9 ms·

Be: From Concept to Near Death

96 points by WoodenChair 8y ago

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
I never knew they had used the Amiga as their reference platform. I had so much hope in the mid and late 90s that Be might be the logical next platform and OS. So much potential. So of course they made little impact. :( Windows was a remarkable disaster area that I could barely grow to tolerate, let alone love. Everything seemed to be a canonical example of how not to implement something. > "taking the helm of Commodore" Oh, if only. Anything to get rid of the idiot that ran them into the ground.
- ido 8y ago
  It may have already been to late to save commodore by 1990.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    I don't think so. The factor that really killed C= beyond any hope of recovery was Motorola abandoning development of the 68k line of processors in favor of the PowerPC initiative, a few years later. And a LOT of stuff died as a result of that, not just the C= Amiga line. Though with Gassee at the helm, they might have been perceptive enough to pivot to the nascent ARM architecture, partnering with Acorn and picking up their abandoned Archimedes line, and thus owning the low-power gaming/multimedia space. (Keep in mind thst the 3DO was in fact ARM-based, so the technical affordances were there). But it's a long shot.
    - ido 8y ago
      But they have already lost their performance edge by 1990. In 1985 the amiga was unprecedented in multimedia abilities and audio-visual performance. It was years ahead of the competition. And then commodore more or less just sat on it with very minor incremental improvements until by 1990 a 386 PC with VGA & a SoundBlaster pretty much closed the gap with a similarly priced & specced amiga 3000. That's why (well one of the reasons anyway) the next generation of games like Doom originated on the PC and not on the Amiga.
      - zozbot123 8y ago
        > But they have already lost their performance edge by 1990. Sure, but they had a robust community of gaming and software developers on their side. Hence why they should have pivoted to the lower-power niche of the market - that's precisely where their pre-existing community could still be a decisive factor. High-end systems (x86, PPC) were a whole other ballgame, even in the mid-to-late 1990s. The console space is even more proof of this - mass-market consoles in the 1990s and to some extent the early-2000s were a lot closer to the 3DO than to anything based on x86 or PPC. Also, nitpicking but Doom itself was "originated" on the NeXT, not on x86-- and the NeXT architecture was quite comparable to Amiga both technically and in its focus on the multimedia space. If anything, it makes a better case for Amiga having lost their technical "edge" at some point.
        dfox 8y ago
        To continue with the nitpicking: Although Doom was "originated" on NeXT the original NeXT implementation was only meant as debugging aid and did graphics output by essentially emulating VGA in user space and didn't support sound at all. Also NeXT is more or less normal Unix workstation with m68k CPU and framebuffer and does not have convoluted architecture with tightly coupled various multimedia accelerators that Amiga has. And while the Amiga's architecture was good way to get impresive performance in 80's it is also the reason why Amiga could not keep up in the 90's as removing all the NTSC video related stuff would break backward compatibility.
      - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
        That was down to management though. If they'd been bought by someone with more interest in what engineering were prototyping, I think it could have been saved, even that late. Even prospered with an engineering dept that had a budget. Dave Haynie has written extensively on the C= suicide (as he describes it), I think there's even a few posts on Quora. Lots that might have kept the edge were started, even prototyped and announced to developers. Course once developers start migrating away, it takes far more effort to get them back, if at all.
      - mrec 8y ago
        > That's why (well one of the reasons anyway) the next generation of games like Doom originated on the PC and not on the Amiga. Well, for the specific example of Doom the Amiga's main problem was its planar graphics; great for scrolling platformers and SEUs, terrible for raycasters, since plotting a single 1-byte pixel takes 8 writes (one per bit) in a naive implementation. There were a lot of clever hacks to address this, but none of them could quite close the gap.
