3 ms·

It was seriously considered by Apple as the successor of the classical MacOS but they got too greedy with the price and Apple went with a NextStep based OS. In

It was seriously considered by Apple as the successor of the classical MacOS but they got too greedy with the price and Apple went with a NextStep based OS. In all honesty BeOS had no leverage because they were so committed to build the successor of MacOS that they had no alternative plan

lproven 4y ago
Be did get too greedy with the asking price, you're right. But that was not the only thing. Be had no particularly special story about dev tools; NeXT had the world's best, plus a charismatic, visionary CEO. Be should have gone and done a deal with Acorn, who could have done them a silent-running, passively-cooled SMP multi-ARM workstation in 1998 for less than the cost of a mid-range Mac. Acorn had cheap SMP hardware ready to go. Be had the state-of-the-art SMP workstation OS before Linux 2.2 made it able to scale usefully.
- smm11 4y ago
  Be didn't have anything. Developers, developers, developers, right? Late 90s I was running OS X Server, Be, and NeXT. NeXT was better than OS X Server, and Be was far behind. Looked pretty, but that was about it. Funny thing is I live in a browser and text editor now, and the Be install I ran in 99 would just about do it!
  - lproven 4y ago
    > Be didn't have anything. Developers, developers, developers, right? Well, quite, yes. > Late 90s I was running OS X Server, Be, and NeXT. Early adopter, huh? OSXS only appeared in 1999. > NeXT was better than OS X Server How so? UI? I'm just curious. > Be was far behind. Looked pretty, but that was about it. I reviewed it then: https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorldMagazine/PCW%20200007%20July%20Created%20From%20PCW%20Cover%20CD%20%28No%20Cover%29/page/n50/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorldMagazine/PC... I think it was more than just a pretty face. It was a demo of how computing should be, and showed that everything else is a bloated mess. It's much worse now, of course. > Funny thing is I live in a browser and text editor now, and the Be install I ran in 99 would just about do it! Which was largely my own thought about Haiku b4. It's very close to doing everything I need.
    - smm11 4y ago
      NeXT was just more mature to me at the time. OSXS was trying to do too much from all directions, while I was of the belief that System 8.6.1 was pretty perfect already. Agree on Be, and I've tried Hauki off and on. It really seems, as I default to using my phone for nearly everything anyway, that a system like that really is ideal at this point. Like a lot of people my day is spent a jump server away, so I haven't cared what I'm using 99 percent of the time.
      - lproven 4y ago
        OK, ISWYM. I mean, yes, NeXTstep was much more mature. No argument. But OS X Server was aimed at a different job, and a different job to classic MacOS as well. People did use NeXTstep as a server -- the first ever web server, notably -- but it wasn't a great one and wasn't its intended role. Classic MacOS was usable as a server too. It seems to be largely forgotten now but the US Army officially moved all its web servers to classic MacOS at one point, because not having any form of shell at all made it largely unhackable. You can't get shell access when there is no shell to get to, and no