8 ms·

What I'd give for a glimpse of the timeline where Apple bought Be instead of NeXT.

by faefox 2y ago

scelerat 2y ago
I can’t think of a better acqui-hire than NeXT + Steve Jobs
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  You mean when NeXT bought Apple and forced Apple to finance the deal. A.K.A. that time when Steve Jobs acqui-hired Apple.
  - alwillis 2y ago
    Apple looked at it as an acquisition, while NeXT looked at it as a merger. NeXT didn’t buy Apple obviously, but Steve Jobs and his lieutenants took over the most important positions within Apple. Which made sense given the situation Apple found itself in.
- faefox 2y ago
  For sure, it was pretty clearly the right call at the time and objectively so with the benefit of hindsight. But BeOS was just too good to be allowed (forced, really) to die on the vine the way that it did.
  - tiledjinn 2y ago
    No need for hindsight. BeOS is still alive. A Haiku for you.
nine_k 2y ago
Some other company would release the iPhone then!
Damogran6 2y ago
While I LOVE LOVE LOVED BeOS. It resonated with me and it was a great experience...it wasn't multiuser and didn't have some stuff that I forget, but seemed necessary for a system to have long-term success. But mam did it cut out the cruft and wring out ALL of the HP of the hardware of the time.
- pavlov 2y ago
  Why was multiuser so important? Apple’s most successful operating system in the Jobs 2.0 era isn’t multiuser either. BeOS would have been a fine foundation for smartphones and tablets. But of course it’s an open question whether Apple could have got that far in the 2000s without the return of Jobs. I suspect the company would have been acquired or merged with some unsuitable suitor like Sun.
  - xattt 2y ago
    Multi-user would have likely been bolted on one way or another at some point, as had happened when other OSes gained fundamental new features.
    - kbolino 2y ago
      Was any operating system actually able to go from single-user to multi-user so easily? Windows NT and OS X were totally rewritten from the ground up relative to their single-user predecessors Windows 9x and classic Mac OS.
      - hypercube33 2y ago
        NT is closer to a mainframe OS than 9x and it came out in the win3 era
        kbolino 2y ago
        Yeah, I actually used NT 3.51 for some time. However it was the NT line that replaced the 9x line, at least from the consumer perspective.
pzautke 2y ago
As someone who loved BeOS at the time, past discussion here on HN leads to believe that Apple's adoption of it would have had some real challenges. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002062
postmodest 2y ago
I suspect that without Jobs, Apple is dead by 2002. Turned into an arm of, like, RIM. Then Google comes out with the Android phone and it's all over for everyone including Microsoft.
- nailer 2y ago
  HTC G1 the original Android phone, was basically another sidekick. We’d have this shitty Android and WinMo for a decade longer and eventually things would get good.
  - monocasa 2y ago
    The slate form factor was already being explored by other manufacturers before the iPhone came out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
    - selectodude 2y ago
      Sure, but unlike the iPhone, that thing was an unbelievable piece of shit.
      - pathartl 2y ago
        It's not hard to extrapolate that something would have entered the market. I assume it would only have been a couple of years later.
    - qingcharles 2y ago
      Microsoft had been doing it since 2000 but never made it cool. Here's one from 2004: https://www.theregister.com/2004/11/03/review_hp_ipaq_6340/ https://www.theregister.com/2004/11/03/review_hp_ipaq_6340/ I had one since 2000 as a daily driver and I loved the thing, but the app library was horrible. The funny thing is, iPhone launched with no support for 3rd party apps. It took damned near a year for the first apps to arrive.
- hylaride 2y ago
pndy 2y ago
Right innit? It's not just Apple using BeOS but wondering how everything else would be different. You actually need to... think different at this point, aye?
pjmlp 2y ago
Assuming Apple would still be successful, and not close shop. It would have settled C++ as the main systems language on desktop OSes, between Windows, and Mac Be OS. Objective-C would have died, and Swift would never come to be. Clang and LLVM probably would never had gotten Apple's sponsorship. POSIX would have died on the desktop, as Be OS like other non UNIX OSes wasn't that keen in being UNIX like. There wouldn't be a flock of Linux and BSD developers rushing out to buy Apple hardware, instead of sponsoring OEMs shipping PCs with those distributons.
snakeyjake 2y ago
