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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Nothing about that first generation of Power Mac reminds me of "fun". It reminds me more of "kernel panics right before CD-R is finalized" or "kernel panics whenever the network cable is unplugged" or sometimes "kernel panics whenever any network cable anywhere on campus is unplugged" and quite frequently "kernel panics if I try to scan a slide" oh and from time to time "installing MS Office from 60 floppies is a bit of a chore". Really cannot think of anything in my personal history of computing that was less fun than a mid-90s Mac.

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I am not even sure there was something that you could call a kernel in that time.

Apple was failing in their quest to secure a modern successor to MacOS 7.

It sure was a lot of fun looking at what they threw at it, and MacOS 9.2 was polished for sure. But without MacOS X, MacOS would have gone the way of BeOS and Amiga...

Still a pity it didn't literally go the way of BeOS by acquiring Be, like might have happened. I used both NeXTstep on 68k and BeOS on Intel, and much preferred the latter. NeXTstep was a crawling horror of abstractions, which might have made it more portable, but also made it clunky.

Anyone else remember having a top-spec iMac G4 in 2002 that couldn't even scroll or resize a window smoothly? Pathetic, and painfully slow. I gave up on 10.1.x and just ran Yellow Dog for about a year until I managed to lay my hands on a copy of 10.2, which was marginally better, but still much slower than Linux at the time. The iLamp was a wonderful machine, but very much let down by its intended OS.

Reacquiring Steve Jobs was probably worth it for Apple. ;-)

In 2002, Macworld was happy with the iMac G4 performance:

"Generally, using the iMac was a pleasure. It was speedy and responsive in most cases, although the Mac OS X version of iMovie was more sluggish than we’d expect from a G4-based machine."

PC Magazine gave it 4 stars and an Editor's Choice award. Readers gave it a 5 star member rating.

> Still a pity it didn't literally go the way of BeOS by acquiring Be

I disagree.

I loved BeOS. I still miss it. It was a great OS, and I preferred it to NeXTstep.

But it wasn't just the OS. NeXT had 2 key things Be didn't: [1] state-of-the-art dev tools [2] Steve Jobs.

Stealing from my own blog post on the subject...

Apple's then CEO Gil Amelio was considering buying former Apple VP Jean-Louis Gassée's company Be, for BeOS, or Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' company NeXT Computer, for OpenStep, the successor to NeXTstep.

They went with NeXT. BeOS was excellent - small, fast, efficient, modern, streamlined, and ran on Apple kit. The company was small, with some excellent engineers. The snag is, Gassée wanted a lot more for it than Apple was offering. Although this was bad - terminal - news for Be, it was probably all for the best for Apple.

BeOS was a great OS, but if Apple had moved to it, its 3rd party developers probably would not have, for the most part, and it would have killed the company.

Apple needed a follow-on for classic MacOS, it needed it urgently and it needed to be a blinder. BeOS did not have one crucial advantage that NeXTstep offered, and as such, it would not have had the same appeal, the devs probably would not have fallen in love with the new Apple OS, and Apple would have withered and died. What didn't BeOS have that NeXTstep had? Well...

NeXT was going cost a packet anyway - it was doing better and had some big names on board. Some were working for it, including several people who worked on the Mac in the early days, including, of course, Jobs himself. It also had some serious clients, including CERN - where Tim Berners-Lee developed the WorldWideWeb on a NeXTstation, and corporate clients such as the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS). NeXT's OS was also beautiful, sophisticated & very hi-tech - but didn't run on Macs, nor even on the Mac's PowerPC processors. It offered 2 major advantages over Be, though: #1, getting Steve Jobs back, and #2, one of the great strengths of NeXTstep was its world-class, industry-leading development tools. Be had nothing to rival these.

Amelio went with NeXT. If the Mac had to move to a new OS, then all Mac developers would have to learn to code for the new OS. Mac devs were pretty wedded to their platform, as were Mac users. And transitioning to a whole new OS, Apple really needed to get the devs on board.

Classic MacOS's dev tools were nothing special and quite hard work. Be was moving its dev tools over to GCC but whereas this was good, it was nothing amazing. But NeXT's Objective-C and Interface Builder were in a whole different league. Getting the Mac 3rd party devs to move to NeXTstep would be vastly easier than to BeOS, as NeXT's dev tools were almost universally recognised as among the best in the industry.

So that's what Amelio did, and history has proved him right.

They were wonderful computers for graphic software like Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop and QuarkXpress, video editing or music recording.

I always wondered if Apple/Be could have had OS X running faster than Apple/NeXT did.

The excuse was always that Be had no software. But NeXT stuff getting into OS X wasn't exactly perfect. Part of me thinks that at least one or two looked at getting A/UX or MAE or something on top of Be, just like Blue Box or whatever got onto OS X.

Apple and the Macintosh platform was on a downhill trajectory in the mid-1990s. Whether a hypothetical Be acquisition could have resulted in a successful operating system is kind of moot, because there's nothing to suggest that a Be acquisition would have arrested the overall decline.

The high order bit in Apple's resurgence was Steve Jobs. He's mostly known for his charisma on stage, but he was instrumental in restructuring the company from the ground up.

Despite early pains, the NeXT technology stack has proven to be an incredibly capable platform which has served Apple extraordinarily well as the basis for two decades of macOS development, and as the software foundation for the iPhone and iPad. The fact that it was underpinned by UNIX was how the Mac got taken seriously by developers in the mid-2000s.

There were no kernel panics back then. There was hardly a kernel per se until 8.6.

We had “Sorry, a system error occurred” bombs. It was “funny” that those errors remained in 1 bit color even though the entire system had full color support for decades.

You got that dialog only if you were (un)lucky.

System 6, 7, and 8 could crash in spectacularly visual ways, as some off-by-one memory access wrote into the VRAM.

I remember it was a point of pride that macs crashed in ways that Windows BSODs could only dream of.

Most common for me was a frozen cursor, actually. Probably once a week or more.

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