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A fitting link to follow up the Apple / Next merger article that's gotten so much traffic today. At the time I really thought Apple was making the wrong move. W

A fitting link to follow up the Apple / Next merger article that's gotten so much traffic today. At the time I really thought Apple was making the wrong move. Who knows what BeOS would have been today had Apple picked it up, but the wisdom of going with something *nix-based seems to have been a great decision.

conception 9y ago
Or if Microsoft didn't actively attempt to destroy it. MS got hit with lawsuits because of Netscape, but their targeted destruction of BeOS was so much worse considering, at the time, BeOS was such a better system that just couldn't fight back.
- erric 9y ago
  This. Wasn't Dell actively installing BeOS on systems but due to Windows licensing restrictions couldn't make that apparent to end users?
- nickbauman 9y ago
  There's (perhaps apocryphal) stories that Gates was terrified of what a Unix with a decent UI might do to upend Windows.
  - zitterbewegung 9y ago
    It’s weird that Linux won as a platform on mobile and it was partially due to Apple making it so that phone carriers had less influence on phones so the carriers needed something to claw it back with .
    - Yetanfou 9y ago
      Linux 'winning' on mobile has nothing to do with Apple doing anything at all. It 'won' mostly because it was chosen as the base for Android as well as several other mobile platforms (Intel's Moblin, Nokia's Maemo, the combined offspring called Meego, Samsung's Tizen, etc). Android 'won' for the same reason that Windows 'won', it was available for all to use in more or less any way they saw fit. The carriers had nothing to do with Android 'winning', that is mostly due to the availability of affordable unlocked devices from a multitude of sources, a market which Apple can not and does not want to touch as the profit margins and opportunities for lock-in are too low.
  - eesmith 9y ago
    If so, that would have been NeXTStep. BeOS was (mostly?) POSIX compatible, but was less of a Unix than Linux. John Perry Barlow described it: "I have a NeXT machine -- I expect a boo or two -- that's as close to UNIX as I've been able to get, and that's kind of like UNIX with training wheels by Armani." http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565929920.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565929920.do
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      Yeah, but Apple solved the NeXTStep problem by buying NeXT and discontinuing Next step for commodity hardware. While it revived Apple, it also neutralized any serious threat NeXTStep might have posed to Microsoft.
      - eesmith 9y ago
        My argument is that if Gates was "terrified of what a Unix with a decent UI might do to upend Windows" then NeXTStep must have been more terrifying than BeOS. In the 1990s I worked in places where NeXT machines were in frequent use, including as the main desktop machine for a number of people. We also had NexT machines available for making presentations. There was never anything like that for BeOS. And FWIW, I was a registered BeOS developer. Remember too that Apple's A/UX was also a "Unix with a decent UI".
  - IncRnd 9y ago
    I remember that Microsoft described Windows as “Windows IS POSIX,” when discussing other operating systems that could be competitors… Windows had a POSIX layer back in the day, similar to the win32 or NT layers, but for federal sales. Of course, the POSIX subsystem was replaced with Windows Subsystem for UNIX, which was too scary of an idea to ever actually use. And, Microsoft has now come full-circle back to having a bash shell. This bash shell does far less, though, not interacting with the rest of the system...
    - int_19h 9y ago
      > This bash shell does far less, though, not interacting with the rest of the system... If you mean WSL, then it actually does (the name "Bash for Windows" is really a misnomer). Not only you get full access to the filesystem, but you can e.g. pipe output of a Win32 binary into a Unix one. It's really much more powerful than WSU.
      - IncRnd 9y ago
        Has WSL been “upgraded” since it was first introduced? When I first looked at it, you needed X forwarding to get a gui and couldn’t launch a windows executable, for example.
