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Back in the days when iOS was new, Android was fledgling and WebOS was flailing, I wondered why the owners of BeOS at the time weren't working on a mobile OS ba

Back in the days when iOS was new, Android was fledgling and WebOS was flailing, I wondered why the owners of BeOS at the time weren't working on a mobile OS based on BeOS. Obviously the touch stuff would have taken some work, but the underpinnings ought to be at least as good as OS X and probably superior to Android out the gate.

chipotle_coyote 9y ago
Ironically, that's kinda what happened to BeOS--the assets were bought by Palm, right around the time Palm was splitting into two companies. PalmSource, the OS company, developed "Palm OS Cobalt," which was intended to be the next-generation Palm operating system, built on BeOS. While they completed Cobalt, the now-separate Palm hardware company didn't use it. Also, according to Jean-Louis Gassée, an Apple engineer tried to buy BeOS from Palm for the then-unnamed smartphone project, as a third candidate between Fadell's vision of a souped-up Pixo--the iPod OS--and Forstall's vision of a cut-down OS X. Palm turned the engineer down. (Gassée didn't name the engineer, but it's hard not to suspect it was Dominic Giampaolo, who created BeFS and went on to create Apple's Spotlight and then, unsurprisingly, work on APFS.)
- Apocryphon 9y ago
  Could they do the same to HaikuOS?
  - chipotle_coyote 9y ago
    While I'm rooting for Haiku in the abstract, they've been working for going on 17 years now without hitting beta. I don't have a lot of confidence that it's ever going to get past the "fascinating curiosity" stage. (I know some people would argue that BeOS itself never got past that point, but I ran it full-time for all of 1999 with very little difficulty--it had a surprisingly robust software scene given its size.) At any rate, I suspect if you were looking for the foundation for a new mobile OS today, there would be better choices.
    - Apocryphon 9y ago
      What better choices would you suggest?
acdha 9y ago
They'd tried something similar around 2000 with internet appliances but hardware limitations were pretty bad. The Sony eVilla — awesome naming choice — project I was involved with had an aggressive hardware price point which included a landscape display used in portrait mode but not video hardware which supported rotation, so it had to be done in software. Be seemed to implode with that failure and by the time Palm bought them I doubt they had many good people left. Palm certainly didn't have the vision to invest significantly and I doubt many companies would have bet on a partnership with two failures.

chipotle_coyote 9y ago

Ironically, that's kinda what happened to BeOS--the assets were bought by Palm, right around the time Palm was splitting into two companies. PalmSource, the OS company, developed "Palm OS Cobalt," which was intended to be the next-generation Palm operating system, built on BeOS. While they completed Cobalt, the now-separate Palm hardware company didn't use it. Also, according to Jean-Louis Gassée, an Apple engineer tried to buy BeOS from Palm for the then-unnamed smartphone project, as a third candidate between Fadell's vision of a souped-up Pixo--the iPod OS--and Forstall's vision of a cut-down OS X. Palm turned the engineer down. (Gassée didn't name the engineer, but it's hard not to suspect it was Dominic Giampaolo, who created BeFS and went on to create Apple's Spotlight and then, unsurprisingly, work on APFS.)

Apocryphon 9y ago
Could they do the same to HaikuOS?
- chipotle_coyote 9y ago
  While I'm rooting for Haiku in the abstract, they've been working for going on 17 years now without hitting beta. I don't have a lot of confidence that it's ever going to get past the "fascinating curiosity" stage. (I know some people would argue that BeOS itself never got past that point, but I ran it full-time for all of 1999 with very little difficulty--it had a surprisingly robust software scene given its size.) At any rate, I suspect if you were looking for the foundation for a new mobile OS today, there would be better choices.
  - Apocryphon 9y ago
    What better choices would you suggest?

acdha 9y ago

They'd tried something similar around 2000 with internet appliances but hardware limitations were pretty bad. The Sony eVilla — awesome naming choice — project I was involved with had an aggressive hardware price point which included a landscape display used in portrait mode but not video hardware which supported rotation, so it had to be done in software. Be seemed to implode with that failure and by the time Palm bought them I doubt they had many good people left. Palm certainly didn't have the vision to invest significantly and I doubt many companies would have bet on a partnership with two failures.