clever x86 code exploit will help you when none of the servers have an x86 chip in them. It wasn't a very good server, though, and quietly I think they changed to something else a bit more conventional not long afterwards. Compared to Classic, I bet OS X Server was a great server OS. ;-) I think the real purpose of OSXS was to answer the question: "OK, we've done a ton of work porting NeXTstep to PowerMac and grafting a kinda sorta MacOS-like desktop on the thing, and it's cost us a sh1t-tonne of money and person-hours of work with not much to show for it so far. Is there any way we can start to make some money off this thing before it's ready to ship as a desktop OS?"
- sillywalk 4y ago
  If only, I miss BeOS. ... Though I think it would be the same chicken/egg APPS problem with the BeBox: Unless you could run existing Risc OS apps under BeOS, I doubt Acorn users would want to switch, and porting existing apps through a Carbon-like API subset would probably be hard, because I gather a lot of apps use assembly and hacks to the OS.. ps I just started trying out Risc OS after reading a couple of your articles on it (modernizing (or not) and the gem of an os (or not)). I've got it on my pi 400, and use it for writing without distraction (no wifi!), and there is no latency while typing. The ADJUST button thing is also pretty neat.
  - lproven 4y ago
    :-) Yeah, you're right, it's just an idle daydream fantasy of mine. RISC OS was and is pretty small and simple. I reckon doing to it what Apple did with Classic -- a version running in a native VM -- was doable.
- laurencerowe 4y ago
  Realistically I don t think Acorn ever really and a hope of becoming a mass market success because their failure wasn’t technical. BeOS was a far better operating system than RiscOS but at the end of the day agglomeration effects are far more important than technical prowess. Maybe they could have captured some of Sun or SGI’s market share but who remembers them either? (I say this as someone who grew up with first and Electron then an A3000.)
  - lproven 4y ago
    This is a good point, yes. I reckon Acorn had 2 possible escape routes, but they didn't seem to notice either. [1] Make the thinnest lightest longest-battery-life laptops around, able to do all the stuff the DOS/Win9x phat boyz did but with no fan, no extra cooling, and do it for a day at a time. RISC OS would have been fine for that... but it was just a different dead end road. [2] The Phoebe (RISC PC 2) was SMP-capable, had richer media support and PCI and so on, but RISC OS wasn't SMP ready and wasn't going to be. SMP was already manifestly The Future. So, commit to it. Current SOTA OSes in ~1998 that could do SMP were either: • Expensive proprietary UNIX workstations -- so undercut them • Windows NT 4 -- not really finished yet, serious weaknesses (e.g. no USB), even if it was the first version with a credible UI. • Linux was not there yet. There was an opening, but the plan to build their own OS -- again -- was insane. They didn't know it but they needed a partner with a lightweight SMP media OS. Be had a lightweight SMP media OS but needed more competitive hardware. But these are just daydreams. If the bottom line is just maximising revenue -- to hell with changing the world, just sell more sugar water (to paraphrase Jobs to Sculley) -- then they did the right thing. Sell lotsa chips, dump the workstations and the OS.

