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Well, I think that was a huge part of the point of the acquisition. Apple knew for a long time it needed to replace classic Mac OS, which didn't have modern OS

Well, I think that was a huge part of the point of the acquisition. Apple knew for a long time it needed to replace classic Mac OS, which didn't have modern OS features. It started the Pink project internally to make a next-generation operating system, and eventually in the early to mid 90s, that got spun out into Taligent, the joint venture between Apple and IBM (and later others). Then Taligent didn't pan out for a variety of reasons. Specifically why is another question, but here it's sufficient to say that Apple decided it certainly wasn't the direction they wanted to go. Taligent ended up being handed off to IBM and repurposed as a rapid app development tool that sat on top of other operating systems (AIX, I guess, mainly) instead of a standalone operating system. As I recall, Apple may have tried to internally do its own second attempt at a next-generation operating system, essentially a competing project to Taligent, but that didn't work out either. So that left Apple in the mid-90s but still stuck on an operating system that was rooted in the 1980s and really, really showing its age. And a lot of it was Motorola 68k only (it was never meant to be portable), but Apple had already started to make the shift to PowerPC CPUs. So there was another reason it was time to start fresh. After at least one if not two failed attempts to come up with their own next-gen OS, here was this company founded by a former Apple luminary, with an operating system sitting there ready to go. NeXTSTEP was already portable enough to run on both 68k and x86 at that time, and once you've got two platforms, you can have pretty high confidence that a third (PowerPC) would be feasible. And I don't think NeXT had great long-term prospects with a standalone platform on its own.

kalleboo 9y ago
They were also very close to buying Be instead, but didn't due to Jean-Louis Gassée pushing for too high a price http://macspeedzone.com/archive/art/con/be.shtml http://macspeedzone.com/archive/art/con/be.shtml
- eloisant 9y ago
  I'm very curious what would have happen if Apple had bought Be instead. On one hand it was a much modern OS because build from scratch in the 90's rather based one the good old Unix, on the other hand OSX being Unix is probably why so many software developers flocked to the mac.
  - mpweiher 9y ago
    Interestingly they had a modern OS kernel, Mach to be exact, with a BSD personality running on top of it (in kernel space). After the acquisition, use of Mach wasn't expanded (never got our user-level pagers, for example, or BSD running as a user-level service), but instead pushed back. Supposedly largely for performance reasons, but of course the L4 kernel showed that didn't need to be the case.
    - AceJohnny2 9y ago
      > After the acquisition, use of Mach wasn't expanded I believe modern XPC services integrated with launchd to allow on-demand job launching (similar to Linux dbus-activation?) are based on Mach 'ports' (IPC). And tangentially, launchd "domains" (gui/user/system) are based on Mach "bootstrap domains", which is why a job launched in the background ("user") may have trouble communicating with a job launched in the GUI domain, if you're just assuming Unix permissions.
  - simonh 9y ago
    Apple had two problems at the time. One was technology and the other was leadership. Be would have helped with the technology part, but in an incomplete way. It wasn’t just the core OS NEXT provided, but also the application development stack. Be wouldn’t have helped on the leadership front at all though. The Mac certainly benefited from attracting a lot of Unix devs, but I don’t think that was a significant contributor to its mainstream success.
  - askvictor 9y ago
    Iirc beos did have a POSIX layer.
- mpweiher 9y ago
  Yes, they had a "Plan Be", but they went with "Plan A" instead :-)
hota_mazi 9y ago
And that plan worked so well that Apple went almost bankrupt one year later and had to be rescued by a fund infusion from Microsoft.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  The story about the $150 million from Microsoft is actually a lot more interesting than that - it wasn't widely reported but it was actually a settlement for a lawsuit in which Microsoft (possibly unwittingly - the job was performed by a contractor) ripped off code from QuickTime.
  - hota_mazi 9y ago
    Since the lawsuit was dropped by Apple, we'll never really know if it had any merit (and it was not about stolen code but GUI copying).
    - kalleboo 9y ago
      There was another lawsuit in addition to the GUI "Look and feel" one. Apple contracted a company to port QuickTime to Windows. Intel/Microsoft then contracted the same company to optimize Video for Windows, and they reused QuickTime code which then shipped with Windows. http://thisdayintechhistory.com/12/06/apple-sues-over-quicktime/ http://thisdayintechhistory.com/12/06/apple-sues-over-quickt...
      - hota_mazi 9y ago
        Again, this is just Apple suing but we never know the outcome in court. At the end of the day, both Microsoft and Apple reused ideas they found at Xerox. To quote Bill Gates himself about the situation: "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
        9y ago
mpweiher 9y ago
> NeXTSTEP was already portable enough to run on both 68k and x86 at that time > and once you've got two platforms, Agreed with your sentiment, but, er: five. Four released publicly: m68k, x86, HP PA, SPARC. And then there was the Motorola 88000 for the NeXT brick. The SPARC OpenStep/Mach port was in addition to OpenStep Solaris and then there was the Windows stuff. Not sure what else they had running internally. That was some seriously portable software. And for developers, adding architectures was a checkbox in ProjectBuilder (once you had taken care of being endian-neutral). UPDATE: just checked the Wikipedia entry on the NeXT brick (aka NeXT RISC Workstation), and it says they were redesigning it based on PowerPC, so the number was probably six and they already had a PowerPC NextStep port when acquired. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_RISC_Workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_RISC_Workstation )
- dbbk 9y ago
  I've been reading "Becoming Steve Jobs" recently and I think it mentioned that NeXT did already have PowerPC working, hence why they were top of the shortlist of potential acquisitions.
- mattl 9y ago
  Yes, look at Firepower Systems -- Jon Rubenstein started it with NeXT's blessing and it did PowerPC stuff based on the NRW tech.

