BeOS almost made Apple a different company (2015)
wired.com
wired.com
I think however that Steve was a larger key to Apples success then the OS. Apple would have been dead without him.
Interesting tidbit: Dominic Giampaolo, who was one of the main developers of BeFS is now engineer on the APFS team [1].
Yep. That's an Apple fan's Darkest Timeline, no doubt.
Having been in Apple developer relations at the time, my perspective is that the specific OS choice was irrelevant to Apple's future success.
By all accounts, BeOS would've also been a fine technology platform for Apple's future. Carbon apparently worked fine on it. And Mac OS X was far from a sure thing, for some time — if early public releases were uninspiring, early developer releases were actively demoralizing.
And yet somehow, we had to make developers believe. The only way that could work is if we believed. And Steve Jobs made us believe.
Amiga still exists but it is very expensive, AmigaOS has evolved a lot and AROS is like an open source AmigaOS 3.X that can be ported to other platforms.
Apple can still buy out Amiga and the license to AmigaOS and make high end PowerPC workstations and servers out of them and install BSD or Linux on them. The Amiga One was better running Linux than AmigaOS, so just make an Amiga API WINE like software that runs AmigaOS apps in Linux. Then make Intel based versions to save money.
Just think Apple could use HaikuOS, MacOS, AmigaOS, AROS, Linux, etc on their Mac line using Intel chips, and contribute to their development to take on Microsoft and Windows.
Yet Apple could make a deal with Valve to port SteamOS to their older Intel Macs to make use of them for playing games on them, etc. Give them PowerMac specs as well to make a PowerPC version of SteamOS.
I am unclear why anyone but a fragmentary, fingernail-thin minority would want this.
I have heard the opposite. I liked the slick look of BeOS, but have been told since that there was very little there there. I don't know either way.
EDIT: See? This is why comment voting is a bad idea, it was bad on Reddit, is bad on every Reddit clone being made and of course is bad on Hacker News. What is the point? You get people downvoting comments without reason, leaving the original commenter wonder why someone would... disagree? Consider it non-constructive? Agree but dislike the tone? What? Text explains much better than a number the intent of someone and me, right now looking at a -1 number near my post, have no idea what exactly is the issue. Not to mention the fadeout that happens in downvoted comments in HN, which is extra bad (gives the impression that this comment is not important before even someone bothers to read it - thus creating a bias against it regardless of the contents).
No really, why was this comment downvoted? There are so many reasons it could have been, from misunderstandings to actual issues, that i cannot pinpoint without someone saying it.
I mean, imagine being in the same room, having a discussion about OSes, someone saying the above about BeOS and me asking the question above... if you disagreed with something i said, wouldn't you try to explain what you disagreed with? Why aren't you doing the same here?
Note that whenever i say something like that (mainly on Reddit, but a couple of times also here) people upvote the comment after the fact, i suppose to "right the wrong". But i am not interested in the comment votes as much as knowing the reasoning. After all i asked a question, my impression from what memsom said was that this was a driver issue that Apple could mostly avoid - downvoting/upvoting isn't a response, doesn't answer the question nor affect the thinking that went on making it.
I was a heavy BeOS user. I owned a BeBox. I developed for the OS. There was a *lot" of stuff under the hood that made the OS very immature. I just didn't sit here listing them. Highlights:
Messaging was flaky prior to R5.1. The BMessage got copied a lot, and the Ports used for messaging could get clogged and then messages got dropped. Quite fatal.
The API was multi threaded - it was a concept that at the time a lot of developers struggled with. It could be extremely complicated to port apps.
A lot of the code was rough and some of it badly documented. So, the guy who worked on it knew it worked, but I doubt many other people did outside of their team. They cut a lot of corners. For example, OpenGL was a disaster. I was told the original dev left and no one was able to support what he left. It never really got back up to the level he had it up to prior o the focus shift.
Media Kit ended up getting a rewrite.
There was quite a bit of 3rd party code in the OS. Some was licensed. Some was GPL. Some of the GPL was a little questionably used, given the license. This is quite probably one of the reasons the OS was never open sourced.
If your comment actually said your summary of it ("my impression was that this was a driver issue that Apple could mostly avoid") then asked "As an ex-user, what do you think?" I doubt it would have been downvoted.
