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Heck no. BeOS was a tech demo that looked great because you couldn’t do anything complex with it. The list of missing features is endless. The longevity of the
by simondotau 5y ago
Heck no. BeOS was a tech demo that looked great because you couldn’t do anything complex with it. The list of missing features is endless. The longevity of the platform is unknowable. And there is no reason to think the injection of BeOS would have abated the steady decline of Apple’s relevance.
NeXT gave Apple a mature platform which has withstood the test of time, underpinning multiple architecture changes and adaptation to dramatically different devices. And more importantly, it gave Steve Jobs back to Apple, who orchestrated its recovery from a decline into irrelevance.
- laumars 5y agoI did run BeOS for a period and it felt a pretty decent system to me. In fact it was my preferred platform for a good while.
- nerdponx 5y ago> The list of missing features is endless. I've never heard someone say this before. What's an important missing feature that other OSes had at the time?
- jandrese 5y agoA decent web browser was the most obvious problem for a long time. Be was different enough that it was hard to port anything that expected a Berkley socket interface, which was all internet applications.
- perardi 5y agoRobust printer support and color management. Which at the time would have been super super duper important for the just-hanging-in-there Mac user base. (I was one of them. It was just hanging in there.) The Mac’s professional niche was printing. Prepress. Big press runs. QuarkXPress. And BeOS could barely print, and had no color management to speak of.
- jonstewart 5y agoYeah, DisplayPostscript/DisplayPDF was a very big deal and upgrade with MacOS X right from the start. That’s an underrated advantage that NeXTStep brought to the table.
- rdsnsca 5y agoOnly the first server version of macOS X used DisplayPostscript, Apple replaced it with "quartz" . DisplayPDF. so they would not have to pay the license fee to Adobe.
- simondotau 5y agoCorrect. But it’s important to note that PDF is an evolution of the postscript language; it shares all of the same drawing primitives. In some respect it’s analogous to JavaScript and JSON. (Yes, postscript is a full scripting language.) It’s unlikely that Apple needed to strip much out of DisplayPostscript in order to rename it DisplayPDF (and then Quartz).
- icedchai 5y agoStarting with the basics, I don't think BeOS even supported multiple users, permissions, access control, etc. I did play around with it in the mid-1990's and recall it had none of this. Perhaps this changed in later versions. But NeXT, other Unix OSes, and NT were far ahead in that regard.