in march 1988, shortly before the release of system 6, technical middle managers at apple held an offsite meeting to plan the future course of mac os development. ideas were written on index cards; features that seemed simple enough to implement in the short term (like adding color to the user interface) were written on blue cards, longer-term goals like true multitasking on pink cards, and "far out" ideas like an object-oriented file system on red cards. development of the ideas contained on the blue and pink cards was to proceed in parallel, and at first the two projects were known simply as "blue" and "pink" (including taligent). apple intended to have the "blue" team (which came to call themselves the "blue meanies" after characters in "yellow submarine") release an updated version of the existing macintosh operating system in the 1990–1991 time-frame, and the "pink" team to release an entirely new os around 1993.