OTOH, if you were actually arguing that the problems were all driver issues (rather than proposing the possibility and asking), then your theory needed a lot more substantiation.
The standard response isn't to start teaching Operating Systems 101.
Really? I never knew that. Care to elaborate?
This was all very similar to the way Classic worked in Mac OS X, save the way the apps ran in the same desktop as the main OS.
Carbon was the old Mac OS Classic APIs ported to OSX. Classic support allowed you to run old binaries. Carbon APIs allowed you to port your classic apps easily-ishly.
When I first heard about OS X, the idea of a widely-available Unix on PowerPC was very exciting. The reality of the first release was, from a performance and feature perspective, pretty underwhelming.
I'd guess the whole iTunes/iPod business put more wind in their sails in the early days.
In English, only the first letter of proper nouns is capitalized. "Next Inc." is technically correct. Be OS and Mac OS look weird but are correct because the proper name is Be or Mac, and OS is an acronym.
Part of the branding is the contrast against standard capitalization conventions in English.
Basically, you don't get to control what others call you.
My argument is that whoever possesses a particular identity should be the ultimate arbiter of the "correct" way to represent it.
As if what some marketing bozo dreams up gets to be the law of the land.
Your opinion of the "correct" representation of your identity should hold more weight than my opinion, though. I'm not arguing ability, I'm arguing correctness.
And whether I write ios, iOs, IOS, iOS or whatever the correct spelling is doesn't matter one little bit.
> Apple denies that its correct name is Apple, Inc. The correct name of Respondent is Apple Inc.
http://www.fosspatents.com/2011/11/apple-to-htc-dont-you-cal...
That's irrelevant, as NeXT is not an english noun, but a trademarked company name, capitalization et al.
* AmigaOS - amiga-oss
* BeOS - bee-oss
* MacOS - mack-oss or ma-koss (I hear both)
* NES - ness or nez
* SNES - sness, snez, or some people said sneeze.
* RTOS - ar-toss
In British English, we lean heavily in this direction. The influence of Youtube is making the "kids" say stuff like "bay-ta" rather than "bee-ta" and "oh ess" rather than "oss", but British English speakers still gravitate to saying the latter.
The only exception I can think of is OS/2. But that is because it was heavily marketed on TV here in the 90's circa OS/2 Warp.
And then "Amiga OS" would be "Amiga O S". As a lifelong British UKian, I don't know many people who would say "OSS" instead of "Oh Ess" for standalone "OS".
> "What OS do you run on your computer?"
Literally do not know a single person who would say "What OSS" in that sentence - they'd all say "What Oh Ess".
But now we've devolved into Gladwell-style anecdating and neither of us want that on our conscience, I think.
We also understand "oh ess" of course, but I think most of us are too lazy to say it.
So I guess the conclusion we can draw is that we Brits don't agree on how this should be pronounced.
See, I'd always say "Oh Ess" there. Maybe it's a generational / regional thing?
> we Brits don't agree on how [anything] should be pronounced
This would have meant a stable, easy-to-install graphical OS available back when KDE and GNOME were still at version 1 or 2.
There were opportunities for the operating system space to play out differently--which in turn could have changed a lot of industry dynamics--but those scenarios are things like:
1.) BSD coalescing earlier and somehow avoiding the legal issues with AT&T. (And I'm not sure to what degree this would have changed the final outcome with BSD substituted for Linux.)
2.) Sun open sourcing Solaris earlier in a surprise move against Windows NT. (Hard to see this happening.)
You got a *ix implementation of the Finder as your GUI, which could also run native System 7 binaries as well as Unix applications.
Of course, it was killed for OS 8 (if you worked for Apple or a reseller at the time you'll know how hopelessly over-optimistic that was - if you didn't, it was supposed to be a brand new microkernel, running a multi-user OS written from the ground up as a Mac OS workalike, plus a server for running System 7 apps. There was even talk of being able to run a Windows environment. Needless to say, the MacOS 8 that actually shipped was not that plan) and Taligent/Pink.
Then they bought NeXT and got... a BSD Unix running the NeXTStep userland and an MacOS Classic compatibility later.
