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Comment by morio | Hacker News Reader

I used to work for Be in Menlo Park in a previous life and I can confirm that the code base quality would have made for a very bad outcome for Apple. Security was the least of the numerous serious issues. That said BeOS somewhat still exists in spirit as a lot of folks from Be went to build/contribute to Android.

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> a lot of folks from Be went to build/contribute to Android.

Does that include the quality and security perspective as well? ;-) j/k

Having never crossed paths with a former Be employee before, __thank you so much__ for your contribution. BeOS was so instrumental to my perspective on computing and operating systems (and potentially the conception of my disdain for what Microsoft did to the world of operating systems around the turn of the century).

From a user perspective, BeOS was nearly perfect. Great UI and utilities, POSIX command line, so fast and responsive. The "install to Windows" option was amazing for trying things out. BeFS was wonderful (it's nice to see Mr. Giampaolo's work continue in macOS).

> a lot of folks from Be went to build/contribute to Android.

That's correct, the IPC in AOSP, Binder, is basically borrow from BeOS

I too used to work at Be (Hi!) as well as developed applications for BeOS. I also worked at Apple on various releases of OS X. NextStep was far ahead of BeOS on multiple fronts. BeOS was a lot of fun to work on, but only scratched the surface of what was needed for a truly commercial general purpose OS. If Apple would have acquired Be instead of Next, who knows what the world would be like today. Apple ended up with a large number of former Be employess as well (some directly and others from Eazel.)

I can never let a thread about BeOS go by without adding my two cents, because I also worked at Be in Menlo Park, back in the day. (I went down with the ship and got laid off as they went out of business.)

I was sore about it at the time, but I agree that Apple made the right decision by choosing NextStep over BeOS. If for no other reason, because that's what brought Jobs back. It's hard to imagine Apple making their stunning comeback without him.

Thanks a lot! I ran BeOS fulltime for a few years (R3/4/5) and I'm looking at a BeOS "the Media OS" poster at my wall here. Fond memories!

Care to share where you got the poster?

It was not in the box. Back then, it was still quite difficult to get a hold on an actual R3 box here in Europe. There was 1 official reseller here in the Netherlands and I actually bought their official demo machine: the famous first dual processor Abit BP6 with 2x 400Mhz Celeron processors. When picking it up in their office I spotted the poster and asked if I may have it. Still got a T-Shirt and a hat too ;-).

I vaguely remember it being in the box (bought R4, R4.5, and R5).

And apparently a couple Amiga gurus made their way to Be (see: Fred Fish).

I’d always heard that after Amiga (and Be) many decided to opt for Linux for philosophical reasons.

Which is ironic, given that I am yet to see a GNU/Linux based hardware setup that matches the experience, hence why I went back to macOS/Windows that much a much closer multimedia experience.

Wow! Thanks so much for working on BeOS. This was a super fun OS to use.

I'm curious what sort of issues you have in mind. I was never very familiar with BeOS but from what I understood the issue with it was more that its responsiveness came from very heavy use of multi-threading, but that also made it very hard to write robust apps for it as, in effect, all app code had to be thread safe. App devs found that condition too hard to handle.

Can I assume that the quality issues were somewhat related to that? BeOS devs found it no easier to write thread safe code in C++ than app devs did?

I’m the guy who left a case of champagne at the office one weekend, to celebrate an early release.

Thanks for the memories.

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