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Comment by natas | Hacker News Reader

I wish apple had bought Be instead of NeXT

Heck no. BeOS was a tech demo that looked great because you couldn’t do anything complex with it. The list of missing features is endless. The longevity of the platform is unknowable. And there is no reason to think the injection of BeOS would have abated the steady decline of Apple’s relevance.

NeXT gave Apple a mature platform which has withstood the test of time, underpinning multiple architecture changes and adaptation to dramatically different devices. And more importantly, it gave Steve Jobs back to Apple, who orchestrated its recovery from a decline into irrelevance.

I did run BeOS for a period and it felt a pretty decent system to me. In fact it was my preferred platform for a good while.

> The list of missing features is endless.

I've never heard someone say this before. What's an important missing feature that other OSes had at the time?

A decent web browser was the most obvious problem for a long time. Be was different enough that it was hard to port anything that expected a Berkley socket interface, which was all internet applications.

Robust printer support and color management.

Which at the time would have been super super duper important for the just-hanging-in-there Mac user base. (I was one of them. It was just hanging in there.)

The Mac’s professional niche was printing. Prepress. Big press runs. QuarkXPress. And BeOS could barely print, and had no color management to speak of.

Yeah, DisplayPostscript/DisplayPDF was a very big deal and upgrade with MacOS X right from the start. That’s an underrated advantage that NeXTStep brought to the table.

Only the first server version of macOS X used DisplayPostscript, Apple replaced it with "quartz" . DisplayPDF. so they would not have to pay the license fee to Adobe.

Correct. But it’s important to note that PDF is an evolution of the postscript language; it shares all of the same drawing primitives. In some respect it’s analogous to JavaScript and JSON. (Yes, postscript is a full scripting language.)

It’s unlikely that Apple needed to strip much out of DisplayPostscript in order to rename it DisplayPDF (and then Quartz).

Starting with the basics, I don't think BeOS even supported multiple users, permissions, access control, etc. I did play around with it in the mid-1990's and recall it had none of this. Perhaps this changed in later versions. But NeXT, other Unix OSes, and NT were far ahead in that regard.

Desktop users didn't need any of that.

Maybe in 1990. As soon as you start networking your systems in an office network, you do. Keeping your personal files separate from the OS/system files is also a good practice in general, to prevent accidental corruption, etc.

‘Posted from my RIM BlackBerry’

Till this day I still miss the hardware mute/unmute button.

What do you mean? iPhones have a hardware button for mute/unmute?

I have a OnePlus 8T which also has a hardware mute switch. They're there, you've just gotta look around.

Hard to imagine Apple today without the Second Coming of Jobs. Incredible, aquihire. Hard to imagine JL Gasee leading Apple in the same way.

Would’ve been interesting if a post-return Jobs Apple had bought Palm in the 2000s, after Palm had acquired both Be Inc. and Handspring.

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