- puzzle 8y ago
  Be courted Amiga developers quite heavily. They would show up at events and declare loudly that the Amiga was a major inspiration and that Be was a modern Amiga in spirit. There was even a slogan floating around, something like "Amiga 1985 - Be 1995”.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    so many things were done on Amiga before becoming products..
- chriswarbo 8y ago
  > I never knew they had used the Amiga as their reference platform. I had so much hope in the mid and late 90s that Be might be the logical next platform and OS. So much potential. So of course they made little impact. :( There were articles and possibly demos of Be stuff in the Amiga magazines my family subscribed to IIRC (I was about 10). It was discussed as a possible replacement, seeing as Amiga was going nowhere under Commodore/Escom/Gateway/etc. QNX was also discussed in a similar way, and I remember getting a demo of QNX for PC on a bootable floppy. Linux turned out to be a more popular replacement (for me, and for Future Publishing who seemed to turn Amiga Format into Linux Format; at least many of the staff seemed to be the same)
rwmj 8y ago
Haiku still exists, and is actually really good now. I was running it for a while.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  I think Haiku's current status supports the "Near Death" assertion.
  - rwmj 8y ago
    How so? It has an active community and has loads of important POSIX/Linux applications ported. There was a talk at FOSDEM about it only last weekend.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      Because hardly anyone is actually using it for it's (or Be's) stated purpose? Because it has a fraction of the users Be did (by percentage)? Hell, HN is pretty up on tech stuff and yet whenever an article about Haiku is posted there's still a lot of people who have no idea what it is. And it has been in active development for over a decade. If that isn't "Near Death", then what is?
      - rwmj 8y ago
        Dead means no development is being done on it, so it cannot possibly work on modern computers. The original Be presumably hasn't seen any development for decades, but Haiku is actively developed and so very much alive. It means it works on current PCs, and has the potential to become more widely used in future (which Be does not).
        AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        "Nearly Dead" != "Dead". It is possible Haiku could start gaining ground and become something widely used in the future, however it is more likely that the project languishes is relative obscurity before eventually being abandoned.
smallstepforman 8y ago
I’ve always wondered (but never read about) what the key people of Microsft, Apple and IBM thought of the Amiga in the late 80’s. Were they worried, powerless, dare they dream that C= would do so many missteps? If anyone has any reading links of how the competition viewed the Amiga, I’d love to read about it.
- jacobush 8y ago
  Commodore and Apple were the same size for a while, but Apple had a better PR spin. Steve Jobs always talked about IBM vs Apple, ignoring Commodore et al. And he was right to do so, it turns out.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Commodore never had a competitive offering for the business market. The one really unambiguously great thing that C= did was the custom chipset for graphics and sound. That was the area they should have continued to progress in; perhaps they would have ended up out-competing SGI and eventually inventing the 3D accelerator.
- bitwize 8y ago
  IBM licensed Amiga tech for use in the OS/2 2.0 (and later) desktop. In fact, that's how we got ARexx; as part of the licensing arrangement, IBM granted Commodore-Amiga a license to use their REXX language. So... IBM definitely thought there was something of value there.
  - puzzle 8y ago
    What Amiga tech is that? ARexx started as retail software that Wishful Thinking Development sold (like WShell). Commodore acquired it years later.
    - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      MS didn't want to collaborate on OS2 any more. So IBM licensed some things for the GUI from Amiga that became Workplace Shell. Possibly included BOOPSI. A REXX licence was indeed part of the deal from what little I remember. http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s02.html#os_2 http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s02.html#os_...
cbm-vic-20 8y ago
I was in university when the BeBox was released. One of my better funded colleagues got one of them shipped to his dorm room. All the nerds went crazy over this thing. It was incredibly fast, physical CPU activity lights (it was a dual PowerPC machine), and a plethora of hardware connectors, including the "GeekPort", a set of GPIOs that made it really easy to interface with external hardware.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  Lots of modern desktop PCs have case LED's that could easily find use as system activity indicators if the Linux kernel (or userspace HAL) supported them. Unfortunately support seems to be really patchy.
  - deadbunny 8y ago
    I believe there is some work on standardizing the RGB LED interface going on as we speak: https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/1/5/191 https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/1/5/191
    - pantalaimon 8y ago
      Linux already has an LED interface, it's just that currently you can give an LED a brightness value 0-255. So a RGB LED would have to be represented by three entries in /sys/class/leds/ That's kind of inconvenient when those three LEDs are actually one RGB LED. This is only how the LEDs are represented to user space, you still need a driver for the chips the LEDs are connected to.
- mmjaa 8y ago
  I still have my BeBox, and love it. For the Blinky lights, a magicshifter suffices: http://magicshifter.net/ http://magicshifter.net/ (I did the OS)
jonstewart 8y ago
In 1996, I bought a Power Computing PowerTower 166 (a Mac clone, the second most powerful Mac one could buy at the time) and ran System 7.5 and then 7.6 on it. But I got bored and figured out how to install BeOS on a second partition. Holy cow! It was sooooo much faster. It had an OpenGL demo app, with spinning cubes, and you could drag and drop movies onto it and they’d play without stuttering as the cube spun around. It was a spare, simple, beautiful OS.
- scroot 8y ago
  Gotta say, my Power Computing was one of my favorite machines I've ever owned
  - butterfi 8y ago
    Power Computing had, if I remember correctly, a one-hour long sale that doubled the amount of RAM you ordered (back when RAM was really expensive). I bought a great tower, pulled half the RAM and redistributed to my other desktop. Good times!
  - jonstewart 8y ago
    Not just the 604, but also the 66 MHz bus and the faaaast 7200 RPM Micropolis 2 GB SCSI hard drive... /swoon I do kind of wonder whether I’d have learned more Unix faster if I’d have bought an SGI O2.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  I say that often: when watching beos demo (97?) these decade.. it brings tears to your eyes. First, because it's so nicely designed it's beautiful. Second because even today my laptop system can't really do that.
hguhghuff 8y ago
I wonder what strategy might have succeeded in Be getting traction against Windows back then? Free from day one? The big problem for any competitor to Windows was that nothing had the drivers support that windows had. Steve Jobs solves that by supporting only his own hardware. Drivers was a huge issue.
- kowdermeister 8y ago
  > Free from day one? That's great in theory, but how do you then pay the developers?
  - tialaramex 8y ago
    The income from selling BeOS wasn't ever covering a significant fraction of R&D costs so who cares? Be was losing about $10M per year from the outset. It never came anywhere close to breaking even. The idea was, either this takes off (in which case you can make money a lot of different ways even if you give the core product away) or the threat that it might forces Apple to buy the whole thing, either way you get your money back and JLG gets what he wants, which is and has always been to be "right" even when he's monumentally and obviously wrong. [ JLG led Apple product development when it was failing, Be which failed, and the Palm spin out that made an OS so lousy even _Palm_ never bothered using it any products. The man is often cited as a "guru" presumably in the same sense as when some random guy is brought in by gullible actors or musicians who've got