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Comment by eatmyshorts | Hacker News Reader

I am not so sure. At the time I thought BeOS was a better purchase. I wonder what could have been if Apple had gone with Gasse instead of Jobs.

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Steve knew how powerful and essential networking was to the compute paradigm we accept.

Be’s TCP stack was never very good. It never had big money applications like Frame or Illustrator, and lacked the robust dev platform (and paying customers) that Next had.

BeOS was also a single-user OS, which made it a nonstarter for businesses. It wouldn't fit within corporate IT as it existed at the time. NeXT, however, and Mac OS X based in large part on it were both multi-user OSes which could actually be used by businesses more reasonably.

And I'm using "business" in a generic sense. This was an important quality for schools, as well, where Macs were incredibly popular (for a number of reasons, including favorable pricing from Apple and historical support for schools since the 80s). Single user OSes just don't fit within any organization trying to at least pretend to have decent IT.

I am mystified by your comment.

How has OS X's "multi-userness" helped organizations?

Do you literally mean two or more people using the same Mac?

Has it been useful for organizations that users can ssh into Macs? Or is Apple Remote Desktop involved? (Does Apple Remote Desktop even allow 2 people two use two instance of OS X's GUI at the same time?)

Or by "multi-user" do you refer to the services that can be enabled using the "Sharing" pane of System Preferences (e.g., file sharing, printer sharing, remote management, internet sharing)?

I mean that BeOS didn’t have a way to login as separate people and use the same computer at different times with a clear separation of access rights. Mac OS X did, like most Unix or Unix-related OSes.

It’s not about simultaneous use, but standard user management, access control, and permissions.

Though yes, technically this also allows multiple to access it simultaneously via ssh and other things that’s not the important part for IT in this instance.

Thanks. For some reason I couldnt think of that on my own.

At a guess it wouldn't be the most valuable company in the world today.

May be BeOS is better, but I would bet money Gasse wouldn't have save Apple. In the end it was NEXT, the OS, Hardware, Software or Engineers they were buying. It was Steve Jobs.

This entire subthread is silly.

- BeOS was not a great choice, though certain aspects were much better than NeXT, primarily the filesystem. There were a lot of things missing, but BeOS's lack of printer support was the headline issue; seems ridiculous today, but "desktop publishing" still mattered to Apple at the time, and it spoke to immaturity of the BeOS graphics stack.

- Aside from WebObjects, the vaunted NeXT software stack was bitrotting. It was buggy and unstable on commodity PC hardware, and it was never polished enough for non-Unix-savvy end users. Apple spent something like six years bringing it up to a consumer-ready spec before they felt comfortable dropping classic Mac OS.

- The original iPod used no NeXT-derived software.

- But without the NeXT purchase, Apple wouldn't have gotten Steve back.

- Without Steve back at Apple, the iPod wouldn't have existed.

- Without the iPod, you don't get the iPhone.

tl;dr: As a result, they bought back Jobs

Oh, I agree. But at the time, I thought BeOS had the edge from a technical standpoint. With Gasse, I doubt we would have seen the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Hindsight is 20/20.

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