Games - Apple Open Collaboration Environment

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	Games - Apple Open Collaboration Environment

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.

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 since the installed base was so small their potential sales were even smaller. In 1996 Apple Computer quietly dropped their efforts to market AOCE, and the project quickly disappeared.

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.

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.

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.

AOCE would normally store a user's e-mail on their computer, as opposed to a server. This not only allowed the user to read their mail anywhere, and also removed the need for a single machine with huge storage space. Small networks could be set up simply by installing the standard "client" software, and the machines would all communicate directly. 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.

Since the mail was stored locally, users with laptop computers would be able to read and compose mail while on the road, and then deliver it the next time they returned to the office and connected back to the LAN. AppleTalk Remote Access, Apple's "standard" solution for supporting the AppleTalk protocol over modems, was also supported for those users who wished to sync up remotely. For security over the potentially "open" phone lines, all communications could be secured using RSA encryption and digital signing, even on the local network.

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