a lot of money suddenly ] In the late 1990s it looked as though it would probably close its doors and the investors would get nothing (technically they'd get the source code, branding and so on, but those are basically worthless), which happens all the time with that sort of business. But the dot com boom saved them. Not Be, the investors. An Offering was written which under normal circumstances would get laughed out of the room. Ha ha ha, you have a product that nobody uses, and you want a nine figure sum of money for a business with a failed Apple executive and a bunch of hackers, No. But at the time you could write blah blah blah "Internet" blah blah and people wouldn't bother reading past the bottom of the first page of your IPO because they already had their wallets open. So now the original investors had their money back, and gradually the big institutional hitters (e.g. pension companies) could exit too, you take $50000 of BEOS and you sell it to a thousand Be fans for $50 per time, when it turns into $4 of cash five years later you're fine and they learn a valuable lesson about investment. Be got a little bit of money left over. The idea was, pivot into making software for "Internet appliances". You know, the computer next to your stove, or that multi-purpose device in your gym which... oh right, yeah, no, those aren't a thing, the idea went nowhere and Be's business went down in flames. JLG got to go ruin Palm instead.
bluedino 8y ago
Gasse is one of the few people I have subscribed to on Medium. His rants on Apple/tech can be a little off, but he's a great writer and has lots of interesting stories. Even though I know how this ends up (they move to PowerPC), I felt left hanging when AT&T canceled the Hobbit processor and they weren't sure what to do next. It was like the feeling you get at the end of a chapter of a great novel.
- exsf0859 8y ago
  If you like Gassee's writing about Be, there's plenty more available in his articles for the Be Newsletter: https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/index.html https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/index.html
  - jodrellblank 8y ago
    From that link, Gassé writing in 1997: When Jobs hired Sculley, the company was on the way up. Today, it's losing customers, developers, money, and market share. [..] Apple doesn't need a CEO, they need a messiah (or a crash test dummy). And any problem that requires walking on water as a solution is, you'll grant me, a problem ill-stated. Still, there may be a way to make the search for a new CEO easier
bsder 8y ago
While AT&T have always been jerks, having Steve Sakoman meltdown because they lost a key supplier is totally beyond the pale. Startups are, almost by definition, exercises in turning disasters into opportunities. MIPS and ARM were quite well established by that time. TI DSP's similarly. Redoing the hardware was certainly an option.
- yellowapple 8y ago
  "Redoing the hardware was certainly an option." And that's exactly what Be did, switching to dual PowerPC processors instead.
donatj 8y ago
Why is the big main hero screenshot Windows with a Be theme rather than actual BeOS?
danans 8y ago
The dual-PowerPC BeBox[1] I bought with savings from my campus job in college was the machine that made me "fall in love" with computers. At the time I was so incredibly jazzed that I didn't need to "telnet" to the campus workstations to complete my Unix-based programming projects, since there was a full standard Unix API and an IDE (CodeWarrior IIRC) came with the machine. And compared to any other computer, the UI was mind-blowingly responsive under multitasking. It was also the platform I used for my first side-project (a graphical IMAP email client). I thought I was quite the tech rebel at the time, thinking I was onboard the nascent stages of this OS, but it seems that by the time I became a devotee, it had already suffered a major internal setback with the AT&T deprecation of the Hobbit CPU. I had always assumed (mistakenly) that they switched to PowerPC because it was "better". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox
DrJosiah 8y ago
Only got to use the downloadable / bootable BeOS on CD / installable. Had a lot of fun on a P166 MMX in my dorm, and a P2-400 in greyscale at work (Nvidia TNT wasn't supported in color initially). Sad to have watched BeOS go away. It was and still is pretty amazing.

