3 ms·

> It was IMHO a "revolution" that - for whatever reasons - never happened. As best i can tell, the history of computers has shown again and again that the mark

> It was IMHO a "revolution" that - for whatever reasons - never happened. As best i can tell, the history of computers has shown again and again that the market will tolerate at best 2 major commercial platforms. Anyone trying to introduce a third will face a steep entry requirement. Damn it, Jobs could not get Next off the ground when it was basically BSD with a pretty face. He needed the brand name recognition of Apple to effectively bring a revamped Next to the world (OSX). And here came another contender that was neither one of the established platforms (Apple and Microsoft), nor was it a _nix derivative (Next ran on a BSD kernel). And it tried to pitch a vertically integrated stack in the form of BeOS running on Bebox.

jaclaz 10y ago
>Damn it, Jobs could not get Next off the ground when it was basically BSD with a pretty face. He needed the brand name recognition of Apple to effectively bring a revamped Next to the world (OSX). Alow me to partially disagree, you are jumping over an important passage, System 6/7/8 on the Mac were there in those years. In - say - 1993 System 7 ran circles around DOS and Windows 3.1/3.11, even if a part of that was due to comparatively more powerful (and very costly) hardware, it was definitely ahead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7 If you bought a computer and OS in pre-Windows NT era, you could choose between DOS+Windows 3.1 and System 7, but the Mac hardware costed something like double the PC. A LC500 was something around US$ 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC_500_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC_500_series A Powerbook 160 double that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_160 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_160 At the time a comparable PC or laptop was half of that. BeOS came out when Windows 95 was all the rage and MacOS started to become outdated, circa 1995/1996, it ran on "normal" hardware and offered much better performance than Windows, but home users were happy with Windows 95 and businesses had NT 4.00 in the meantime, that - love it or hate it - was rock solid.

jaclaz 10y ago

>Damn it, Jobs could not get Next off the ground when it was basically BSD with a pretty face. He needed the brand name recognition of Apple to effectively bring a revamped Next to the world (OSX). Alow me to partially disagree, you are jumping over an important passage, System 6/7/8 on the Mac were there in those years. In - say - 1993 System 7 ran circles around DOS and Windows 3.1/3.11, even if a part of that was due to comparatively more powerful (and very costly) hardware, it was definitely ahead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7 If you bought a computer and OS in pre-Windows NT era, you could choose between DOS+Windows 3.1 and System 7, but the Mac hardware costed something like double the PC. A LC500 was something around US$ 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC_500_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC_500_series A Powerbook 160 double that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_160 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_160 At the time a comparable PC or laptop was half of that. BeOS came out when Windows 95 was all the rage and MacOS started to become outdated, circa 1995/1996, it ran on "normal" hardware and offered much better performance than Windows, but home users were happy with Windows 95 and businesses had NT 4.00 in the meantime, that - love it or hate it - was rock solid.