It ran, as I would later learn to appreciate, really well on a Pentium II (at 400MHz?). BeOS on a P2 beat the pants off Windows XP on a 2GHz Athlon 64.
I am one of those idiots who still believe Apple is a hardware company and as with all hardware companies, software is an afterthought.
When they ditched OS9 for BSD this reinforced my belief.
I honestly believe without BSD there would be no NeXTSTEP/OSX/iOS/macOS/watchOS/tvOS, etc. This article suggests they could have used BeOS. But, they did not.
My hope has always been that Apple would optionally sell hardware without a pre-installed BSD/Mach-derived OS, allowing users to install their own choice of OS.
For example, a fully open source BSD with a BSD kernel. That would be my choice but other users might choose differently.
I am not interested so much in the graphics capabilities of Apple HW. I am after the form factor.
Be did have the BeBox that had a Geekport that Apple could have used to better expand Macs for.
There was this ARDI Exeuctor software that could run 68K Classic MacOS stuff in Linux, Windows, NextOS, and I think they were porting it to BeOS.
NextOS was a much better choice due to the OpenStep librarie shared with HP, Sun, Oracle, and others. It was forked as GNUStep and ported to Linux and other operating systems.
Apple has always been a hardware company that has the software integrated to the hardware. It is because they bundle both together than it works better than PCs running Windows from everyone and their brother making PC Clones. Even with the Hackintosh stuff not all drivers work and some Hackintoshes don't have things that a Mac does like OS updates, etc.
BeOS was made into a multimedia OS to challenge AmigaOS that already was a multimedia OS with Video Toaster and other stuff. BSD aka NextOS was more of a workstation/server OS and clearly the better choice.
That is exactly how Mac OS X ran classic MacOS apps in the early days. It was called "classic environment" or "blue box".
It was removed after OS X 10.4, as by that point most "classic" apps had been updated to the Carbon API and recompiled as native OS X apps.
The question I have always had is what would happen if BSD project committers were allowed and enabled to write drivers for Apple hardware.
There must be many reasons why Apple cannot sell hardware with full specs to enable open source developers to write drivers, but being an idiot I could not tell you what those are. As I see it, any value Apple adds to the hardware is in how they select components and build the computer. I fail to see how controlling who can write drivers adds value for the user.
The "hardware/software integration" is great. Up until the company starts using their position as exclusive "integrator" to lock down products and dictate how those products can be used after they have been sold.
Hackintosh is a noble effort but it differs from what I want. I do not want an Apple BSD-like OS to run on any non-Apple hardware. I want a non-Apple BSD OS to run on any Apple hardware. This will not happen, but I still think about it and wonder.
It worked with no extra files on a Mac running BeOS, on a BeBox it required a dump of the toolbox ROM.
You're obviously not an idiot, but the best mental model for Apple isn't "hardware company" or "software company" — it's "product company".
[EDIT: Apple actually tried "software company" on for size. Remember Mac clones? It's one of the first things Steve killed upon his return.]
Later versions started looking a little bit more like a conventional operating system. For instance, a file system was added in 3.0 to support the removable SD card.
Perhaps at one time.. now I think they are an 'ecosystem lock in' company, and use hardware and software to achieve that means..
I keep hearing this, and I find it as ridiculous as ever if not more.
Music for today's people means basically streaming -- you move to Windows or wherever and you get from Apple Music to Spotify (or even keep using Apple Music). No lock in. Music geeks who hoard mp3s/flacs are not locked-in either. And the minority who "carefully curates" their playlists and adds annotations to their music files (which might not port easily) is insignificant.
Ditto for movies. Besides, Neflix, Amazon video, etc dominate there too.
Ditto for apps. Most apps exists on both platforms. And those that do not and you can't live without (e.g. Sketch for some, or Things for others, etc), are a genuine advantage, not a "lock-in". Most are not even Apple's anyway.
And it's not like you suffer any great loss if you give up your iOS (or Android for that matter) app purchases to go to the other side. The majority of people have just 10-20 apps they've bought from some survey's I've seen. Besides, millions of people move from Android to iOS and vice versa all the time, and their old apps doesn't stop them.