96 points by WoodenChair 8y ago

I never knew they had used the Amiga as their reference platform. I had so much hope in the mid and late 90s that Be might be the logical next platform and OS. So much potential. So of course they made little impact. :( Windows was a remarkable disaster area that I could barely grow to tolerate, let alone love. Everything seemed to be a canonical example of how not to implement something. > "taking the helm of Commodore" Oh, if only. Anything to get rid of the idiot that ran them into the ground.

ido 8y ago
It may have already been to late to save commodore by 1990.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  I don't think so. The factor that really killed C= beyond any hope of recovery was Motorola abandoning development of the 68k line of processors in favor of the PowerPC initiative, a few years later. And a LOT of stuff died as a result of that, not just the C= Amiga line. Though with Gassee at the helm, they might have been perceptive enough to pivot to the nascent ARM architecture, partnering with Acorn and picking up their abandoned Archimedes line, and thus owning the low-power gaming/multimedia space. (Keep in mind thst the 3DO was in fact ARM-based, so the technical affordances were there). But it's a long shot.
  - ido 8y ago
    But they have already lost their performance edge by 1990. In 1985 the amiga was unprecedented in multimedia abilities and audio-visual performance. It was years ahead of the competition. And then commodore more or less just sat on it with very minor incremental improvements until by 1990 a 386 PC with VGA & a SoundBlaster pretty much closed the gap with a similarly priced & specced amiga 3000. That's why (well one of the reasons anyway) the next generation of games like Doom originated on the PC and not on the Amiga.
    - zozbot123 8y ago
      > But they have already lost their performance edge by 1990. Sure, but they had a robust community of gaming and software developers on their side. Hence why they should have pivoted to the lower-power niche of the market - that's precisely where their pre-existing community could still be a decisive factor. High-end systems (x86, PPC) were a whole other ballgame, even in the mid-to-late 1990s. The console space is even more proof of this - mass-market consoles in the 1990s and to some extent the early-2000s were a lot closer to the 3DO than to anything based on x86 or PPC. Also, nitpicking but Doom itself was "originated" on the NeXT, not on x86-- and the NeXT architecture was quite comparable to Amiga both technically and in its focus on the multimedia space. If anything, it makes a better case for Amiga having lost their technical "edge" at some point.
      - dfox 8y ago
        To continue with the nitpicking: Although Doom was "originated" on NeXT the original NeXT implementation was only meant as debugging aid and did graphics output by essentially emulating VGA in user space and didn't support sound at all. Also NeXT is more or less normal Unix workstation with m68k CPU and framebuffer and does not have convoluted architecture with tightly coupled various multimedia accelerators that Amiga has. And while the Amiga's architecture was good way to get impresive performance in 80's it is also the reason why Amiga could not keep up in the 90's as removing all the NTSC video related stuff would break backward compatibility.
    - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      That was down to management though. If they'd been bought by someone with more interest in what engineering were prototyping, I think it could have been saved, even that late. Even prospered with an engineering dept that had a budget. Dave Haynie has written extensively on the C= suicide (as he describes it), I think there's even a few posts on Quora. Lots that might have kept the edge were started, even prototyped and announced to developers. Course once developers start migrating away, it takes far more effort to get them back, if at all.
    - mrec 8y ago
      > That's why (well one of the reasons anyway) the next generation of games like Doom originated on the PC and not on the Amiga. Well, for the specific example of Doom the Amiga's main problem was its planar graphics; great for scrolling platformers and SEUs, terrible for raycasters, since plotting a single 1-byte pixel takes 8 writes (one per bit) in a naive implementation. There were a lot of clever hacks to address this, but none of them could quite close the gap.
puzzle 8y ago
Be courted Amiga developers quite heavily. They would show up at events and declare loudly that the Amiga was a major inspiration and that Be was a modern Amiga in spirit. There was even a slogan floating around, something like "Amiga 1985 - Be 1995”.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  so many things were done on Amiga before becoming products..
chriswarbo 8y ago
> I never knew they had used the Amiga as their reference platform. I had so much hope in the mid and late 90s that Be might be the logical next platform and OS. So much potential. So of course they made little impact. :( There were articles and possibly demos of Be stuff in the Amiga magazines my family subscribed to IIRC (I was about 10). It was discussed as a possible replacement, seeing as Amiga was going nowhere under Commodore/Escom/Gateway/etc. QNX was also discussed in a similar way, and I remember getting a demo of QNX for PC on a bootable floppy. Linux turned out to be a more popular replacement (for me, and for Future Publishing who seemed to turn Amiga Format into Linux Format; at least many of the staff seemed to be the same)

rwmj 8y ago

Haiku still exists, and is actually really good now. I was running it for a while.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
I think Haiku's current status supports the "Near Death" assertion.
- rwmj 8y ago
  How so? It has an active community and has loads of important POSIX/Linux applications ported. There was a talk at FOSDEM about it only last weekend.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    Because hardly anyone is actually using it for it's (or Be's) stated purpose? Because it has a fraction of the users Be did (by percentage)? Hell, HN is pretty up on tech stuff and yet whenever an article about Haiku is posted there's still a lot of people who have no idea what it is. And it has been in active development for over a decade. If that isn't "Near Death", then what is?
    - rwmj 8y ago
      Dead means no development is being done on it, so it cannot possibly work on modern computers. The original Be presumably hasn't seen any development for decades, but Haiku is actively developed and so very much alive. It means it works on current PCs, and has the potential to become more widely used in future (which Be does not).
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        "Nearly Dead" != "Dead". It is possible Haiku could start gaining ground and become something widely used in the future, however it is more likely that the project languishes is relative obscurity before eventually being abandoned.

smallstepforman 8y ago

I’ve always wondered (but never read about) what the key people of Microsft, Apple and IBM thought of the Amiga in the late 80’s. Were they worried, powerless, dare they dream that C= would do so many missteps? If anyone has any reading links of how the competition viewed the Amiga, I’d love to read about it.