lproven 4y ago

Be did get too greedy with the asking price, you're right. But that was not the only thing. Be had no particularly special story about dev tools; NeXT had the world's best, plus a charismatic, visionary CEO. Be should have gone and done a deal with Acorn, who could have done them a silent-running, passively-cooled SMP multi-ARM workstation in 1998 for less than the cost of a mid-range Mac. Acorn had cheap SMP hardware ready to go. Be had the state-of-the-art SMP workstation OS before Linux 2.2 made it able to scale usefully.

smm11 4y ago
Be didn't have anything. Developers, developers, developers, right? Late 90s I was running OS X Server, Be, and NeXT. NeXT was better than OS X Server, and Be was far behind. Looked pretty, but that was about it. Funny thing is I live in a browser and text editor now, and the Be install I ran in 99 would just about do it!
- lproven 4y ago
  > Be didn't have anything. Developers, developers, developers, right? Well, quite, yes. > Late 90s I was running OS X Server, Be, and NeXT. Early adopter, huh? OSXS only appeared in 1999. > NeXT was better than OS X Server How so? UI? I'm just curious. > Be was far behind. Looked pretty, but that was about it. I reviewed it then: https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorldMagazine/PCW%20200007%20July%20Created%20From%20PCW%20Cover%20CD%20%28No%20Cover%29/page/n50/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorldMagazine/PC... I think it was more than just a pretty face. It was a demo of how computing should be, and showed that everything else is a bloated mess. It's much worse now, of course. > Funny thing is I live in a browser and text editor now, and the Be install I ran in 99 would just about do it! Which was largely my own thought about Haiku b4. It's very close to doing everything I need.
  - smm11 4y ago
    NeXT was just more mature to me at the time. OSXS was trying to do too much from all directions, while I was of the belief that System 8.6.1 was pretty perfect already. Agree on Be, and I've tried Hauki off and on. It really seems, as I default to using my phone for nearly everything anyway, that a system like that really is ideal at this point. Like a lot of people my day is spent a jump server away, so I haven't cared what I'm using 99 percent of the time.
    - lproven 4y ago
      OK, ISWYM. I mean, yes, NeXTstep was much more mature. No argument. But OS X Server was aimed at a different job, and a different job to classic MacOS as well. People did use NeXTstep as a server -- the first ever web server, notably -- but it wasn't a great one and wasn't its intended role. Classic MacOS was usable as a server too. It seems to be largely forgotten now but the US Army officially moved all its web servers to classic MacOS at one point, because not having any form of shell at all made it largely unhackable. You can't get shell access when there is no shell to get to, and no clever x86 code exploit will help you when none of the servers have an x86 chip in them. It wasn't a very good server, though, and quietly I think they changed to something else a bit more conventional not long afterwards. Compared to Classic, I bet OS X Server was a great server OS. ;-) I think the real purpose of OSXS was to answer the question: "OK, we've done a ton of work porting NeXTstep to PowerMac and grafting a kinda sorta MacOS-like desktop on the thing, and it's cost us a sh1t-tonne of money and person-hours of work with not much to show for it so far. Is there any way we can start to make some money off this thing before it's ready to ship as a desktop OS?"
sillywalk 4y ago
If only, I miss BeOS. ... Though I think it would be the same chicken/egg APPS problem with the BeBox: Unless you could run existing Risc OS apps under BeOS, I doubt Acorn users would want to switch, and porting existing apps through a Carbon-like API subset would probably be hard, because I gather a lot of apps use assembly and hacks to the OS.. ps I just started trying out Risc OS after reading a couple of your articles on it (modernizing (or not) and the gem of an os (or not)). I've got it on my pi 400, and use it for writing without distraction (no wifi!), and there is no latency while typing. The ADJUST button thing is also pretty neat.
- lproven 4y ago
  :-) Yeah, you're right, it's just an idle daydream fantasy of mine. RISC OS was and is pretty small and simple. I reckon doing to it what Apple did with Classic -- a version running in a native VM -- was doable.
laurencerowe 4y ago
Realistically I don t think Acorn ever really and a hope of becoming a mass market success because their failure wasn’t technical. BeOS was a far better operating system than RiscOS but at the end of the day agglomeration effects are far more important than technical prowess. Maybe they could have captured some of Sun or SGI’s market share but who remembers them either? (I say this as someone who grew up with first and Electron then an A3000.)
- lproven 4y ago
  This is a good point, yes. I reckon Acorn had 2 possible escape routes, but they didn't seem to notice either. [1] Make the thinnest lightest longest-battery-life laptops around, able to do all the stuff the DOS/Win9x phat boyz did but with no fan, no extra cooling, and do it for a day at a time. RISC OS would have been fine for that... but it was just a different dead end road. [2] The Phoebe (RISC PC 2) was SMP-capable, had richer media support and PCI and so on, but RISC OS wasn't SMP ready and wasn't going to be. SMP was already manifestly The Future. So, commit to it. Current SOTA OSes in ~1998 that could do SMP were either: • Expensive proprietary UNIX workstations -- so undercut them • Windows NT 4 -- not really finished yet, serious weaknesses (e.g. no USB), even if it was the first version with a credible UI. • Linux was not there yet. There was an opening, but the plan to build their own OS -- again -- was insane. They didn't know it but they needed a partner with a lightweight SMP media OS. Be had a lightweight SMP media OS but needed more competitive hardware. But these are just daydreams. If the bottom line is just maximising revenue -- to hell with changing the world, just sell more sugar water (to paraphrase Jobs to Sculley) -- then they did the right thing. Sell lotsa chips, dump the workstations and the OS.