Mail -- you have IMAP. You can use whatever client on whatever platform.
The same goes for other things. Heck, most apps a "normal" person uses are through the web these days, and play equally well.
If Apple locks-in anybody with something, it's convenience and end-to-end product line. Not some nefarious scheme.
It is the "small" nuisances such as "AppleID", "AppStore" and "XCode" that differentiate now from then.
I have owned Apple HW both then and now. These "hoops" are not optional conveniences, they are forced.
The Apple computers now come with "services" pre-installed. Other companies pay for placements. Again, not optional. Nor a new idea. We saw this with crapware on PC's and laptops.
But, unlike crapware, these cannot be uninstalled. The best one can do is ignore them. This is not always enough since they may be unintentionally launched and run in the background.
The company makes a determination on what users "should" want, and wiping their computer free of all marketing is not among the "acceptable" uses. I bought the HW. It is mine. That is how things used to be.
Whether I choose to continue to interact with Apple afterwards is my choice, not Apple's.
Stupid example: How do I use my own time servers for setting system time in iOS? Should I have to work around a default setting by the company that cannot be disabled or should I be given control to create or change that setting in the first instance? Is appropriate for the company to assume I want to use their remote servers and data centers for anything?
For those who understand what "root" is, the idea of having to "root" a computer you bought is insane if you think about it.
In a former decade Apple marketing claimed the company was moving in a different direction from IBM where they alleged individuality was being stifled. "Following the company line" was frowned upon. If the marketing was to be believed, Apple would presumably set the user free.
Today, Apple uses UNIX-like, free BSD-licensed software, and its implementation of permissions to appoint themselves as remote "system administrator" for every person who buys one of their computers.
As if these computers all belong to a single company and hence must all run the company-approved OS and seek approval for changes, installing software, etc. What about individual users who are free to think for themselves and make their own choices? In Apple's view these users either do not exist or they should look elsewhere for their computers.
The saddest part of this "evolution" toward control of the user after purchase and lock-in to becoming a patron of Apple businesses, and the success Apple has had, is that other companies try to emulate it, e.g., Microsoft.
Fortunately it seems like Apple users are starting to question some of the tactics, e.g., removing headphone jacks. Windows users complained about version 8 when the "Start" button disappeared. But consider younger users who may never have been exposed to S/PDIF headphone jacks or a Windows "Start" button.
If older computers gave users more control and posed less risk to user privacy, then this I think is not a part of history that these market-driven companies have any interest in keeping alive through future generations.
I believe that when users defend one or the other of these large companies all trying to lock them in (presuming they have no financial stake of said companies), they may be simply reacting, maybe subconsciously, to a lack of choice and a feeling of helplessness. These are users who must accept at least one of these companies into their daily computing activities and so they defend their "choice". No user can be faulted for this when they effectively have no real choice.
As I see it, the notion of having "choice" in computer use is becoming more and more illusory. This is especially true for younger users born into a world where they can and do depend on their computers for almost everything.
One might argue that they are left to "choose" to between the lesser of a few evils. They have to "trust" at least one of these companies. Not 50% trust but 100%. They must go "all in". For whatever reason, some will commit themselves 120%. They will be the staunch defenders, the advocates, the "influencers".
The question is how much of the trust is actually earned by these companies versus being given to them by users on faith in the face of no viable alternatives. I remember not having to even consider whether to "trust" Apple. Back in those days brand-new computers did not begin sending packets to company-selected remote servers as soon as you plugged them in for the first time.
It should go without saying but the "monopoly" issue might also have some relevance to an absence of real "choice". That is all I will say.
Steve settled that debate fairly early on and showed that both sides were wrong. Apple sells "the whole thing". They sell a curated experience that involves their close management of the hardware, the software, key peripherals, the iTunes store, etc. They do all that so they can deliver more than they could by pursuing some single niche part of the experience.
When NeXT was on the ropes they got out of hardware but kept making the software. Likewise when Apple was in trouble they opened up the hardware but kept the software close to their chest because that's where the value is.
Why is this the case? Where is the value in the OS? Its all about the ecosystem. The OS is important because of all the applications that users can run on it. Word, Excel, Photoshop, InDesign, etc. The key advantage NeXT had over Beos was an ecosystem of applications - modest compared to the Mac but it existed, there was no OmniGroup for BeOS - and there was a robust set of developer tools and frameworks to build those apps on.
PC hardware is a commodity. Anybody can build a computer from components in their bedroom. Building a new OS from scratch is a whole different ballgame. And no, rolling up a new Linux distro doesn't count.
Why is NeXT written "NeXt" in this piece? I don't think I've ever seen it written that way.
Other OSes that "almost made Apple an entirely different company" were Taligent and Copland, for varying levels of "almost".
From Masters of Doom, Carmack programmed Doom on a NeXT machine would like to get my hands on one
It's hard to remember this kind of weird random capitalization.
When I read "iPhone", I remember "i, phone, two words with only the second word capitalized".
When I read "mRNA", I remember "mrna, all caps except for the first letter".
When I read it I read "NeXT", I read, "next with random capitalization".
Now when I write back, the first 2 are deterministic; the third is probabilistic.
Are you familiar with McIntosh apples? ;)
The computer industry really jumped into case sensitive naming with both feet. I'm sure NeXT wasn't the first such example but they were one of the earlier ones when it started to become the norm.
I don't know how to judge "when it started to become the norm." It seems too easy to set the line semi-arbitrarily to the time you want.
A Mac users in the 1980s, before NeXT, would know about MacPaint and other Mac* software. The Mac 2D graphics used QuickDraw, which in turn was "was grounded in the Apple Lisa's LisaGraf" (quoting Wikipedia).
MicroPro International Corporation developed WordStar staring in June 1979. Again quoting Wikipedia, "By May 1983 BYTE magazine called WordStar "without a doubt the best-known and probably the most widely used personal computer word-processing program"."
There's AutoCAD.
And in the 1970s and 1980s ComputerLand was a large retail computer store, with "about 800 stores by 1985." (Microsoft, btw, was originally "Micro-Soft".)
While it may have been popular in the computer industry, I don't know enough about other fields. I pointed out in another thread the DryIce Corporation started in the 1920s, producing frozen carbon dioxide.
Edit: I realized I do know of earlier naming schemes which used mixed-capitalization. Before Micro-Soft was "Traf-O-Data", which followed a mid-20th century practice that includes Bridge-O-Rama (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge-O-Rama ) Bowl-O-Rama (http://www.bctv.org/opinion/bowl-o-rama-was-more-than-a-bowl... ), etc.
Just anecdotally, it would seem publications tend to respect camel case but may or may not when there are other capitalization oddities including lowercase first letters.
CiCi's pizza - "Joe Croce and Mike Cole founded Cicis in 1985". (That was also the year NeXT was founded.)
"In 1971, Nebraska Consolidated Mills changed its name to "ConAgra""
"CryoLife, Inc. incorporated in 1984 in Florida, was the first biomedical company to specialize in the ultra-low temperature preservation of human heart valves used for cardiac reconstruction, primarily in children born with heart defects."
Freeport-McMoRan - "In 1981, Freeport Minerals Company merged with the McMoRan Oil and Gas Company. The McMoRan Oil and Gas Company was founded in 1967 by three partners, William Kennon McWilliams Jr. ("Mc"), James Robert (Jim Bob) Moffett ("Mo"), who were both petroleum geologists, and Byron McLean Rankin, Jr. ("Ran"), ..."
BankAmericard - founded in 1958; became Visa. "In June 1970, Bank of America gave up control of the BankAmericard program. The various BankAmericard issuer banks took control of the program, creating National BankAmericard Inc. (NBI), an independent Delaware corporation which would be in charge of managing, promoting and developing the BankAmericard system within the United States."
"In 1965, the Pepsi-Cola Company merged with Frito-Lay, Inc. to become PepsiCo, Inc"
"Initially held as a private partnership, SeaWorld offered its stock publicly in 1968 enabling them to expand and open additional parks." (Elsewhere, "After temporarily going public in 1968 a mere four years after its founding, SeaWorld was bought by the Anheuser Busch Companies, Inc. and became its entertainment subsidiary.")
"In 1981, the company [Calgary Power] changed its name to its current name of TransAlta Corporation."
