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Comment by JAFTEM | Hacker News Reader

I'm too young to know, so I'm guessing, but was this move also to get Jobs back? I think not long after he became CEO.

Very much so. There were two primary candidates in the running, NeXT and Be Inc., run by Jean-Louis Gassée, previously the president of Apple Europe.

Some very strong arguments have been made for why BeOS would have been a better choice for Apple at the time, but the truth is that Be was always a second choice for Apple if NeXT could not be acquired.

Apple got a great two for one deal by acquiring both a solid UNIX-based foundation for their future and Steve Jobs, but Jobs was really the crown jewel. Apple was in a terrible position at the time, and most industry watchers didn't expect them to survive.

WIRED ran their famous "101 Ways to Save Apple" cover story around that time, and Michael Dell made his infamous quote that Apple should "shut down and give the money back to the shareholders."

It really was a bleak time, and a technology solution was only part of what Apple needed. Steve Jobs' return was what the acquisition was ultimately about.

1990something: >Michael Dell made his infamous quote that Apple should "shut down and give the money back to the shareholders."

2017: Who's Michael Dell?

Steve Jobs is better known dead than Michael Dell is alive.

Steve emailed Apple employees in 06, saying:

> It turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future. Based on today's stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today.

> 2017: Who's Michael Dell?

He's a guy worth $23.5B (says Google today).

Dell may not be very exciting, but Michael Dell is doing fine.

> Michael Dell made his infamous quote that Apple should "shut down and give the money back to the shareholders."

In a bizarre turn of events, he took Dell (the company) off the stock market himself making it non-publicly owned.

Don't forget that Dell still has twice the market share of Apple on laptops. Apple is successful today because of the iPhone, but Dell is still doing great.

Their market cap is $24 billion, while Apple is at $900 billion, and is in the race to become the world's first trillion-dollar company.

Even Acer (remember them) is worth almost 3x what Dell is today.

Back in the day there was a clear distinction between personal computers and dedicated workstations. Personal computers were cheap, underpowered and used wimpy operating systems and workstations were expensive, powerful and used powerful operating systems. At some point personal computers became powerful enough to run workstation operating systems so Microsoft started working on Windows NT after hiring workstation guys like Dave Cutler. Dave Cutler had worked on VMS which was one of the few non Unix-based workstation operating systems of the day. Apple purchased NeXT to acquire its workstation team and tech and as a bonus they got Steve Jobs who founded that company after leaving Apple. Every Windows OS of today descends from NT and every version of Mac OS X descends from NeXTSTEP. Dedicated workstation companies like Sun and SGI couldn't compete with much cheaper workstation PCs and nowadays just about every modern personal computer on the planet uses a workstation OS.

The move was more to acquire a rock solid Unix/BSD based operating system with serious multitasking functionality, for the purpose of building professional workstations... If you look at the G4 power macs and G4 powerbook laptops from the 2000 to 2006 era the result is evident. Legacy MacOS on PowerPC was a dead end.

At that time in 1996 they knew that Microsoft was going to take the NT kernel and build it into something very stable and more consumer friendly. NT 3.5 and NT4.0 never saw widespread consumer adoption, only in corporate environments. But the later release of Windows 2000 was significantly more stable and capable than legacy MacOS.

Apple even considered licensing the NT kernel before the acquisition: http://lowendmac.com/2013/the-rise-and-fall-of-apples-gil-am...

I forgot about that. Windows NT 3.5 and I think 4.0 were ported to the DEC Alpha CPU architecture and shipped on a number of (very expensive) DEC workstations at the time. So it is not totally nuts to possibly port it to the then-current Apple/Motorola PowerPC architecture as well.

https://www.google.com/search?q=dec+alpha+windows+nt&ie=utf-...

I thought there once was a Windows NT version for PowerPC, but it was never released, or was pulled short after release. Never seen it in action though.

It was released; in fact, I actually have a Windows NT 4.0 CD that has a PowerPC version on the disk, alongside an x86 version.

But short-lived. First was NT 3.51, and it did not even make it to NT4 SP3.

Even Windows 95/98 had a significantly stronger multitasking architecture than classic Mac OS.

Though OS/2 2.0 would have been even better once sound etc was added. Another reason why I disliked the entire debacle.

The only thing I miss from OS/2 is SOM, which was much better than COM.

I remember BeOS was being developed to replace tor MacOS and they had the BeBox, pre-emptive multitasking and even multiprocessor support. Jean-Louis Gassee never got the opportunity.

EDIT: Actually he HAD the opportunity and because he passed it up we have Mac OS X today!!

From Wikipedia:

In 1996, Apple Computer decided to abandon Copland, the project to rewrite and modernize the Macintosh operating system. BeOS had many of the features Apple sought, and around Christmas time they offered to buy Be for $120 million, later raising their bid to $200 million. However, despite estimates of Be's total worth at approximately $80 million,[citation needed] Gassée held out for $275 million, and Apple balked. In a surprise move, Apple went on to purchase NeXT, the company their former co-founder Steve Jobs had earlier left Apple to found, for $429 million, with the high price justified by Apple getting Jobs and his NeXT engineers in tow. NeXTSTEP was used as the basis for their new operating system, Mac OS X.

It's basically Napoleon coming back to defeat Duke Wellington except he mops the floor with him.

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