost no systems offer, although the need for this in an era of ubiquitous mail servers is arguable. vCard is a file format standard for personal data interchange, specifically electronic business cards. ...