TransCanada - The company was founded in 1951 but I don't know if it was written "TransCanada" from the beginning. I did find https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&dat=19770728&id=... from 1977 saying "TransCanada", which is good enough to show it was pre-NeXT.
Yes, it is a marketing trend starting almost a century ago (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ie50226a029?journalCode=... shows a 1928 article starting "Thirty tons per day of solid carbon dioxide - that is one measure of the recently complete plan of the DryIce Corporation ..")
However, the MacDonalds, McGregors, and others will disagree on your final statement.
Richard and Maurice McDonald opened the first McDonald's restaurant in 1940.
FitzWilliam, FitzPatrick, FitzGerald, etc. are also proper nouns where more than the first letter is capitalized.
The IJsselmeer written in English preserves the Dutch capitalization rules.
Then there's hyphenated words like "There is no such thing as an ex-Marine ..." (http://www.military.com/marine-corps-birthday/marine-birthda... ), but that leads to the question "what is a word?"
Combined with whyenot's example: "The ex-Marine ate a McIntosh apple at the McDonald's on the IJsselmeer."
No, it's not.
Plus, working for Sakoman? No thanks.
Archived newsletters for BeOS developers.
Be used GCC's 2.9x C++ ABI, which wasn't stable and was changed in 3.0. Would Apple have forked GCC? Or re-worked the design of Be avoid the issue?
I think the old one is actually a shim for the new one (it isn't a full build, all it does is forwards the calls) but i'm not 100% sure.
I hacked together a MWOB decompiler back in the day and re-implemented it as a fun little project last year. It's on my GitHub [1] is anyone cares. I will some day get an assembler working and outputting MWOB files. Probably.
There's some other BeOS stuff kicking about, including an input driver for using gesture based writing [2]. I was writing this for BeIA, as at the time I has one of the Dt300 web pads running BeIA 1.0. There was a crappy UI toolkit wrapper we were using for Free Pascal too [3]. The latter included "fdb", which was a cool little BMessage based debugger tool. I wrote is as a throw away, bit some one once told me it was their daily driver at one point for debugging apps on end user machines.
[1] https://github.com/memsom/mwobdec [2] https://github.com/memsom/ratcowsoftopensource/tree/master/B... [3] https://github.com/memsom/ratcowsoftopensource/tree/master/d...
Intel used PE for R3, then ELF from R4 onwards. So R3 Intel software is not compatible with any other release.
No idea what the Hobbit BeBoxen used.
BeIA used ELF or CELF, the latter being a customised ELF exe format with compression of symbols and stuff like that to reduce on disk size.
Acronyms take on their own life sometimes.
http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/cocoa/136618-what-does-n...
And the two LED strips for the two processors showed off :-)
BeFS was a wonderful experience, it showed what could be achieved if you were not held back by legacy code.
Back in the real world, Apple made the correct choice in not buying BeOS.
how come, given the positive review you are giving it?
After Be Inc folded, this guy tried to get his "yellow Tab" company going for a while. It would stop and start. No one believed it would happen.
Then they released a product based on the BETA R5.1 release. Everyone was a bit confused. Was it legal? This went on for some years. They made about 4 or 5 betas, then a 1.0 release, then a 1.1 and 1.2. There was a BETA for 1.5 too.All along, people were shouting "this is not legal." They made a load of changes that implied they had source code access. A few notable community developers were involved. At least one ex-Be employee was also involved.
So, 2007, the proverbial brown stuff hit the fan. Firstly, ACCESS come out and say "we do not believe YellowTab has a legitimate license. Moreover, we have been trying to give them notice of this for many years"[2]. Then, JLG (former CEO of Be Inc) basically comes out in public saying "we never licensed anything to yellowtab". There was a complete breakdown of the timeline of events on OS News[4]. It was like getting a big box of popcorn and watching the biggest BeOS conspiracy theory since the Focus Shift unravel. It was compelling.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnussoft_ZETA
[1] Focust shift. They stopped the desktop in favour of Internet Appliances.
[2] http://www.osnews.com/story/17623/Access_Completely_Unaware_...
[3] http://www.osnews.com/story/17664/JLG_No_Agreement_Between_Y...
