7 ms·

Of course, if they bought Be and not NeXT (which is consistently mis-capitalized), they wouldn't have gotten Jobs back. Apple very nearly went under before Jobs

Of course, if they bought Be and not NeXT (which is consistently mis-capitalized), they wouldn't have gotten Jobs back. Apple very nearly went under before Jobs brought it back from the brink; had BeOS become the next MacOS, there may not have been a next MacOS.

bluedino 9y ago
Right, without Jobs there's no iPod or iPhone to run BSD
CharlesW 9y ago
> Of course, if they bought Be and not NeXT […], they wouldn't have gotten Jobs back. Yep. That's an Apple fan's Darkest Timeline, no doubt. Having been in Apple developer relations at the time, my perspective is that the specific OS choice was irrelevant to Apple's future success. By all accounts, BeOS would've also been a fine technology platform for Apple's future. Carbon apparently worked fine on it. And Mac OS X was far from a sure thing, for some time — if early public releases were uninspiring, early developer releases were actively demoralizing. And yet somehow, we had to make developers believe. The only way that could work is if we believed. And Steve Jobs made us believe. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)
- KernelPanic0 9y ago
  At the time I hoped that Apple would buy the Amiga company and fix AmigaOS to run Classic Mac stuff and merge both systems into PowerPC systems and then later on use Intel X86 chips. Amiga still exists but it is very expensive, AmigaOS has evolved a lot and AROS is like an open source AmigaOS 3.X that can be ported to other platforms. Apple can still buy out Amiga and the license to AmigaOS and make high end PowerPC workstations and servers out of them and install BSD or Linux on them. The Amiga One was better running Linux than AmigaOS, so just make an Amiga API WINE like software that runs AmigaOS apps in Linux. Then make Intel based versions to save money. Just think Apple could use HaikuOS, MacOS, AmigaOS, AROS, Linux, etc on their Mac line using Intel chips, and contribute to their development to take on Microsoft and Windows. Yet Apple could make a deal with Valve to port SteamOS to their older Intel Macs to make use of them for playing games on them, etc. Give them PowerMac specs as well to make a PowerPC version of SteamOS.
  - eropple 9y ago
    > Yet Apple could make a deal with Valve to port SteamOS to their older Intel Macs to make use of them for playing games on them, etc. Give them PowerMac specs as well to make a PowerPC version of SteamOS. I am unclear why anyone but a fragmentary, fingernail-thin minority would want this.
- JKCalhoun 9y ago
  > By all accounts, BeOS would've also been a fine technology platform for Apple's future. I have heard the opposite. I liked the slick look of BeOS, but have been told since that there was very little there there. I don't know either way.
  - memsom 9y ago
    The BeOS was all smoke and mirrors. It worked really well to the end user, yes. But it was extremely lean under the hood. I think getting it to do what the baseline of Mac OS 9 did would have taken significant engineering. The issue was stuff we take for granted these days, like networking (netserver, shudder!), printing (severely lacking drivers), USB (barely worked in R5.03, slightly better if you installed the leaked BETA USB stacks)... stuff like that. It all "sort of" worked. But it still wasn't completely ready when Be Inc closed their doors. And this was even after they completely re-wrote the network stack (aka BONE.)
    - badsectoracula 9y ago
      Isn't all that stuff about drivers? If Apple got BeOS they would only need to implement drivers for their own hardware and ignore anything else. EDIT: See? This is why comment voting is a bad idea, it was bad on Reddit, is bad on every Reddit clone being made and of course is bad on Hacker News. What is the point? You get people downvoting comments without reason, leaving the original commenter wonder why someone would... disagree? Consider it non-constructive? Agree but dislike the tone? What? Text explains much better than a number the intent of someone and me, right now looking at a -1 number near my post, have no idea what exactly is the issue. Not to mention the fadeout that happens in downvoted comments in HN, which is extra bad (gives