4 ms·

No, it's not on multiple fronts. Copland failed internally before it ever hit the market (i.e. it was never generally released.) Sure, the NeXT acquisition was

by blihp 8y ago

No, it's not on multiple fronts. Copland failed internally before it ever hit the market (i.e. it was never generally released.) Sure, the NeXT acquisition was the final nail in the coffin for it, but it had failed long before that. Part of the reason for the NeXT acquisition was that Copland was such a mess. It could be argued whether NeXT or Be was the better option, but Apple desperately needed to buy an OS... because Apple didn't have something that was going to ship.

everybodyknows 8y ago
Preceded by Apple's late-80s failure with the "Pink" OS: http://lowendmac.com/2014/pink-apples-first-stab-at-a-modern-operating-system/ http://lowendmac.com/2014/pink-apples-first-stab-at-a-modern...
- Shebanator 8y ago
  It wasn't actually proceeded by Pink. Copland and Pink were going on in parallel, and the competition between them (and the original MacOS folks as well) was intense. Pink was the first to lose that battle, and got spun out as a result. Source: I worked on Pink/Taligent for six years. Prior to that I supported A/UX and MPW in MacDTS.
kilo_bravo_3 8y ago
>It could be argued whether NeXT or Be was the better option, I think a lot of people start mashing years together when it comes to BeOS. Apple announced the NeXT acquisition in December 1996. In December 1996, BeOS was still a developer preview with the first "real" release still about two years away. NeXTStep was already 8 years old. In 1996 BeOS was at a completely different state of readiness and maturity than it was with R5 (which everyone remembers fondly). USENET is full of posts, 96-98, of individual developers announcing with triumph the porting of UNIX core utilities to the BeOS developer release versions-- utilities that were already present and mature in NeXT/Openstep. Mac OS X Server 1.0 was released about two years after the deal was finalized and I imagine it would have taken about two years of really hard work just to make BeOS multiuser, nevermind porting all of the core utilities. It took a couple more years (it was a somewhat jerky transition for many users) before a "usable" OS X was released but from the beginning there was an wide variety of software available for it that was easily ported from NS/OS, and features like Display Postscript, Objective-C, a mature set of APIs, and most importantly of all Project Builder were there from the beginning. The software scene on BeOS in 1996 was... sparse.
- npunt 8y ago
  Agree with everything you said and NeXT was the right call (even sans Jobs). Apple needed mature ecosystem, libraries, etc, not just a base OS. However, BeOS was far more stable/mature than its 'developer release' status implied. I remember how blown away people were at the dev release in 1996 by how solid it was, not just by how forward thinking its features were. I don't think multiuser would have been a showstopper for release if BeOS was acquired by Apple. They could have put out 2-3 versions of a single user OS and few would have cared.
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    One wonders, what if someone else had bought Be?
    - BonesJustice 8y ago
      Someone did: PalmSource (the software spinoff from Palm). It was to be the basis for their Palm OS “Cobalt”, which was eventually abandoned. Or by “someone else”, did you mean someone other than PalmSource? Let’s be honest, though: most new OSes don’t enjoy much success or longevity. The only successful new arrival I can remember recently was Android, and it had the backing of Google, and was aimed at a relatively new market. It also borrowed heavily from established tech: Linux kernel, JDK and JVM. I doubt there’s more than a handful companies that could have turned BeOS into something big, and of those, Apple was probably their best bet.
      - Apocryphon 8y ago
        Someone who actually had a chance to do something with BeOS, and of sticking around for longer than a few years.
  - foobiekr 8y ago
    something I have been wondering about for years, having been around: was Be actually acquisition bait from day one for Apple? I am convinced that NeXT wasn't; they just didn't build something that was designed for acquisition. But Be, Inc. and BeOS really strike me as the kind of design, company, compromises, focus and leadership/team that I've come to associate with startups that are actually designed to be acquired by the executive's former employer after some time. I would love to know if this is true, though in my experience, that is usually only known to the founders and executives except in the really obvious cases.

by blihp 8y ago

everybodyknows 8y ago

Preceded by Apple's late-80s failure with the "Pink" OS: http://lowendmac.com/2014/pink-apples-first-stab-at-a-modern-operating-system/ http://lowendmac.com/2014/pink-apples-first-stab-at-a-modern...

Shebanator 8y ago
It wasn't actually proceeded by Pink. Copland and Pink were going on in parallel, and the competition between them (and the original MacOS folks as well) was intense. Pink was the first to lose that battle, and got spun out as a result. Source: I worked on Pink/Taligent for six years. Prior to that I supported A/UX and MPW in MacDTS.

kilo_bravo_3 8y ago

>It could be argued whether NeXT or Be was the better option, I think a lot of people start mashing years together when it comes to BeOS. Apple announced the NeXT acquisition in December 1996. In December 1996, BeOS was still a developer preview with the first "real" release still about two years away. NeXTStep was already 8 years old. In 1996 BeOS was at a completely different state of readiness and maturity than it was with R5 (which everyone remembers fondly). USENET is full of posts, 96-98, of individual developers announcing with triumph the porting of UNIX core utilities to the BeOS developer release versions-- utilities that were already present and mature in NeXT/Openstep. Mac OS X Server 1.0 was released about two years after the deal was finalized and I imagine it would have taken about two years of really hard work just to make BeOS multiuser, nevermind porting all of the core utilities. It took a couple more years (it was a somewhat jerky transition for many users) before a "usable" OS X was released but from the beginning there was an wide variety of software available for it that was easily ported from NS/OS, and features like Display Postscript, Objective-C, a mature set of APIs, and most importantly of all Project Builder were there from the beginning. The software scene on BeOS in 1996 was... sparse.

npunt 8y ago
Agree with everything you said and NeXT was the right call (even sans Jobs). Apple needed mature ecosystem, libraries, etc, not just a base OS. However, BeOS was far more stable/mature than its 'developer release' status implied. I remember how blown away people were at the dev release in 1996 by how solid it was, not just by how forward thinking its features were. I don't think multiuser would have been a showstopper for release if BeOS was acquired by Apple. They could have put out 2-3 versions of a single user OS and few would have cared.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  One wonders, what if someone else had bought Be?
  - BonesJustice 8y ago
    Someone did: PalmSource (the software spinoff from Palm). It was to be the basis for their Palm OS “Cobalt”, which was eventually abandoned. Or by “someone else”, did you mean someone other than PalmSource? Let’s be honest, though: most new OSes don’t enjoy much success or longevity. The only successful new arrival I can remember recently was Android, and it had the backing of Google, and was aimed at a relatively new market. It also borrowed heavily from established tech: Linux kernel, JDK and JVM. I doubt there’s more than a handful companies that could have turned BeOS into something big, and of those, Apple was probably their best bet.
    - Apocryphon 8y ago
      Someone who actually had a chance to do something with BeOS, and of sticking around for longer than a few years.
- foobiekr 8y ago
  something I have been wondering about for years, having been around: was Be actually acquisition bait from day one for Apple? I am convinced that NeXT wasn't; they just didn't build something that was designed for acquisition. But Be, Inc. and BeOS really strike me as the kind of design, company, compromises, focus and leadership/team that I've come to associate with startups that are actually designed to be acquired by the executive's former employer after some time. I would love to know if this is true, though in my experience, that is usually only known to the founders and executives except in the really obvious cases.