jacobush 8y ago
Commodore and Apple were the same size for a while, but Apple had a better PR spin. Steve Jobs always talked about IBM vs Apple, ignoring Commodore et al. And he was right to do so, it turns out.
pjc50 8y ago
Commodore never had a competitive offering for the business market. The one really unambiguously great thing that C= did was the custom chipset for graphics and sound. That was the area they should have continued to progress in; perhaps they would have ended up out-competing SGI and eventually inventing the 3D accelerator.
bitwize 8y ago
IBM licensed Amiga tech for use in the OS/2 2.0 (and later) desktop. In fact, that's how we got ARexx; as part of the licensing arrangement, IBM granted Commodore-Amiga a license to use their REXX language. So... IBM definitely thought there was something of value there.
- puzzle 8y ago
  What Amiga tech is that? ARexx started as retail software that Wishful Thinking Development sold (like WShell). Commodore acquired it years later.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    MS didn't want to collaborate on OS2 any more. So IBM licensed some things for the GUI from Amiga that became Workplace Shell. Possibly included BOOPSI. A REXX licence was indeed part of the deal from what little I remember. http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s02.html#os_2 http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s02.html#os_...

cbm-vic-20 8y ago

I was in university when the BeBox was released. One of my better funded colleagues got one of them shipped to his dorm room. All the nerds went crazy over this thing. It was incredibly fast, physical CPU activity lights (it was a dual PowerPC machine), and a plethora of hardware connectors, including the "GeekPort", a set of GPIOs that made it really easy to interface with external hardware.

zozbot123 8y ago
Lots of modern desktop PCs have case LED's that could easily find use as system activity indicators if the Linux kernel (or userspace HAL) supported them. Unfortunately support seems to be really patchy.
- deadbunny 8y ago
  I believe there is some work on standardizing the RGB LED interface going on as we speak: https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/1/5/191 https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/1/5/191
  - pantalaimon 8y ago
    Linux already has an LED interface, it's just that currently you can give an LED a brightness value 0-255. So a RGB LED would have to be represented by three entries in /sys/class/leds/ That's kind of inconvenient when those three LEDs are actually one RGB LED. This is only how the LEDs are represented to user space, you still need a driver for the chips the LEDs are connected to.
mmjaa 8y ago
I still have my BeBox, and love it. For the Blinky lights, a magicshifter suffices: http://magicshifter.net/ http://magicshifter.net/ (I did the OS)

jonstewart 8y ago

In 1996, I bought a Power Computing PowerTower 166 (a Mac clone, the second most powerful Mac one could buy at the time) and ran System 7.5 and then 7.6 on it. But I got bored and figured out how to install BeOS on a second partition. Holy cow! It was sooooo much faster. It had an OpenGL demo app, with spinning cubes, and you could drag and drop movies onto it and they’d play without stuttering as the cube spun around. It was a spare, simple, beautiful OS.

scroot 8y ago
Gotta say, my Power Computing was one of my favorite machines I've ever owned
- butterfi 8y ago
  Power Computing had, if I remember correctly, a one-hour long sale that doubled the amount of RAM you ordered (back when RAM was really expensive). I bought a great tower, pulled half the RAM and redistributed to my other desktop. Good times!
- jonstewart 8y ago
  Not just the 604, but also the 66 MHz bus and the faaaast 7200 RPM Micropolis 2 GB SCSI hard drive... /swoon I do kind of wonder whether I’d have learned more Unix faster if I’d have bought an SGI O2.
agumonkey 8y ago
I say that often: when watching beos demo (97?) these decade.. it brings tears to your eyes. First, because it's so nicely designed it's beautiful. Second because even today my laptop system can't really do that.

hguhghuff 8y ago

I wonder what strategy might have succeeded in Be getting traction against Windows back then? Free from day one? The big problem for any competitor to Windows was that nothing had the drivers support that windows had. Steve Jobs solves that by supporting only his own hardware. Drivers was a huge issue.

