What I'd give for a glimpse of the timeline where Apple bought Be instead of NeXT.
I love BeOS.
I love BeOS more than you.
I love BeOS more than Jean-Louis Gassée.
BeOS wasn't ready. I was there I used BeOS as my daily driver on a maxxed-out Power Macintosh 6400. I have, today, that machine still running BeOS. I also have a second dual-PII running BeOS.
BeOS wasn't ready.
Apple was making a decision in 1996 for a deal that had to be struck and struck fast (1997). I started using BeOS in 1997 with one of the first Power Macintosh releases.
Those days (my days) it wasn't ready-- you had to pile patch on top of patch on top of community fix on top of some set of drivers some dude in Boise made in order to get things functional. I spent more time browsing BeOS listservs and download sites fixing things (at 56k) than using it.
Everyone is remembering fondly the R4.5/R5 days in late 1999. Three years after the December 1996 announcement of the NeXT acquisition. By then BeOS was... better. It was running on PCs and had a much larger user community. In 1996/7? Just a handful of BeBox owners and Mac users dumb enough (me) to try it.
Management would have been professionally negligent to choose it over NeXTStep.
In 1996, when Apple was up against the wall, NeXTStep was almost ten years old. All they had to do was buy the company, port it to PPC, and change some copyright messages and icons around. Took about two years.
BeOS would have required way more time, money, and expertise.
BeOS had no multi-user, no security (at all), an "aspirational" level of posix compliance, drivers that were a disaster, a network stack specifically designed to frustrate you, and no "companies that actually matter and no Gobe doesn't count" application support.
I get it. It was pretty. It was fast. French electro DJs loved it because it was low latency, and some audio tools were ported to it.
A userbase of French electro DJs doesn't pay the bills.
that market was what jobs had to pivot to (there's a great video where he pushes the rationalization of going to academia and Enterprise workstations) so that next could survive. and it infected apple from the inside.
the timeline everyone missed with beos is exactly apple not becoming the mix of ibm and Microsoft it is today.
And Steve Jobs as the founder of Apple had a political capital than JLG would have ever had.
While I know that the measly $250 million that Microsoft invested in Apple didn’t “save it”, only SJ could make peace with MS (only Nixon could go to China) and make the tough choices.
Founders are given a lot more leeway to make huge changes than any other manager.
Good example, the interface is incredibly snappy but no Wifi. I love the vision of BeOS but it probably would have been the death of Apple if they had gone with it.
https://hardware.besly.de/index.php?hardware=Wireless_Networ... https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/support-for-realtek-usb-wifi-...
I'd love to see what Apple would have done... but at the same time I fear very much it would have killed Apple.
BeOS was amazing, but its dev tools were nothing special while NeXT's were state of the art, industry-beating. That means no way to win Mac developers over to the new OS.
BeOS was as insecure as Classic MacOS, so no way to crack the server market (not that that worked) and no way to build nice locked-down little gadgets like iPhones.
And while Be had JLG, a very smart cookie, NeXT had Jobs, who had more vision in a day than JLG in a year.
Me, I wish a disappointed Be had done a deal with Acorn and ported to Arm.
Arms in the hundreds-of-MHz range were there and gigahertz-class was coming soon. Acorn had prototype multi-processor machines. Be had the best SMP support in the business in the late 1990s.
They could have reskinned BeOS to look more RISC OS like, run RO in a VM like OS X ran Classic in a VM, and offered both the thinnest lightest Web-capable laptops in the world, and compellingly-priced multiprocessor desktop workstations that didn't need a dozen cooling fans and could have gone to 4-way or even 8-way at an affordable price, which x86 and PowerPC chips could not touch.
BeOS would have been a fine foundation for smartphones and tablets. But of course it’s an open question whether Apple could have got that far in the 2000s without the return of Jobs. I suspect the company would have been acquired or merged with some unsuitable suitor like Sun.
source: kernighans readingbook, "unix a memoir" or something like that, great read
I wonder, though, it is based on MacOS somehow, right? Which is based on BSD. Could there be some left over multi-user plumbing sticking around in a technical sense?
Android is in a similar boat. They're still an important way to manage filesystem access of programs.
Most vendors have this enabled now and things like work accounts/MDM use the same system.
> [...] User data is partitioned into separate directories, each in their own data protection domains and protected by both UNIX permissions and sandboxing.
POSIX users are quite important.
Unless you _want_ your solitare game have the ability to enumerate your contacts and send mail.
They could have built that on top of BeOS just as well as on NextStep.
Because computing devices, and access to them, was not so ubiquitous back then. Families all had to share a single computer. Business users had to share access to large servers. There were no smartphones. Some had to travel to an educational setting just to see or use a computer.
I reckon it was the star power of Jobs more than the OS as such that saved Apple in the late 90s.
Jobs' ability to do the deal with MS to get MS Office on the Mac and a cash injection of $150m saved Apple at the time.
We were well into the 2000s before OSX really began to make a difference to Apple's fortunes, and no one could have predicted that OSX would be the foundation for the iPhone OS.
It wasnt even a given that OSX would be the OS for the iPhone during development.
But absolutly, NeXT was the best choice, even if the OSX Beta and 10.0 were almost unusably slow and buggy!
I was at the Paris Mac Expo when Jobs launched the beta, and the excitement was amazing!
Same year as the Key Lime iBooks IIRC. They rose up our of the floor on a pedastal if I'm remembering it right LOL.
I worked at Apple in the 90s, and saw all the demos of early releases of OSX and the confusing stack of platforms and tools. Jobs did the right thing ditching that!
Finally, I remember being at the Mac Expo in London and BE was there. We were standing around admiring the cool light bars on the front of the Be Box and its multitasking abilities.
If I'm remenbering right the lights on the front went up and down to indicate CPU usage. I could be imagining that?
Someone correct me if I'm misremembering :-)
It was years before Apple became profitable and the $50 million was a drop in the bucket
https://www.theregister.com/2004/11/03/review_hp_ipaq_6340/
I had one since 2000 as a daily driver and I loved the thing, but the app library was horrible.
The funny thing is, iPhone launched with no support for 3rd party apps. It took damned near a year for the first apps to arrive.
Blackberries were OK at the time, but my god RIM was so culturally conservative and Google at the time had no design sense that we'd probably be 10 years behind where we are now - and if we even had software keyboards they'd be terrible.
Which keep being forgotten, in these kind of discussions.
It would have settled C++ as the main systems language on desktop OSes, between Windows, and Mac Be OS.
Objective-C would have died, and Swift would never come to be.
Clang and LLVM probably would never had gotten Apple's sponsorship.
POSIX would have died on the desktop, as Be OS like other non UNIX OSes wasn't that keen in being UNIX like.
There wouldn't be a flock of Linux and BSD developers rushing out to buy Apple hardware, instead of sponsoring OEMs shipping PCs with those distributons.
A.K.A. that time when Steve Jobs acqui-hired Apple.
NeXT didn’t buy Apple obviously, but Steve Jobs and his lieutenants took over the most important positions within Apple.
Which made sense given the situation Apple found itself in.
A lot (most?) of Be engineers ended up at a company called Danger, which was bought by Google a few years later, and they all went on to be the original core team of Android. Some BeOS technologies even ended up in Android such as its Binder, which from memory the Be engineer working on it open sourced it just before Palm bought Be, and then he used the same code in Android.