the impression that this comment is not important before even someone bothers to read it - thus creating a bias against it regardless of the contents). No really, why was this comment downvoted? There are so many reasons it could have been, from misunderstandings to actual issues, that i cannot pinpoint without someone saying it. I mean, imagine being in the same room, having a discussion about OSes, someone saying the above about BeOS and me asking the question above... if you disagreed with something i said, wouldn't you try to explain what you disagreed with? Why aren't you doing the same here? Note that whenever i say something like that (mainly on Reddit, but a couple of times also here) people upvote the comment after the fact, i suppose to "right the wrong". But i am not interested in the comment votes as much as knowing the reasoning. After all i asked a question, my impression from what memsom said was that this was a driver issue that Apple could mostly avoid - downvoting/upvoting isn't a response, doesn't answer the question nor affect the thinking that went on making it.
- tambourine_man 9y ago
  Carbon apparently worked fine on it Really? I never knew that. Care to elaborate?
  - memsom 9y ago
    I don't know about Carbon, but Sheepshaver started on the BeOS and one could run a full version of the MacOS up to about 8.1 along side BeOS with no real performance hit. For example, I used to run R5.03 on my PM9500/200MP and I could start up MacOS 8.1 and in a window or full screen. I used to use it to get a decent browser (NetPositive sucked badly by that point.) The MacOS was running as a process, and if it hung or crashed, you could kill it and restart it. This was all very similar to the way Classic worked in Mac OS X, save the way the apps ran in the same desktop as the main OS.
    - peatmoss 9y ago
      That's not quite right. Sheepshaver was approximately analogous to the classic mode where OS X booted a full version of Classic Mac OS in the background. I.e. a virtual machine like Sheepshaver Carbon was the old Mac OS Classic APIs ported to OSX. Classic support allowed you to run old binaries. Carbon APIs allowed you to port your classic apps easily-ishly.
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  I'll second that. When I first heard about OS X, the idea of a widely-available Unix on PowerPC was very exciting. The reality of the first release was, from a performance and feature perspective, pretty underwhelming. I'd guess the whole iTunes/iPod business put more wind in their sails in the early days.
copperx 9y ago
> NeXT (which is consistently mis-capitalized) In English, only the first letter of proper nouns is capitalized. "Next Inc." is technically correct. Be OS and Mac OS look weird but are correct because the proper name is Be or Mac, and OS is an acronym.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  Except that those aren't the proper capitalizations of those companies/products. NeXT Computer's would've been capitalized that way. "macOS" is actually the spelling in Apple's trademark for their OS, after the rebranding (http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4809:yupimn.8.4 http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4809:yup...). Part of the branding is the contrast against standard capitalization conventions in English.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Apple is just as free to use some fancy spelling to enhance their branding as I am to ignore that fancy spelling. As if what some marketing bozo dreams up gets to be the law of the land.
    - khedoros1 9y ago
      True, true. And I'm free to call you "Jack-o-Matt", "Fizzlepitch", "qwjehkjsaldhaeb", and so on, calling them different, but correct, stylistic representations of your name. What you want to be called isn't "the law of the land". Your opinion of the "correct" representation of your identity should hold more weight than my opinion, though. I'm not arguing ability, I'm arguing correctness.
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        Yes, but my identity is a legal identity and your mis-spellings would have some interesting side effects if you for instance tried to have me served. Hint: don't try that. And whether I write ios, iOs, IOS, iOS or whatever the correct spelling is doesn't matter one little bit.

