Bedrock was a joint effort by Apple Computer and Symantec to produce a cross platform programming framework for writing applications on the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms. The project was a failure for a variety of reasons, and after delivering a developer preview version the project was abandoned in late 1993. History Background Bedrock started as an internal effort at Symantec in the early 1990s. At the time many of Symantec's products ran on both Mac and Windows, and what would become Bedrock was originally an internal set of tools intended to ease the effort of keeping both platforms up to date. In 1991, Apple released the 3.0 version of its own development environment, MPW, along with its own object framework, MacApp. MPW was a command-line driven system that had not been competitively maintained. MacApp 3.0 is a major upgrade from previous versions, being ported from Object Pascal to C++. This left it largely incompatible with the previous version, and caused considerable consternation in the Mac developer community. Symantec was also the supplier of the then-premier development platform on the Mac, Think C. This is a GUI-based environment which included an application framework of its own, TCL. Think C/TCL had garnered a considerable following in the Mac community, especially during the MacApp 3.0 era. To remain competitive, at some point MPW would have to be replaced with something much more similar to Think. Throughout this period, Microsoft Windows was first starting its rise in popularity. Cross-platform development systems had been developed, but to this time they tended to be relatively simple, delivering least-common-denominator applications. A cross-platform SDK that could deliver first-rate solutions is one of the industry's supremely idealistic goals at the time. Concept The first mention of a collaboration between Apple and Symantec was contained in the flier for WWDC '92. The companies talked about it very briefly at the show, calling it "Cross Platform Framework" and mentioning that more would be revealed at the PC Expo show in June. This was greeted with considerable interest in the press. At the MacWorld show they announced the conceptnot yet a real productas Bedrock. Bedrock would first be released on the Mac and Windows, with plans to expand it in the future to support Unix, OS/2, Windows NT, and Pink—the OS originated at Apple and now developed at Taligent. It was expected to become "the most direct path for migration"