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.
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.
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.
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.
My argument is that whoever possesses a particular identity should be the ultimate arbiter of the "correct" way to represent it.
Basically, you don't get to control what others call you.
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