bluedino 9y ago

Right, without Jobs there's no iPod or iPhone to run BSD

CharlesW 9y ago

> Of course, if they bought Be and not NeXT […], they wouldn't have gotten Jobs back. Yep. That's an Apple fan's Darkest Timeline, no doubt. Having been in Apple developer relations at the time, my perspective is that the specific OS choice was irrelevant to Apple's future success. By all accounts, BeOS would've also been a fine technology platform for Apple's future. Carbon apparently worked fine on it. And Mac OS X was far from a sure thing, for some time — if early public releases were uninspiring, early developer releases were actively demoralizing. And yet somehow, we had to make developers believe. The only way that could work is if we believed. And Steve Jobs made us believe. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)

KernelPanic0 9y ago
At the time I hoped that Apple would buy the Amiga company and fix AmigaOS to run Classic Mac stuff and merge both systems into PowerPC systems and then later on use Intel X86 chips. Amiga still exists but it is very expensive, AmigaOS has evolved a lot and AROS is like an open source AmigaOS 3.X that can be ported to other platforms. Apple can still buy out Amiga and the license to AmigaOS and make high end PowerPC workstations and servers out of them and install BSD or Linux on them. The Amiga One was better running Linux than AmigaOS, so just make an Amiga API WINE like software that runs AmigaOS apps in Linux. Then make Intel based versions to save money. Just think Apple could use HaikuOS, MacOS, AmigaOS, AROS, Linux, etc on their Mac line using Intel chips, and contribute to their development to take on Microsoft and Windows. Yet Apple could make a deal with Valve to port SteamOS to their older Intel Macs to make use of them for playing games on them, etc. Give them PowerMac specs as well to make a PowerPC version of SteamOS.
- eropple 9y ago
  > Yet Apple could make a deal with Valve to port SteamOS to their older Intel Macs to make use of them for playing games on them, etc. Give them PowerMac specs as well to make a PowerPC version of SteamOS. I am unclear why anyone but a fragmentary, fingernail-thin minority would want this.
JKCalhoun 9y ago
> By all accounts, BeOS would've also been a fine technology platform for Apple's future. I have heard the opposite. I liked the slick look of BeOS, but have been told since that there was very little there there. I don't know either way.
- memsom 9y ago
  The BeOS was all smoke and mirrors. It worked really well to the end user, yes. But it was extremely lean under the hood. I think getting it to do what the baseline of Mac OS 9 did would have taken significant engineering. The issue was stuff we take for granted these days, like networking (netserver, shudder!), printing (severely lacking drivers), USB (barely worked in R5.03, slightly better if you installed the leaked BETA USB stacks)... stuff like that. It all "sort of" worked. But it still wasn't completely ready when Be Inc closed their doors. And this was even after they completely re-wrote the network stack (aka BONE.)
  - badsectoracula 9y ago
    Isn't all that stuff about drivers? If Apple got BeOS they would only need to implement drivers for their own hardware and ignore anything else. EDIT: See? This is why comment voting is a bad idea, it was bad on Reddit, is bad on every Reddit clone being made and of course is bad on Hacker News. What is the point? You get people downvoting comments without reason, leaving the original commenter wonder why someone would... disagree? Consider it non-constructive? Agree but dislike the tone? What? Text explains much better than a number the intent of someone and me, right now looking at a -1 number near my post, have no idea what exactly is the issue. Not to mention the fadeout that happens in downvoted comments in HN, which is extra bad (gives the impression that this comment is not important before even someone bothers to read it - thus creating a bias against it regardless of the contents). No really, why was this comment downvoted? There are so many reasons it could have been, from misunderstandings to actual issues, that i cannot pinpoint without someone saying it. I mean, imagine being in the same room, having a discussion about OSes, someone saying the above about BeOS and me asking the question above... if you disagreed with something i said, wouldn't you try to explain what you disagreed with? Why aren't you doing the same here? Note that whenever i say something like that (mainly on Reddit, but a couple of times also here) people upvote the comment after the fact, i suppose to "right the wrong". But i am not interested in the comment votes as much as knowing the reasoning. After all i asked a question, my impression from what memsom said was that this was a driver issue that Apple could mostly avoid - downvoting/upvoting isn't a response, doesn't answer the question nor affect the thinking that went on making it.
tambourine_man 9y ago
Carbon apparently worked fine on it Really? I never knew that. Care to elaborate?
- memsom 9y ago
  I don't know about Carbon, but Sheepshaver started on the BeOS and one could run a full version of the MacOS up to about 8.1 along side BeOS with no real performance hit. For example, I used to run R5.03 on my PM9500/200MP and I could start up MacOS 8.1 and in a window or full screen. I used to use it to get a decent browser (NetPositive sucked badly by that point.) The MacOS was running as a process, and if it hung or crashed, you could kill it and restart it. This was all very similar to the way Classic worked in Mac OS X, save the way the apps ran in the same desktop as the main OS.
  - peatmoss 9y ago
    That's not quite right. Sheepshaver was approximately analogous to the classic mode where OS X booted a full version of Classic Mac OS in the background. I.e. a virtual machine like Sheepshaver Carbon was the old Mac OS Classic APIs ported to OSX. Classic support allowed you to run old binaries. Carbon APIs allowed you to port your classic apps easily-ishly.
jstewartmobile 9y ago
I'll second that. When I first heard about OS X, the idea of a widely-available Unix on PowerPC was very exciting. The reality of the first release was, from a performance and feature perspective, pretty underwhelming. I'd guess the whole iTunes/iPod business put more wind in their sails in the early days.

copperx 9y ago

> NeXT (which is consistently mis-capitalized) In English, only the first letter of proper nouns is capitalized. "Next Inc." is technically correct. Be OS and Mac OS look weird but are correct because the proper name is Be or Mac, and OS is an acronym.

khedoros1 9y ago
Except that those aren't the proper capitalizations of those companies/products. NeXT Computer's would've been capitalized that way. "macOS" is actually the spelling in Apple's trademark for their OS, after the rebranding (http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4809:yupimn.8.4 http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4809:yup...). Part of the branding is the contrast against standard capitalization conventions in English.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Apple is just as free to use some fancy spelling to enhance their branding as I am to ignore that fancy spelling. As if what some marketing bozo dreams up gets to be the law of the land.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    True, true. And I'm free to call you "Jack-o-Matt", "Fizzlepitch", "qwjehkjsaldhaeb", and so on, calling them different, but correct, stylistic representations of your name. What you want to be called isn't "the law of the land". Your opinion of the "correct" representation of your identity should hold more weight than my opinion, though. I'm not arguing ability, I'm arguing correctness.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      Yes, but my identity is a legal identity and your mis-spellings would have some interesting side effects if you for instance tried to have me served. Hint: don't try that. And whether I write ios, iOs, IOS, iOS or whatever the correct spelling is doesn't matter one little bit.