kowdermeister 8y ago
> Free from day one? That's great in theory, but how do you then pay the developers?
- tialaramex 8y ago
  The income from selling BeOS wasn't ever covering a significant fraction of R&D costs so who cares? Be was losing about $10M per year from the outset. It never came anywhere close to breaking even. The idea was, either this takes off (in which case you can make money a lot of different ways even if you give the core product away) or the threat that it might forces Apple to buy the whole thing, either way you get your money back and JLG gets what he wants, which is and has always been to be "right" even when he's monumentally and obviously wrong. [ JLG led Apple product development when it was failing, Be which failed, and the Palm spin out that made an OS so lousy even _Palm_ never bothered using it any products. The man is often cited as a "guru" presumably in the same sense as when some random guy is brought in by gullible actors or musicians who've got a lot of money suddenly ] In the late 1990s it looked as though it would probably close its doors and the investors would get nothing (technically they'd get the source code, branding and so on, but those are basically worthless), which happens all the time with that sort of business. But the dot com boom saved them. Not Be, the investors. An Offering was written which under normal circumstances would get laughed out of the room. Ha ha ha, you have a product that nobody uses, and you want a nine figure sum of money for a business with a failed Apple executive and a bunch of hackers, No. But at the time you could write blah blah blah "Internet" blah blah and people wouldn't bother reading past the bottom of the first page of your IPO because they already had their wallets open. So now the original investors had their money back, and gradually the big institutional hitters (e.g. pension companies) could exit too, you take $50000 of BEOS and you sell it to a thousand Be fans for $50 per time, when it turns into $4 of cash five years later you're fine and they learn a valuable lesson about investment. Be got a little bit of money left over. The idea was, pivot into making software for "Internet appliances". You know, the computer next to your stove, or that multi-purpose device in your gym which... oh right, yeah, no, those aren't a thing, the idea went nowhere and Be's business went down in flames. JLG got to go ruin Palm instead.

bluedino 8y ago

Gasse is one of the few people I have subscribed to on Medium. His rants on Apple/tech can be a little off, but he's a great writer and has lots of interesting stories. Even though I know how this ends up (they move to PowerPC), I felt left hanging when AT&T canceled the Hobbit processor and they weren't sure what to do next. It was like the feeling you get at the end of a chapter of a great novel.

exsf0859 8y ago
If you like Gassee's writing about Be, there's plenty more available in his articles for the Be Newsletter: https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/index.html https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/index.html
- jodrellblank 8y ago
  From that link, Gassé writing in 1997: When Jobs hired Sculley, the company was on the way up. Today, it's losing customers, developers, money, and market share. [..] Apple doesn't need a CEO, they need a messiah (or a crash test dummy). And any problem that requires walking on water as a solution is, you'll grant me, a problem ill-stated. Still, there may be a way to make the search for a new CEO easier

bsder 8y ago

While AT&T have always been jerks, having Steve Sakoman meltdown because they lost a key supplier is totally beyond the pale. Startups are, almost by definition, exercises in turning disasters into opportunities. MIPS and ARM were quite well established by that time. TI DSP's similarly. Redoing the hardware was certainly an option.

yellowapple 8y ago
"Redoing the hardware was certainly an option." And that's exactly what Be did, switching to dual PowerPC processors instead.

donatj 8y ago

Why is the big main hero screenshot Windows with a Be theme rather than actual BeOS?

danans 8y ago

The dual-PowerPC BeBox[1] I bought with savings from my campus job in college was the machine that made me "fall in love" with computers. At the time I was so incredibly jazzed that I didn't need to "telnet" to the campus workstations to complete my Unix-based programming projects, since there was a full standard Unix API and an IDE (CodeWarrior IIRC) came with the machine. And compared to any other computer, the UI was mind-blowingly responsive under multitasking. It was also the platform I used for my first side-project (a graphical IMAP email client). I thought I was quite the tech rebel at the time, thinking I was onboard the nascent stages of this OS, but it seems that by the time I became a devotee, it had already suffered a major internal setback with the AT&T deprecation of the Hobbit CPU. I had always assumed (mistakenly) that they switched to PowerPC because it was "better". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox

DrJosiah 8y ago

Only got to use the downloadable / bootable BeOS on CD / installable. Had a lot of fun on a P166 MMX in my dorm, and a P2-400 in greyscale at work (Nvidia TNT wasn't supported in color initially). Sad to have watched BeOS go away. It was and still is pretty amazing.