7 ms·

The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X

92 points by elblanco 17y ago

wmf 17y ago
This is a good story (it contains some details that I don't think were publicly revealed back in 1996) but the title is misleading since NT plays a very minor part. Edit: I'm not sure which embarrasses me more; the fact that this old story got 30 points or that my trivial comment got 16 points.
- pyre 17y ago
  I agree. Sensationalist title that isn't even the real title of the article.
  - wmf 17y ago
    To be fair, it is right up at the top of the page.
    - pyre 17y ago
      I looked at the <title> and it says "Apple Confidential: The Acquisition of NeXT". Since the actual title at the top of the page isn't bold or a larger text size I tuned it out thinking it was an advertisement.
      - jrockway 17y ago
        The Internet has ads?
      - elblanco 17y ago
        I didn't know HN guidelines required one to hunt through the HTML source of a page to get the title.
        pyre 17y ago
        I thought that my response was an implicit agreement that I was wrong and missed the actual title of the article. Instead I get an intellectually disingenuous response implying that I 'noticed' the <title> of the page because I decided to look at the HTML source for some strange reason.
        elblanco 17y ago
        You were probably just nostalgic for the simplicity of late 90's web code.
  - elblanco 17y ago
    Dunno, that's the real title of the article up at the top of the page.
- mortenjorck 17y ago
  Indeed, this might at least be better titled "The Day They Almost Decided To Put BeOS On The Mac Instead Of OS X" But that's a genuinely fascinating alternate-history concept -- Windows NT was never likely, but from the story, it seems as if Be almost made it, foiled only by its founder's hubris. What if Jean-Louis Gassée had settled for one of Apple's numerous offers? It seems he had it in the bag for months, holding out for more until he got too greedy and Apple turned to Jobs. If Gassée hadn't been blinded by the dollar signs, what would have become of BeOS in Apple's hands? Would an alternate-universe, Be-based OSX have still saved the company? Would Jobs have gone down with his NeXT ship, and simply laid low for the 2000s? We'd have no iPod, no iPhone; Apple in 2010 would be either a Sun or an SGI. Or maybe it couldn't have happened any other way. Maybe Jobs knew Gassée would push his luck too far and timed NeXT's overtures to Apple. Maybe he had done all the research, knew all the angles, and had planned this from the start. Maybe, just maybe, there was no force of nature that could stop Jobs' return to Apple.
  - cookiecaper 17y ago
    >We'd have no iPod, no iPhone; Apple in 2010 would be either a Sun or an SGI. And why in your hypothetical alternate universe where Apple went with Be instead of NeXT is this a given? You don't know that there'd be no iPod or iPhone, and you don't know that Apple would end up like SGI or Sun. Why do you assume that Jobs and NeXT are so important? Surely history turns on small hinges, but that doesn't necessarily mean the decision to go with Be would have doomed Apple to failure. Things would probably be much different today with the actual products, but there's no reason to believe that Apple wouldn't have released an MP3 player or a phone, or that it wouldn't be stylish.
    - mediaman 17y ago
      Jobs, and the team he hired, including Jon Ive, were the driving force behind the iMac, iPod, and iPhone designs. If Apple felt no need to hire Jobs because they had Be, why would it be reasonable to presume they would still create the same game-changing products that were primarily created by the team Jobs hired, who were not employed at Apple prior to his arrival? Even Tim Cook, Apple's widely respected COO, was hired by Steve in 1998.
