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Oh what would have been what could have been had Apple bought Be instead of Next. We'd likely not have any iPhones or a 2.5T Apple but we could have had some re

Oh what would have been what could have been had Apple bought Be instead of Next. We'd likely not have any iPhones or a 2.5T Apple but we could have had some really cool software. BeOS and now Haiku will always have a special place in my nerd-head. consider sponsoring the team here: https://github.com/sponsors/haiku https://github.com/sponsors/haiku

angrygoat 4y ago
Circa 1999 one of the popular machines in my uni's computer club was the BeBox - it had a solid web browser, it was fast, it had the cool CPU usage indicator on the front, and it was *nix enough to compile most stuff or to work on assignments in ANSI C. And it was just so snappy, it could do more than one thing without getting janky. A real shame that they faded out. I kind of miss those days with all the different and varied workstations – Be, SGI, DEC, HP, IBM, Sun, ...
- rzzzt 4y ago
  I'd like to see the GeekPort reintroduced on non-Pi class machines. A bit of digital GPIO, some analog lines, maybe SPI...
  - hakfoo 4y ago
    I wonder why there isn't a $20 PCI-E card (or perhaps USB dongle) that offers a 40-pin RasPi-style port.
    - ofrzeta 4y ago
      If you had a PCI card you would need some kind of external adapter or breakout box for the GPIO pins. Seems much more practical to have the board in the "breakout box" and connect it via USB.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      I don't know about the prices but mixed-signal GPIO rigs for PCIe and USB are very common. Look at the "LabJack" for example. The LabJack U3-HV has almost exact feature parity with the geekport.
      - hakfoo 4y ago
        A quick google puts it at $130, well beyond the price of "just buy a Raspberry Pi or similar device, which also comes with all the SoC smarts too."
        jeffbee 4y ago
        Fair enough. It compares more favorably to an odd port inconveniently located on the back of a $5000 (2022 dollars) tower PC.
  - guenthert 4y ago
    Twenty years ago I might have liked that too, but these days I much prefer dedicated machines (MCUs like Arduino, P8X32A, R.Pico etc. or "single-board" (or rather "open-frame") computers like R.Pi, BBB etc.) for the acoustic noise alone (not to speak of power bill and electrical safety). USB or Ethernet (preferred for galvanic separation) on the PC does just fine to connect to those.
cameroncooper 4y ago
It would be interesting to see what would have happened had Apple bought Be instead of Apple, but I think it's pretty clear Apple made the "right" move. NeXT had really good software, and of course, Steve Jobs (and let's not forget about the rest of the NeXT team with people like Avie). Hard to imagine Jean-Louis Gassée (or anyone else really) being able to turn the company around like Steve did.
- hankman86 4y ago
  Exactly. In acquiring NeXT, Apple bought leadership and culture. And we can argue forever if Apple’s engineers could have shipped the first OSX release earlier or in a better state, had they instead acquired Be. But I doubt it. Because - again - they bought themselves a high-performance culture, which they might not have gotten from Be. Porting BeOS to Apple hardware / existing software would have likely required an equally Herculean effort. Oh and they got Steve Jobs of course who made quick work of pushing out the old Apple leadership. And good that he did.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    BeOS already ran on existing Apple PowerPC hardware of the time: http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/support/guides/beosreadylist_ppc.html http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/su...
KMag 4y ago
In school, I quad-booted Debian, Win2k, QNX, and BeOS on my desktop. BeOS was very light weight. Its ethernet driver for 3c509 was buggy and crashed often, but being a userspace driver, I just got a popup asking permission to restart the driver. Conversely, a couple years later I had an OSX laptop, and a corrupted backup CD that would kernel panic OSX, Win2k, and Linux. (Honestly, ISO 9660 and FAT32 drivers should be migrated out of mainstream OS kernels, since kernel latency is very far from being the bottleneck when using thunmb drives or CDs.) On the other hand, BeOS had some questionable uses of metadata. After improperly using tar to backup my home directory before a reinstall, I lost all of my NetPositive browser bookmarks. I didn't realize each bookmark was a zero-sized file with the URL actually stored in metadata. My improper backup procedure dropped the metadata fork. Also, there was a kernel bug related to semaphores. I had some semaphore code that worked fine under Linux but would kernel panic BeOS. Had Apple purchased Be, we'd likely have a much lighter weight OSX, though perhaps with poorer support for multiple users. I'm still hoping that someday QNX RTP gets open-sourced. A hard real-time light weight microkernel OS was fun to play around with. In particular, a cache benchmark I ran for a systems class showed quite a bit smaller cache footprint for QNX vs. Debian. (Though, Debian almost certainly had more daemons running, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison of kernel cache footprints.)
