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This interview with Scott Holdaway from 1999 has more on the OpenDoc/Gobe transition: https://birdhouse.org/beos/bible/bos/int_holdaway.html

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That’s super interesting because it was written while they still existed and BeOS could have a future. But even then they weren’t sure about Be but proceeded anyway.

Gotta love the passion for the OS. As megacorps unify all of technology, I feel like this passion and rooting for an underdog is getting lost. Perhaps that’s just the market and technology maturing and solving peoples needs. Yet the nerd in me loves the idea of writing for an obscure platform simply for the enjoyment of it.

For some reason things seemed more possible back then for other platforms. Maybe it was just the afterglow of the personal computer era of the 80s? The Gobe team took a risk, I took a risk with my video editor and a many other teams dove into making apps for BeOS knowing it was a gamble. We were all also much younger, but in general the environment seemed more open. I should emphasis "seemed" as Microsoft came along and made life very hard for Be and Eazel and I am sure others who tried to get their operating systems onto PC hardware.

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