[4] http://www.osnews.com/story/17628/Timeline_of_Zeta_Developme...
I didn't know this came crashing down so hard. To me it was just another strange TV-shopping software product that nobody wanted and so it didn't sell. I was 16 and Windows was all I knew at that time.
HaikuOS is a good OS to try and use BeOS API calls to make it work like BeOS.
Just followed whatever guide I could find online.
Which I find quite bad, as it hinders OS research, specially in regards to safer OS architectures.
On the other hand, networking lagged far behind and while you could get into arguments about respective API quality there's no question NextStep was more comprehensive.
Also, according to Jean-Louis Gassée, an Apple engineer tried to buy BeOS from Palm for the then-unnamed smartphone project, as a third candidate between Fadell's vision of a souped-up Pixo--the iPod OS--and Forstall's vision of a cut-down OS X. Palm turned the engineer down. (Gassée didn't name the engineer, but it's hard not to suspect it was Dominic Giampaolo, who created BeFS and went on to create Apple's Spotlight and then, unsurprisingly, work on APFS.)
Be seemed to implode with that failure and by the time Palm bought them I doubt they had many good people left. Palm certainly didn't have the vision to invest significantly and I doubt many companies would have bet on a partnership with two failures.
In my opinion BeOS was technically superior in the sense that it was far more pervasively multithreaded, which meant UIs never locked up just because they were waiting on some slow computation or network resource. I still believe it's the case that BeOS on circa-2000 hardware was more responsive than any UI I ever used before or since, including MacOS X on 2017 hardware. Even just resizing a Finder window in 2017 on my MacBook lags the cursor in a way that never happened on BeOS.
Using Objective-C is just like C++ in regards to shooting yourself with the C subset common to both languages.
Foundation did not have that much support for heavy multi-processing. At least not at the same level as OS X.
It was all about UNIX programming model + Mach ports and tasks.
If you want to read about it, this is one of the few places where the documentation is still available online.
I grant that NeXT would have been more difficult for develop for when you did require parallelism for running compute intensive tasks on multiprocessor systems, but this was not the NeXT target market. BeOS got the ability to do parallelism by choosing the more fragile concurrency model, and apps paid for it in all cases. NeXT didn't do parallelism in the GUI apps, and was easier to develop for as a result.
Oh, it did. The system was the same as Unix, only difference is you got logged in as root, but it was certainly there.
(Developed BeOS applications in the late 1990s.)
This might in part be because the compositor which syncs screen updates at 60Hz (or whatever your monitor uses) while the mouse cursor is drawn on top of that via the GPU.
It is one of the reasons i really dislike compositors, they make everything feel sluggish. The only exception i know of is XFCE's compositor which has an option to not do any form of vsync so you get immediate updates.
(although TBH i do not use compositors at all since i do not see the point, considering they are mainly used for frilly stuff like translucent windows with shadows that i personally avoid anyway)
Not true at all, the BeOS ui locked up plenty when using any real apps that is. GoBE office suite would slow BeOS and its ui to a crawl, Mozilla would too, a few IDEs that were around did too. Trying to do anything beyond dail-up networking was a joke. There are a few other apps that did slow BeOS as well but they escape me as I haven't really used BeOS in 15 years.
BeOS was no more than a toy OS, I lost interest in it because Windows 2000, FreeBSD and Linux were more stable and just as fast on 2000-2004 era hardware.
That certainly doesn't match my experience: some apps like Mozilla could block their own window contents (but not window manager operations like moving or resizing) but the overall UI never blocked for anything except a video driver crash – and then only for a couple seconds as the kernel restarted that process.
As an example, on a dual P-90 I could simultaneously stream video to disk from a FireWire camcorder (which was actually a real-time challenge on that minimally-buffered hardware which Win98 & OS/2 couldn't meet except with a completely idle system), compile Mozilla (which, IIRC, took about an hour), and not even notice the impact on my email and web browsing activity. Aggregate disk transfer performance would be slower but a good real-time scheduler meant that you didn't have huge lags while reading every small file.
Windows and macOS still fail that test unless run with SSDs, and then only when e.g. Windows Update or the Xcode updates aren't running in the background.