- kls 17y ago
  Actually at the time Apple was working towards what was termed the Common Hardware Reference Platform or CHRP in which the main goal was to be able to run the new NT being developed, on Apple hardware. It actually happened too, for a brief time there was a NT 4 PPC version that ran on the CHRP platform. The thinking was we will give it our all and if all best efforts fail we will just become a high-end windows platform. The management at the time really did not understand the dynamics of their customer bases. To this day, I am dumbfounded as to how they survived. That first iMac landed at a crucial time and took off like wildfire. As well someone started listening to the right people because if I remember correctly there was some pretty open Steve hating on the board, how he ascended to power again is another one in a million shot.
leej 17y ago
great movie idea!
jacobolus 17y ago
> “Amelio now admits that Apple overpaid for NeXT” Really? The result seems to have been worth the price to Apple shareholders.
- wmf 17y ago
  "now" = 1999 when the book was written. The "Apple is doomed" perma-meme was still going in those days.
  - jacobolus 17y ago
    Yes, I realize. I was pointing out that his assessment may have been a bit off. :-)
- lsb 17y ago
  It's from a book in 1999. As of 1998, the share price hadn't soared as much as they'd hoped.
- watmough 17y ago
  Yep, in 1996 I hired on with an oil co in Scotland. One of my first tasks was to migrate everything from gawdawful Performa 6100s to Windows 95 boxes and laptops. Being in IT, I was lumbered with one of said Performa's. It was awful. Unstable, slow. It was sad, since 4 years before in 92, I'd had a dream box Mac IIcx on my desk. Pre-Internet of course. Thank goodness for NeXT and NeXTStep. OS X has done nothing but get better and better with every release.
- gwern 17y ago
  Personally, I'm wondering how 200m for Be is extravagant and unthinkable and absolutely absurd, but 427m for NextStep is absolutely fine.
  - wmf 17y ago
    That point was made repeatedly by BeOS fanboys in the wake of the deal, but as the article says, "the BeOS still needed three years of additional expensive development before it could ship (it didn't have any printer drivers, didn't support file sharing, wasn't available in languages other than English, and didn't run existing Mac applications)." In retrospect, Apple gave NeXTSTEP a pretty thorough multi-year overhaul as well, so maybe BeOS would have been fine.
tybris 17y ago
To be honest, if Windows NT had lived up to its promise it would have been the greatest OS of all time.
- lallysingh 17y ago
  Ugh, I remember what they promised in Cairo. What was promised wasn't realistic; making it inappropriate to consider NT as having failed by not meeting expectations.
- bediger 17y ago
  Isn't that anthropomorphizing NT a bit? I mean, it's an OS, not a being. And the "promise" turned out to be mostly hype, at least in the 1995-1996 time frame. "A better Unix than Unix", "The Best Designed Operatings System", stuff like that is almost totally illogical, just an emotional appeal really. If you read Helen Custer's "Inside Windows NT" you might have been excused for thinking you were reading about Mach 2.5, but I'm not sure what relation the OS described by "Inside Windows NT" (1st ed) had to the real Windows NT 3.1. So I'm still confused about what "promise" NT had.
jister 17y ago
if ("Windows" == "controversial") views > more

