4 ms·
I always thought of BeOS as basically a reboot of the NeXT. Same niche, same promise, same flop ;-(. BeOS was later so they avoided the H/W side-road. A good th
by acveilleux 10y ago
I always thought of BeOS as basically a reboot of the NeXT. Same niche, same promise, same flop ;-(. BeOS was later so they avoided the H/W side-road. A good thing.
- philjohn 10y agoThey didn't - BEOS was first launched only for their own line of hardware, the BeBox - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox
- acveilleux 10y agoDidn't know that. The numbers sold are tiny.
- baldfat 10y agoTechnologically it didn't flop, nor did Amiga. Inferior technology won in the 90s.
- huxley 10y agoNo, it was a different niche, different promise and only one of them flopped (after all NeXTSTEP lives on as macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, etc) NeXTSTEP was Steve Jobs' attempt to build an OS that fulfilled the promise of what he saw during his visit to PARC (as opposed to just the graphical interface which is what was implemented with the Mac). It was a true-multi-user Unix with a beautiful UI and an object-oriented framework that was far more influential than its marketshare would have suggested (it led to Microsoft starting Cairo, IBM building WorkplaceOS, and Apple/IBM sinking fortunes and thousands of man-hours into Taligent/Pink). BeOS was Jean-Louis Gasse's attempt to build a successor to the Mac (including Quicktime which came after Jobs) but built to be multiprocessor and SMT (symmetric multitasking) friendly from the start. It was --like the Mac-- a single-user OS but intended to extract all the performance possible from "modern hardware" ACCESS Co. the current owner of the PalmOS and BeOS assets basically frittered away whatever potential BeOS had. So it definitely flopped.