        strmpnk 9y ago
        It's been steadily and continuously improved. Some of the latest improvements still require an insider build but win32 process interaction just works now (in my experience).
        IncRnd 9y ago
        That's very good.
        int_19h 9y ago
        You still need to jump through hoops with GUI. I don't think that's going to change anytime soon, since their focus is mainly on developer command line scenarios. Still, when you need UI, XRDP or Xming work adequately.
- tomcam 9y ago
  Can you me more about the "targeted destruction" of this operating system by Microsoft? I worked there at the time and don't remember anything like that.
  - starsinspace 9y ago
    Here's an old article on it: https://web.archive.org/web/20080420193929/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/02/20/be_inc_sues_microsoft/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080420193929/https://www.there... And another old document on it: https://www.jumpjet.info/Application-Software/BeOS/msft_complaint.pdf https://www.jumpjet.info/Application-Software/BeOS/msft_comp... In essence, Microsoft used its market position to pressure PC makers to not sell PCs which allow dual booting into a second preinstalled OS. Back then, it seemed that Be Inc finally got a breakthrough in the market, with Hitachi interested in shipping it preinstalled next to Windows, with a boot manager to select which one you want on every start. This might have finally gotten BeOS the wider exposure to users which it needed to become disruptive (most people will not install an aftermarket OS, they will just use whatever comes with the computer).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- wmf 9y ago
  OTOH, startups need to factor anticompetitive behavior into their planning; whining about being bullied didn't help Netscape or Be.
dilap 9y ago
I remember thinking it was a terrible decision at the time too. It's hard to even imagine how different the world would look today if they'd gone for BeOS; I think Apple would almost certainly have died or been acquired, and we'd all probably still be using a mix of feature phones and whatever craziness Blackberry was up to. (BeOS was really sweet though! So damn snappy. Even on way way way more powerful hardware today, macOS is still not generally snappy. It's a shame.)
- waddlesplash 9y ago
  Haiku is still "damn snappy", whether on a 15-year-old Athlon XP or the latest Core i7 (neither of which BeOS will even boot on). You should give it a try sometime :-)
- cmrdporcupine 9y ago
  The whole "Apple needed to buy an OS to be saved" thing was always hogwash -- they bought NeXT under the auspices of "just" porting OpenStep to PowerPC and Mac-ifying it ... but in reality that took them 5 years to accomplish. I'm pretty sure that in 5 years pre-Jobs Apple could have shipped the Copland project, which had reached Developer Release status just prior to Jobs coming on board and its cancellation. I don't think NeXT brought anything tech wise to Apple that Apple couldn't have done already. In reality it was a Steve Jobs/Avi Tevanian coup that led to the mass layoff of a whole lot of people and the garbage binning of a lot of good tech (Newton, OpenDoc, Dylan just to name a few). In any case if not for the iPod/iPhone/iTunes jump, Apple would probably be dead by now. They were in trouble until the revenue and brand cachet from that started to roll in. What I mean to say by this is: Apple needed neither BeOS or NeXTstep. They needed urgently management discipline and to ship the decent tech they already had. Jobs came on board and provided discipline, killed a bunch of expenses, and kept a lifeline going through the iMac sales, but wasted that money on the OS X transition when they probably could have just finished Copland in that time. But hey, I wasn't there, so...
  - dilap 9y ago
    Yeah, definitely, the focus that Jobs' provided was far more important than the tech. I doubt Copland was going anywhere, though, no matter how much time they gave it. The underlying tech of NextStep was just so much better than the classic macOS assembly/pascal, cooperative-multi-tasking, single-memory-sapce, GetNextEvent() universe. Just too hard a problem to try to modernize while still so closely tied to MacOS in your mind...they needed to make a clean break.

conception 9y ago

Or if Microsoft didn't actively attempt to destroy it. MS got hit with lawsuits because of Netscape, but their targeted destruction of BeOS was so much worse considering, at the time, BeOS was such a better system that just couldn't fight back.

erric 9y ago
This. Wasn't Dell actively installing BeOS on systems but due to Windows licensing restrictions couldn't make that apparent to end users?
nickbauman 9y ago
There's (perhaps apocryphal) stories that Gates was terrified of what a Unix with a decent UI might do to upend Windows.
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  It’s weird that Linux won as a platform on mobile and it was partially due to Apple making it so that phone carriers had less influence on phones so the carriers needed something to claw it back with .
  - Yetanfou 9y ago
    Linux 'winning' on mobile has nothing to do with Apple doing anything at all. It 'won' mostly because it was chosen as the base for Android as well as several other mobile platforms (Intel's Moblin, Nokia's Maemo, the combined offspring called Meego, Samsung's Tizen, etc). Android 'won' for the same reason that Windows 'won', it was available for all to use in more or less any way they saw fit. The carriers had nothing to do with Android 'winning', that is mostly due to the availability of affordable unlocked devices from a multitude of sources, a market which Apple can not and does not want to touch as the profit margins and opportunities for lock-in are too low.
- eesmith 9y ago
  If so, that would have been NeXTStep. BeOS was (mostly?) POSIX compatible, but was less of a Unix than Linux. John Perry Barlow described it: "I have a NeXT machine -- I expect a boo or two -- that's as close to UNIX as I've been able to get, and that's kind of like UNIX with training wheels by Armani." http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565929920.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565929920.do
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    Yeah, but Apple solved the NeXTStep problem by buying NeXT and discontinuing Next step for commodity hardware. While it revived Apple, it also neutralized any serious threat NeXTStep might have posed to Microsoft.
    - eesmith 9y ago
      My argument is that if Gates was "terrified of what a Unix with a decent UI might do to upend Windows" then NeXTStep must have been more terrifying than BeOS. In the 1990s I worked in places where NeXT machines were in frequent use, including as the main desktop machine for a number of people. We also had NexT machines available for making presentations. There was never anything like that for BeOS. And FWIW, I was a registered BeOS developer. Remember too that Apple's A/UX was also a "Unix with a decent UI".
- IncRnd 9y ago
  I remember that Microsoft described Windows as “Windows IS POSIX,” when discussing other operating systems that could be competitors… Windows had a POSIX layer back in the day, similar to the win32 or NT layers, but for federal sales. Of course, the POSIX subsystem was replaced with Windows Subsystem for UNIX, which was too scary of an idea to ever actually use. And, Microsoft has now come full-circle back to having a bash shell. This bash shell does far less, though, not interacting with the rest of the system...
  - int_19h 9y ago
    > This bash shell does far less, though, not interacting with the rest of the system... If you mean WSL, then it actually does (the name "Bash for Windows" is really a misnomer). Not only you get full access to the filesystem, but you can e.g. pipe output of a Win32 binary into a Unix one. It's really much more powerful than WSU.
    - IncRnd 9y ago
      Has WSL been “upgraded” since it was first introduced? When I first looked at it, you needed X forwarding to get a gui and couldn’t launch a windows executable, for example.
      - strmpnk 9y ago
        It's been steadily and continuously improved. Some of the latest improvements still require an insider build but win32 process interaction just works now (in my experience).
        IncRnd 9y ago
        That's very good.
      - int_19h 9y ago
        You still need to jump through hoops with GUI. I don't think that's going to change anytime soon, since their focus is mainly on developer command line scenarios. Still, when you need UI, XRDP or Xming work adequately.
tomcam 9y ago
Can you me more about the "targeted destruction" of this operating system by Microsoft? I worked there at the time and don't remember anything like that.
- starsinspace 9y ago
  Here's an old article on it: https://web.archive.org/web/20080420193929/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/02/20/be_inc_sues_microsoft/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080420193929/https://www.there... And another old document on it: https://www.jumpjet.info/Application-Software/BeOS/msft_complaint.pdf https://www.jumpjet.info/Application-Software/BeOS/msft_comp... In essence, Microsoft used its market position to pressure PC makers to not sell PCs which allow dual booting into a second preinstalled OS. Back then, it seemed that Be Inc finally got a breakthrough in the market, with Hitachi interested in shipping it preinstalled next to Windows, with a boot manager to select which one you want on every start. This might have finally gotten BeOS the wider exposure to users which it needed to become disruptive (most people will not install an aftermarket OS, they will just use whatever comes with the computer).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
wmf 9y ago
OTOH, startups need to factor anticompetitive behavior into their planning; whining about being bullied didn't help Netscape or Be.

dilap 9y ago

I remember thinking it was a terrible decision at the time too. It's hard to even imagine how different the world would look today if they'd gone for BeOS; I think Apple would almost certainly have died or been acquired, and we'd all probably still be using a mix of feature phones and whatever craziness Blackberry was up to. (BeOS was really sweet though! So damn snappy. Even on way way way more powerful hardware today, macOS is still not generally snappy. It's a shame.)

waddlesplash 9y ago
Haiku is still "damn snappy", whether on a 15-year-old Athlon XP or the latest Core i7 (neither of which BeOS will even boot on). You should give it a try sometime :-)
cmrdporcupine 9y ago
The whole "Apple needed to buy an OS to be saved" thing was always hogwash -- they bought NeXT under the auspices of "just" porting OpenStep to PowerPC and Mac-ifying it ... but in reality that took them 5 years to accomplish. I'm pretty sure that in 5 years pre-Jobs Apple could have shipped the Copland project, which had reached Developer Release status just prior to Jobs coming on board and its cancellation. I don't think NeXT brought anything tech wise to Apple that Apple couldn't have done already. In reality it was a Steve Jobs/Avi Tevanian coup that led to the mass layoff of a whole lot of people and the garbage binning of a lot of good tech (Newton, OpenDoc, Dylan just to name a few). In any case if not for the iPod/iPhone/iTunes jump, Apple would probably be dead by now. They were in trouble until the revenue and brand cachet from that started to roll in. What I mean to say by this is: Apple needed neither BeOS or NeXTstep. They needed urgently management discipline and to ship the decent tech they already had. Jobs came on board and provided discipline, killed a bunch of expenses, and kept a lifeline going through the iMac sales, but wasted that money on the OS X transition when they probably could have just finished Copland in that time. But hey, I wasn't there, so...
- dilap 9y ago
  Yeah, definitely, the focus that Jobs' provided was far more important than the tech. I doubt Copland was going anywhere, though, no matter how much time they gave it. The underlying tech of NextStep was just so much better than the classic macOS assembly/pascal, cooperative-multi-tasking, single-memory-sapce, GetNextEvent() universe. Just too hard a problem to try to modernize while still so closely tied to MacOS in your mind...they needed to make a clean break.