92 points by elblanco 17y ago

wmf 17y ago

This is a good story (it contains some details that I don't think were publicly revealed back in 1996) but the title is misleading since NT plays a very minor part. Edit: I'm not sure which embarrasses me more; the fact that this old story got 30 points or that my trivial comment got 16 points.

pyre 17y ago
I agree. Sensationalist title that isn't even the real title of the article.
- wmf 17y ago
  To be fair, it is right up at the top of the page.
  - pyre 17y ago
    I looked at the <title> and it says "Apple Confidential: The Acquisition of NeXT". Since the actual title at the top of the page isn't bold or a larger text size I tuned it out thinking it was an advertisement.
    - jrockway 17y ago
      The Internet has ads?
    - elblanco 17y ago
      I didn't know HN guidelines required one to hunt through the HTML source of a page to get the title.
      - pyre 17y ago
        I thought that my response was an implicit agreement that I was wrong and missed the actual title of the article. Instead I get an intellectually disingenuous response implying that I 'noticed' the <title> of the page because I decided to look at the HTML source for some strange reason.
        elblanco 17y ago
        You were probably just nostalgic for the simplicity of late 90's web code.
- elblanco 17y ago
  Dunno, that's the real title of the article up at the top of the page.
mortenjorck 17y ago
Indeed, this might at least be better titled "The Day They Almost Decided To Put BeOS On The Mac Instead Of OS X" But that's a genuinely fascinating alternate-history concept -- Windows NT was never likely, but from the story, it seems as if Be almost made it, foiled only by its founder's hubris. What if Jean-Louis Gassée had settled for one of Apple's numerous offers? It seems he had it in the bag for months, holding out for more until he got too greedy and Apple turned to Jobs. If Gassée hadn't been blinded by the dollar signs, what would have become of BeOS in Apple's hands? Would an alternate-universe, Be-based OSX have still saved the company? Would Jobs have gone down with his NeXT ship, and simply laid low for the 2000s? We'd have no iPod, no iPhone; Apple in 2010 would be either a Sun or an SGI. Or maybe it couldn't have happened any other way. Maybe Jobs knew Gassée would push his luck too far and timed NeXT's overtures to Apple. Maybe he had done all the research, knew all the angles, and had planned this from the start. Maybe, just maybe, there was no force of nature that could stop Jobs' return to Apple.
- cookiecaper 17y ago
  >We'd have no iPod, no iPhone; Apple in 2010 would be either a Sun or an SGI. And why in your hypothetical alternate universe where Apple went with Be instead of NeXT is this a given? You don't know that there'd be no iPod or iPhone, and you don't know that Apple would end up like SGI or Sun. Why do you assume that Jobs and NeXT are so important? Surely history turns on small hinges, but that doesn't necessarily mean the decision to go with Be would have doomed Apple to failure. Things would probably be much different today with the actual products, but there's no reason to believe that Apple wouldn't have released an MP3 player or a phone, or that it wouldn't be stylish.
  - mediaman 17y ago
    Jobs, and the team he hired, including Jon Ive, were the driving force behind the iMac, iPod, and iPhone designs. If Apple felt no need to hire Jobs because they had Be, why would it be reasonable to presume they would still create the same game-changing products that were primarily created by the team Jobs hired, who were not employed at Apple prior to his arrival? Even Tim Cook, Apple's widely respected COO, was hired by Steve in 1998.
kls 17y ago
Actually at the time Apple was working towards what was termed the Common Hardware Reference Platform or CHRP in which the main goal was to be able to run the new NT being developed, on Apple hardware. It actually happened too, for a brief time there was a NT 4 PPC version that ran on the CHRP platform. The thinking was we will give it our all and if all best efforts fail we will just become a high-end windows platform. The management at the time really did not understand the dynamics of their customer bases. To this day, I am dumbfounded as to how they survived. That first iMac landed at a crucial time and took off like wildfire. As well someone started listening to the right people because if I remember correctly there was some pretty open Steve hating on the board, how he ascended to power again is another one in a million shot.

leej 17y ago

great movie idea!

jacobolus 17y ago

> “Amelio now admits that Apple overpaid for NeXT” Really? The result seems to have been worth the price to Apple shareholders.

wmf 17y ago
"now" = 1999 when the book was written. The "Apple is doomed" perma-meme was still going in those days.
- jacobolus 17y ago
  Yes, I realize. I was pointing out that his assessment may have been a bit off. :-)
lsb 17y ago
It's from a book in 1999. As of 1998, the share price hadn't soared as much as they'd hoped.
watmough 17y ago
Yep, in 1996 I hired on with an oil co in Scotland. One of my first tasks was to migrate everything from gawdawful Performa 6100s to Windows 95 boxes and laptops. Being in IT, I was lumbered with one of said Performa's. It was awful. Unstable, slow. It was sad, since 4 years before in 92, I'd had a dream box Mac IIcx on my desk. Pre-Internet of course. Thank goodness for NeXT and NeXTStep. OS X has done nothing but get better and better with every release.
gwern 17y ago
Personally, I'm wondering how 200m for Be is extravagant and unthinkable and absolutely absurd, but 427m for NextStep is absolutely fine.
- wmf 17y ago
  That point was made repeatedly by BeOS fanboys in the wake of the deal, but as the article says, "the BeOS still needed three years of additional expensive development before it could ship (it didn't have any printer drivers, didn't support file sharing, wasn't available in languages other than English, and didn't run existing Mac applications)." In retrospect, Apple gave NeXTSTEP a pretty thorough multi-year overhaul as well, so maybe BeOS would have been fine.

tybris 17y ago

To be honest, if Windows NT had lived up to its promise it would have been the greatest OS of all time.

lallysingh 17y ago
Ugh, I remember what they promised in Cairo. What was promised wasn't realistic; making it inappropriate to consider NT as having failed by not meeting expectations.
bediger 17y ago
Isn't that anthropomorphizing NT a bit? I mean, it's an OS, not a being. And the "promise" turned out to be mostly hype, at least in the 1995-1996 time frame. "A better Unix than Unix", "The Best Designed Operatings System", stuff like that is almost totally illogical, just an emotional appeal really. If you read Helen Custer's "Inside Windows NT" you might have been excused for thinking you were reading about Mach 2.5, but I'm not sure what relation the OS described by "Inside Windows NT" (1st ed) had to the real Windows NT 3.1. So I'm still confused about what "promise" NT had.

jister 17y ago

if ("Windows" == "controversial") views > more