kalleboo 9y ago

They were also very close to buying Be instead, but didn't due to Jean-Louis Gassée pushing for too high a price http://macspeedzone.com/archive/art/con/be.shtml http://macspeedzone.com/archive/art/con/be.shtml

eloisant 9y ago
I'm very curious what would have happen if Apple had bought Be instead. On one hand it was a much modern OS because build from scratch in the 90's rather based one the good old Unix, on the other hand OSX being Unix is probably why so many software developers flocked to the mac.
- mpweiher 9y ago
  Interestingly they had a modern OS kernel, Mach to be exact, with a BSD personality running on top of it (in kernel space). After the acquisition, use of Mach wasn't expanded (never got our user-level pagers, for example, or BSD running as a user-level service), but instead pushed back. Supposedly largely for performance reasons, but of course the L4 kernel showed that didn't need to be the case.
  - AceJohnny2 9y ago
    > After the acquisition, use of Mach wasn't expanded I believe modern XPC services integrated with launchd to allow on-demand job launching (similar to Linux dbus-activation?) are based on Mach 'ports' (IPC). And tangentially, launchd "domains" (gui/user/system) are based on Mach "bootstrap domains", which is why a job launched in the background ("user") may have trouble communicating with a job launched in the GUI domain, if you're just assuming Unix permissions.
- simonh 9y ago
  Apple had two problems at the time. One was technology and the other was leadership. Be would have helped with the technology part, but in an incomplete way. It wasn’t just the core OS NEXT provided, but also the application development stack. Be wouldn’t have helped on the leadership front at all though. The Mac certainly benefited from attracting a lot of Unix devs, but I don’t think that was a significant contributor to its mainstream success.
- askvictor 9y ago
  Iirc beos did have a POSIX layer.
mpweiher 9y ago
Yes, they had a "Plan Be", but they went with "Plan A" instead :-)

hota_mazi 9y ago

And that plan worked so well that Apple went almost bankrupt one year later and had to be rescued by a fund infusion from Microsoft.

kalleboo 9y ago
The story about the $150 million from Microsoft is actually a lot more interesting than that - it wasn't widely reported but it was actually a settlement for a lawsuit in which Microsoft (possibly unwittingly - the job was performed by a contractor) ripped off code from QuickTime.
- hota_mazi 9y ago
  Since the lawsuit was dropped by Apple, we'll never really know if it had any merit (and it was not about stolen code but GUI copying).
  - kalleboo 9y ago
    There was another lawsuit in addition to the GUI "Look and feel" one. Apple contracted a company to port QuickTime to Windows. Intel/Microsoft then contracted the same company to optimize Video for Windows, and they reused QuickTime code which then shipped with Windows. http://thisdayintechhistory.com/12/06/apple-sues-over-quicktime/ http://thisdayintechhistory.com/12/06/apple-sues-over-quickt...
    - hota_mazi 9y ago
      Again, this is just Apple suing but we never know the outcome in court. At the end of the day, both Microsoft and Apple reused ideas they found at Xerox. To quote Bill Gates himself about the situation: "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
      - 9y ago

mpweiher 9y ago

> NeXTSTEP was already portable enough to run on both 68k and x86 at that time > and once you've got two platforms, Agreed with your sentiment, but, er: five. Four released publicly: m68k, x86, HP PA, SPARC. And then there was the Motorola 88000 for the NeXT brick. The SPARC OpenStep/Mach port was in addition to OpenStep Solaris and then there was the Windows stuff. Not sure what else they had running internally. That was some seriously portable software. And for developers, adding architectures was a checkbox in ProjectBuilder (once you had taken care of being endian-neutral). UPDATE: just checked the Wikipedia entry on the NeXT brick (aka NeXT RISC Workstation), and it says they were redesigning it based on PowerPC, so the number was probably six and they already had a PowerPC NextStep port when acquired. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_RISC_Workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_RISC_Workstation )

dbbk 9y ago
I've been reading "Becoming Steve Jobs" recently and I think it mentioned that NeXT did already have PowerPC working, hence why they were top of the shortlist of potential acquisitions.
mattl 9y ago
Yes, look at Firepower Systems -- Jon Rubenstein started it with NeXT's blessing and it did PowerPC stuff based on the NRW tech.