jeffbee 4y ago
I find this take somewhat baffling. At the moment that Apple bought NeXT, NeXTSTEP had a mature software toolchain, a working IPv4 networking stack, and enterprise customers, three things that BeOS lacked. BeOS had a primitive software toolchain ecosystem based on pre-standard C++. BeOS IP networking barely worked and despite everything claimed in their advertising it was fully serialized, single-threaded networking. BeOS had zero customers. The only thing that Be did have was one nifty demo, and a somewhat innovative file system. Apple must have correctly deduced that it would be easy to improve the filesystem, because they later did so, with the same author. Comparing BeOS and NextSTEP in 1997 is like comparing a ham sandwich to a piglet and a bag of flour. One of these things was a finished product.
- steve1977 4y ago
  NeXT even had stuff like WebObjects, which was really ahead of its time back then. And AFAIK it still powers some services at Apple.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    iTunes and App Store seem to both still be backed by webobjects services. Stuff like [1] still respond at WO-like URLs and still include headers like `x-webobjects-whatever` so I surmise these are still production WO apps. 1: https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/wsLookup?id=909253&urlDesc= https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/w...
- perardi 4y ago
  Also, NeXtSTEP could reliably print stuff. Which, given that publishing was the niche that arguably kept the Mac alive during those years: kinda important!
- PAPPPmAc 4y ago
  (Just because I love this argument): Have you used Mid-90s OpenStep and BeOS on period hardware? People rose-tinted-glasses the hell out of OpenStep (...and the first few OS X releases), it's ridiculously sluggish and brittle (in that same kind of "I did something to config and rendered it unbootable" way as early 2000s Linux). BeOS is shockingly performant and flexible on the same hardware. As much as the original BeOS network stack was mediocre (and it was, it wasn't fixed until the BONE design in that final Dano leak in 2001) the much-touted NeXT networking stack was literally the open source 4.3BSD networking code running hosted, with their awful NetInfo system on top, which Apple spent the next several years excising. Excising like the Adobe license fees cost more than a PC, few major vendors (not even Adobe!) willing to port their software to, Display PostScript GUI they had to throw out and replace. I'll grant that they got a really good set of development tools they're still essentially using, and Be's were rough (and kind of alien, that kind of pervasive threading is _still_ hard with decades of work on the tooling). Apple bought NeXT because the stack looked architecturally like a less-bungled version of their own failed Pink/Taligent effort, and Steve Jobs had a better relationship with people still at Apple than Jean-Louis Gassée.
diskzero 4y ago
Many Be employees, including myself, ended up at Apple; some after a brief time at Eazel and others later on. They had, and continue to, make great contributions. As a former Be employee and lover of BeOS, I can say that Apple acquiring Be would have been a disaster for Apple. I have no ill will to Gil Amelio, Ellen Hancock, Steve Glass and the other leadership, but they didn't have what it took (other than the NeXT purchase) to pull Apple out of crisis.
pjmlp 4y ago
Assuming Apple's success by going with Be instead of NeXT, we would have yet another mainstream OS where C++ plays a major role, thus settling the whole discussiong regarding C vs C++ for OS design.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Linus Torvalds has settled that whole discussion, by rejecting C++ and subsequently adopting Rust. Even Windows is basically written in C in its lowest layers anyway, they apparently don't find C++ itself very useful.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Linus Torvalds has settled that whole discussion for the Linux kernel. Thankfully his opinion about C++ is meaningless outside Linux world. Windows started to adopt C++ on the kernel since Vista, you can make use of Windows Implementation Library, a C++ template library for kernel, drivers and userspace code. Just gotta to love that VC++ /kernel flag. macOS with its NeXTSTEP heritage, changed from having Objective-C drivers on kernel space to C++ drivers in kernel space. Then if you bother to broaden your horizons beyond FOSS UNIX clones, there are enough OSes already shipping C++ on the kernel.

