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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

If they could have worked out a deal to license MacOS X in the late 90s, it would have been a real game changer. Its too bad Jobs would not give Dell reasonable terms.

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Mac OSX Server wasn't very popular. I'm guessing since Dell made very respectable servers in the 90's this was an effort to put a kind of NeXT server on Dell hardware, or at least an early version of Mac OSX Server.

nit: did macos x even exist in the 90s? Or did you mean macos 9?

MacOSX was released in 2001, so it would have had to have been System 7/8/9 by that point.

Work porting System 7/8/9 to Intel would have been completely wasted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

It might have been worth it in 1992. By 1998 there was no point.

That is a really interesting what-if scenario, but I don't think the mid-90s Apple corporate management would have been willing to go through with it. At the very least they would have tried to lock it down to Apple designed Intel hardware, they've never been able to let go of being a hardware company.

If that's the case, that would be fun.

Give Dell an outdated OS, and launch a brand new OS yourself

I think at that stage it was still NextStep morphing into Rhapsody/OS X

Mac OS X was a work in progress during the late 90s. The Apple/NeXT merger was in 1996, there were developer releases of Rhapsody (with x86 support) in 1997 and 1998, and Mac OS X Server 1.0 was released in 1999. But the first public beta of Mac OS X with the Aqua UI was in 2000, and OS X version 10.0 was in 2001. So any deal negotiated in the late 90s to bring Mac OS X to Intel PCs would have taken a few years to come to fruition, but Apple did have a usable x86 operating system to base negotiations on in the late 90s.

OPENSTEP was running on x86 even before the merger. The work would have been mostly to make it look and feel more like what Mac OS users were familiar with, and adding the ability to run "Classic" Mac OS applications.

True, but OPENSTEP on its own would not have been of much interest to Dell given the very small software ecosystem. The promise of also inheriting the Mac application ecosystem made Mac OS X far more marketable.

I used to work on OpenStep and it was nothing like the previous version of MacOS; I used to work on MacOS before OpenStep.

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