Kaleida (project)
Kaleida was a project to develop a media player (the Kaleida Media Player ) that should be controlled via a scripting language called ScriptX . The aim of Kaleida should be to serve the emerging market for interactive CDs at the beginning of the 90s with a product that should not only run on all common operating systems, but also in the form of set-top boxes on the home television.
Kaleida Labs , a joint venture between Apple and IBM (similar to the Taligent developed at the same time ) was in charge of the development . The company finally broke up in 1996 after the project was a complete failure, also due to the changed market conditions.
history
Kaleida Labs was founded in the summer of 1992. It consisted mainly of developers who had previously developed the in-house media player QuickTime under Apple . The investor Nat Goldhaber was recruited as CEO of the company. However, this soon came under fire due to its public appearances, in which he made completely unrealistic predictions and ascribed a downright world-changing significance to the project, while at the same time the company showed no progress in the development of Kaleida. Apple and IBM invested US $ 20 million in the company in the first year alone, and finally in 1993 were no longer willing to finance the CEO's excessive salary or the overhang of employees, fired him from the company and put an IBM in his place -Manager to the top.
Under the new leadership, the planned set-top boxes were given up and around 25 percent of the employees were laid off. Since Kaleida was now far behind its schedule, the focus was on the development of the Kaleida Media Player. This should be able to run on all mid-range computers common at the time - an 80486 with 25 MHz and 4 MB RAM or a Motorola 68030 with comparable equipment served as a reference. Since it was assumed that PCs of this class were equipped with CD-ROM drives across the board, Kaleida should already be delivered by OEMs together with new PCs.
On December 19, 1994, version 1.0 of the Kaleida Media Player and the ScriptX scripting language actually appeared. However, the performance was disappointing: the player required 3MB of RAM on its own before a CD-ROM was even loaded. Since the operating system (especially System 7 ) already took up a large part of the main memory, the Kaleida Media Player was practically unusable on the reference PCs sought. There was also no version for PowerPC Macs, which were increasingly appearing on the market at the time to replace the 68k Macs.
In the end, Kaleida's death came mainly from market developments. The triumphant advance of the World Wide Web decimated the market for interactive CDs (which is where Philips' competing product CD-i ultimately failed) and effectively pushed it back into small niches. At the same time, the company Netscape with its 1994 published Netscape Navigator Kaleida came before the goal of a cross-platform development platform. Ultimately, the developers at Kaleida did not manage to reduce the memory consumption of the product to the point where it could be used on common computers of the time. The gaps that Kaleida left open were initially closed by Macromedia with the Macromedia Director (from which Flash later developed) and later Sun Microsystems with its programming language Java, which is similar to ScriptX in many ways, but due to conceptual differences (ScriptX is interpreted, Java is compiled to bytecode) has a significantly lower memory consumption.
In January 1996, the Kaleida Labs company was finally dissolved. Shortly before that, however, Version 1.5 of ScriptX was released, as IBM had contracted to do so. The developer of ScriptX, John Wainweight, moved to the Autodesk company to develop the MaxScript scripting language for the 3D graphics program 3ds Max .