angrygoat 4y ago

Circa 1999 one of the popular machines in my uni's computer club was the BeBox - it had a solid web browser, it was fast, it had the cool CPU usage indicator on the front, and it was *nix enough to compile most stuff or to work on assignments in ANSI C. And it was just so snappy, it could do more than one thing without getting janky. A real shame that they faded out. I kind of miss those days with all the different and varied workstations – Be, SGI, DEC, HP, IBM, Sun, ...

rzzzt 4y ago
I'd like to see the GeekPort reintroduced on non-Pi class machines. A bit of digital GPIO, some analog lines, maybe SPI...
- hakfoo 4y ago
  I wonder why there isn't a $20 PCI-E card (or perhaps USB dongle) that offers a 40-pin RasPi-style port.
  - ofrzeta 4y ago
    If you had a PCI card you would need some kind of external adapter or breakout box for the GPIO pins. Seems much more practical to have the board in the "breakout box" and connect it via USB.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    I don't know about the prices but mixed-signal GPIO rigs for PCIe and USB are very common. Look at the "LabJack" for example. The LabJack U3-HV has almost exact feature parity with the geekport.
    - hakfoo 4y ago
      A quick google puts it at $130, well beyond the price of "just buy a Raspberry Pi or similar device, which also comes with all the SoC smarts too."
      - jeffbee 4y ago
        Fair enough. It compares more favorably to an odd port inconveniently located on the back of a $5000 (2022 dollars) tower PC.
- guenthert 4y ago
  Twenty years ago I might have liked that too, but these days I much prefer dedicated machines (MCUs like Arduino, P8X32A, R.Pico etc. or "single-board" (or rather "open-frame") computers like R.Pi, BBB etc.) for the acoustic noise alone (not to speak of power bill and electrical safety). USB or Ethernet (preferred for galvanic separation) on the PC does just fine to connect to those.

cameroncooper 4y ago

It would be interesting to see what would have happened had Apple bought Be instead of Apple, but I think it's pretty clear Apple made the "right" move. NeXT had really good software, and of course, Steve Jobs (and let's not forget about the rest of the NeXT team with people like Avie). Hard to imagine Jean-Louis Gassée (or anyone else really) being able to turn the company around like Steve did.

hankman86 4y ago
Exactly. In acquiring NeXT, Apple bought leadership and culture. And we can argue forever if Apple’s engineers could have shipped the first OSX release earlier or in a better state, had they instead acquired Be. But I doubt it. Because - again - they bought themselves a high-performance culture, which they might not have gotten from Be. Porting BeOS to Apple hardware / existing software would have likely required an equally Herculean effort. Oh and they got Steve Jobs of course who made quick work of pushing out the old Apple leadership. And good that he did.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  BeOS already ran on existing Apple PowerPC hardware of the time: http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/support/guides/beosreadylist_ppc.html http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/su...

KMag 4y ago

In school, I quad-booted Debian, Win2k, QNX, and BeOS on my desktop. BeOS was very light weight. Its ethernet driver for 3c509 was buggy and crashed often, but being a userspace driver, I just got a popup asking permission to restart the driver. Conversely, a couple years later I had an OSX laptop, and a corrupted backup CD that would kernel panic OSX, Win2k, and Linux. (Honestly, ISO 9660 and FAT32 drivers should be migrated out of mainstream OS kernels, since kernel latency is very far from being the bottleneck when using thunmb drives or CDs.) On the other hand, BeOS had some questionable uses of metadata. After improperly using tar to backup my home directory before a reinstall, I lost all of my NetPositive browser bookmarks. I didn't realize each bookmark was a zero-sized file with the URL actually stored in metadata. My improper backup procedure dropped the metadata fork. Also, there was a kernel bug related to semaphores. I had some semaphore code that worked fine under Linux but would kernel panic BeOS. Had Apple purchased Be, we'd likely have a much lighter weight OSX, though perhaps with poorer support for multiple users. I'm still hoping that someday QNX RTP gets open-sourced. A hard real-time light weight microkernel OS was fun to play around with. In particular, a cache benchmark I ran for a systems class showed quite a bit smaller cache footprint for QNX vs. Debian. (Though, Debian almost certainly had more daemons running, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison of kernel cache footprints.)

