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> What’s left for us now is to wonder, how different would the desktop computer ecosystem look today if all those years ago, back in 1997, Apple decided to buy
by jsjohnst 7y ago
> What’s left for us now is to wonder, how different would the desktop computer ecosystem look today if all those years ago, back in 1997, Apple decided to buy Be Inc. instead of NeXT? Would Tim Berners-Lee have used a BeBox to run the world’s first web server instead?
For this hypothetical scenario to ever had been possible, BeOS would’ve had to time travel, as TBL wrote WorldWideWeb on a NeXT machine in 1990[0]. BeOS was initially developed in 1991 per Wikipedia[1] and the initial release of BeOS to the public wasn’t until 1995.
[0] https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS