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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

It would be great if someone wrote an article about the alternate histories where Apple chose other strategies. For instance, what an Apple-Be merge would have resulted in, what kind of products and tech. And how NeXT would have lasted without Apple.

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A reason nobody has might be that the actual outcome was more unlikely and unexpected than the alternative histories one might come up with. They'd be short and conclude with both companies being sold for scrap and absorbed uselessly into some behemoth or another.

Wow, I haven't heard someone mention BeOs in over a decade. That was a pretty OS, but I'd take that black NeXT case any day. Those NeXT boxes were so cool.

There's stories on HN about Haiku from time to time. That project's still going on in the background.

Just a few days ago, in fact:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13200633

BeBoxes were beautiful although maybe in a way only a mother could love.

the das blinkenlights were so badass though

There have been a few late nights where I found myself searching eBay and other places for a used BeBox. Sadly, they're hard to come by (and expensive). I used to have a bunch of NeXT hardware and it is indeed cool. I got rid of it in a move a few years ago because it was just taking up space in my closets, but I still miss it....

I have a dual 603e-133 BeBox in working condition (not for sale). About 800 of them were produced. I've had mine since 1997.

What if Apple hadn't built the Mac but had gone all-in on the Apple ][gs years earlier?

None of the tech really mattered, not much anyway. What Apple really got with NeXT was Steve Jobs' vision, along with a more seasoned CEO better capable of realizing that vision. Whether Apple had gotten BeOS or NeXT didn't really matter all that much in comparison.

This is demonstrably false. MacOS Copland was scrapped in favor of a descendant of NeXTSTEP that became MacOS X.

Hundreds (thousands?) of API calls in both Desktop iOS development are prefaced NS_ ... that is NeXTSTEP

This is ridiculous pedantry, but the "NS" prefix actually means "Next / Sun". It was introduced in OpenStep [1], which was supposed to become Sun's GUI layer on Solaris until Java happened.

Before the OpenStep revamp, the class prefix used in NeXTSTEP was "NX". I think there are still some lingering NX* classes/functions you might see in AppKit stack traces.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep

I think people forget that NeXT and its OS had some time to evolve. NeXT had .8 in 1988 and 1.0 in 1989. So, we are talking 8ish years of evolution and API changes. Going from the pre-web to WebObjects and its influence on the API.

That's an amazing factoid. "NS" standing for NeXTSTEP would then be a popular misconception, then. It also introduces an interesting hypothetical of what if Sun ended up adopting OpenStep, if Java was not developed in time or fell through or whatever.

The OpenStep spec was a collaboration between NeXT and Sun. OpenStep was available as a full OS (for 68k NeXT hardware and 486 beige PCs) as well as running on top of Solaris (SPARC), HPUX, and Windows NT. Sun went with Java instead but Microsoft has a WinObjC project. Go Figure. Until 10.7 or so, OS X still included Windows NT theme graphics [1].

NeXTStep 3.0 used the NS namespace; 2.0 and earlier was NX.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/02/mac_images/

TIL WinObjC is alive and well.

https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC

You can get some information how Objective-C related to Java at Sun, by the original Java team.

https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html

Actually it's just a fact! A factoid is something which sounds like a fact but is actually false.

I always thought a factoid was a tiny fact.

Merriam Webster actually lists both meanings (small fact and non-fact). https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid

nice one--just checked your source and you're absolutely correct. I'm not a Mac OS so i had no idea how Cocoa methods were prefixed, but i recall listening to a reply of session from the Apple developer conference around 2007 in which a fairly senior apple dev, which giving brief summary of the history of Cocoa, said more or less that "NS" stands for NextStep"

This internal demonstration of NeXTSTEP shows just how much this similarity applies to what the end-user sees in macOS/OS X as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk

Yes at the time all the major mac magazines were acknowledging that it looked like Copland would never ship, but the question was whether to replace it with NeXTSTEP or BeOS. Both had strong ties to former Apple execs with obviously Jobs being the bigger draw at NeXT, but Jean-Louis Gassée at Be was not to be discounted either.

Both Jobs and Gassée were both forced out by Sculley who alot of people credit with driving Apple toward the mediocrity that defined it in the mid 90s.

The other big factor at the time was the fact that BeOS ran on PowerPC, and NeXTSTEP did not. NeXT had done some work to produce their own hardware with dual 601s, but never shipped it and abandoned that work to focus on the IBM PC hardware. This meant that the first few years of the Apple/NeXT merger were spent just getting NeXTSTEP running on PowerPC.

The biggest buzz of the time was that even though Steve's return to Apple had killed the growing Mac clone industry, maybe Rhapsody would run on x86 hardware. There were rumors all over that they would make this happen, although they were many years too early, as Apple wouldn't make that switch until 2005.

Don't agree with this at all.

NeXT was an actual operating system that people used. You could run word processing apps from which you could print and email. There was a fully fledged development platform with real developers building real third party apps. BeOS was more like a giant tech demo.

If we focus on just the technologies choosing BeOS would have meant at least a few years more engineering effort. And you still wouldn't have been able to replicate the ground breaking nature of OSX in the short time frame required.

I suspect both financially and in consumer mind share they would have never recovered from selecting BeOS.

BeOS/BeBox was demoed at a MacWorld. There was a cool display of the utilization of each CPU and you could disable each CPU by unchecking a checkbox. The demo app didn't prevent you from disabling the last CPU. The booth-guy wasn't very happy with me.

Hey, I remember that! The NeOS demo at Macworld expo was indeed cool. Down to the ability to shut off the last CPU.

If it was even possible. I liked beos, but it was an rtos with a GUI on it. No real network stack, no real print stack, I don't even remember the state of internationalization. No multiuser story or security story. It's not clear the you could add that stuff to be.

Maybe not from a business/product standpoint, but the merger meant that OS X had NeXT roots that exist to this day, even with the ascension of Swift over Objective-C. I'd say the history of technology there is interesting, especially when you consider the troubled history getting to OS X:

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F7... http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/14

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