jeffbee 4y ago

I find this take somewhat baffling. At the moment that Apple bought NeXT, NeXTSTEP had a mature software toolchain, a working IPv4 networking stack, and enterprise customers, three things that BeOS lacked. BeOS had a primitive software toolchain ecosystem based on pre-standard C++. BeOS IP networking barely worked and despite everything claimed in their advertising it was fully serialized, single-threaded networking. BeOS had zero customers. The only thing that Be did have was one nifty demo, and a somewhat innovative file system. Apple must have correctly deduced that it would be easy to improve the filesystem, because they later did so, with the same author. Comparing BeOS and NextSTEP in 1997 is like comparing a ham sandwich to a piglet and a bag of flour. One of these things was a finished product.

steve1977 4y ago
NeXT even had stuff like WebObjects, which was really ahead of its time back then. And AFAIK it still powers some services at Apple.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  iTunes and App Store seem to both still be backed by webobjects services. Stuff like [1] still respond at WO-like URLs and still include headers like `x-webobjects-whatever` so I surmise these are still production WO apps. 1: https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/wsLookup?id=909253&urlDesc= https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStoreServices.woa/ws/w...
perardi 4y ago
Also, NeXtSTEP could reliably print stuff. Which, given that publishing was the niche that arguably kept the Mac alive during those years: kinda important!
PAPPPmAc 4y ago
(Just because I love this argument): Have you used Mid-90s OpenStep and BeOS on period hardware? People rose-tinted-glasses the hell out of OpenStep (...and the first few OS X releases), it's ridiculously sluggish and brittle (in that same kind of "I did something to config and rendered it unbootable" way as early 2000s Linux). BeOS is shockingly performant and flexible on the same hardware. As much as the original BeOS network stack was mediocre (and it was, it wasn't fixed until the BONE design in that final Dano leak in 2001) the much-touted NeXT networking stack was literally the open source 4.3BSD networking code running hosted, with their awful NetInfo system on top, which Apple spent the next several years excising. Excising like the Adobe license fees cost more than a PC, few major vendors (not even Adobe!) willing to port their software to, Display PostScript GUI they had to throw out and replace. I'll grant that they got a really good set of development tools they're still essentially using, and Be's were rough (and kind of alien, that kind of pervasive threading is _still_ hard with decades of work on the tooling). Apple bought NeXT because the stack looked architecturally like a less-bungled version of their own failed Pink/Taligent effort, and Steve Jobs had a better relationship with people still at Apple than Jean-Louis Gassée.

diskzero 4y ago

Many Be employees, including myself, ended up at Apple; some after a brief time at Eazel and others later on. They had, and continue to, make great contributions. As a former Be employee and lover of BeOS, I can say that Apple acquiring Be would have been a disaster for Apple. I have no ill will to Gil Amelio, Ellen Hancock, Steve Glass and the other leadership, but they didn't have what it took (other than the NeXT purchase) to pull Apple out of crisis.

pjmlp 4y ago

Assuming Apple's success by going with Be instead of NeXT, we would have yet another mainstream OS where C++ plays a major role, thus settling the whole discussiong regarding C vs C++ for OS design.

zozbot234 4y ago
Linus Torvalds has settled that whole discussion, by rejecting C++ and subsequently adopting Rust. Even Windows is basically written in C in its lowest layers anyway, they apparently don't find C++ itself very useful.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Linus Torvalds has settled that whole discussion for the Linux kernel. Thankfully his opinion about C++ is meaningless outside Linux world. Windows started to adopt C++ on the kernel since Vista, you can make use of Windows Implementation Library, a C++ template library for kernel, drivers and userspace code. Just gotta to love that VC++ /kernel flag. macOS with its NeXTSTEP heritage, changed from having Objective-C drivers on kernel space to C++ drivers in kernel space. Then if you bother to broaden your horizons beyond FOSS UNIX clones, there are enough OSes already shipping C++ on the kernel.