Apple would have died. I love BeOS. I love BeOS more than you. I love BeOS more than Jean-Louis Gassée. BeOS wasn't ready. I was there I used BeOS as my daily driver on a maxxed-out Power Macintosh 6400. I have, today, that machine still running BeOS. I also have a second dual-PII running BeOS. BeOS wasn't ready. Apple was making a decision in 1996 for a deal that had to be struck and struck fast (1997). I started using BeOS in 1997 with one of the first Power Macintosh releases. Those days (my days) it wasn't ready-- you had to pile patch on top of patch on top of community fix on top of some set of drivers some dude in Boise made in order to get things functional. I spent more time browsing BeOS listservs and download sites fixing things (at 56k) than using it. Everyone is remembering fondly the R4.5/R5 days in late 1999. Three years after the December 1996 announcement of the NeXT acquisition. By then BeOS was... better. It was running on PCs and had a much larger user community. In 1996/7? Just a handful of BeBox owners and Mac users dumb enough (me) to try it. Management would have been professionally negligent to choose it over NeXTStep. In 1996, when Apple was up against the wall, NeXTStep was almost ten years old. All they had to do was buy the company, port it to PPC, and change some copyright messages and icons around. Took about two years. BeOS would have required way more time, money, and expertise. BeOS had no multi-user, no security (at all), an "aspirational" level of posix compliance, drivers that were a disaster, a network stack specifically designed to frustrate you, and no "companies that actually matter and no Gobe doesn't count" application support. I get it. It was pretty. It was fast. French electro DJs loved it because it was low latency, and some audio tools were ported to it. A userbase of French electro DJs doesn't pay the bills.
- temac 2y ago
  The C++ API bound forever to the gcc 2.95 ABI IIRC was also an "interesting" choice. Sure with success they would certainly have engineered a way forward, out of necessity, but if I would have had to give my opinion about that for Apple at the time...
  - timschmidt 2y ago
    The Haiku project folks worked out ABI compatibility for newer GCC releases. Current builds of Haiku support binary backwards compatibility with the 2.95 ABI while also supporting newer GCC ABIs at the same time. So at least we know it is (and would have been) possible.
firecall 2y ago
Many moons ago I read that Apple came super close to buying Be, but Jean-Louis Gassée wanted to much money and negotiations fell apart. I reckon it was the star power of Jobs more than the OS as such that saved Apple in the late 90s. Jobs' ability to do the deal with MS to get MS Office on the Mac and a cash injection of $150m saved Apple at the time. We were well into the 2000s before OSX really began to make a difference to Apple's fortunes, and no one could have predicted that OSX would be the foundation for the iPhone OS. It wasnt even a given that OSX would be the OS for the iPhone during development. But absolutly, NeXT was the best choice, even if the OSX Beta and 10.0 were almost unusably slow and buggy! I was at the Paris Mac Expo when Jobs launched the beta, and the excitement was amazing! Same year as the Key Lime iBooks IIRC. They rose up our of the floor on a pedastal if I'm remembering it right LOL. I worked at Apple in the 90s, and saw all the demos of early releases of OSX and the confusing stack of platforms and tools. Jobs did the right thing ditching that! Finally, I remember being at the Mac Expo in London and BE was there. We were standing around admiring the cool light bars on the front of the Be Box and its multitasking abilities. If I'm remenbering right the lights on the front went up and down to indicate CPU usage. I could be imagining that? Someone correct me if I'm misremembering :-)
- scarface_74 2y ago
  The $150 million had nothing to do with saving Apple. They had already secured a billion dollar line of credit and besides, the same quarter Apple spent $100 million to buy out PowerComputings Mac assets and license. It was years before Apple became profitable and the $50 million was a drop in the bucket
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
aryonoco 2y ago
We kind of live in an alternate to that alternative reality. A lot (most?) of Be engineers ended up at a company called Danger, which was bought by Google a few years later, and they all went on to be the original core team of Android. Some BeOS technologies even ended up in Android such as its Binder, which from memory the Be engineer working on it open sourced it just before Palm bought Be, and then he used the same code in Android.

What I'd give for a glimpse of the timeline where Apple bought Be instead of NeXT.

by faefox 2y ago

What I'd give for a glimpse of the timeline where Apple bought Be instead of NeXT.

scelerat 2y ago

I can’t think of a better acqui-hire than NeXT + Steve Jobs

actionfromafar 2y ago
You mean when NeXT bought Apple and forced Apple to finance the deal. A.K.A. that time when Steve Jobs acqui-hired Apple.
- alwillis 2y ago
  Apple looked at it as an acquisition, while NeXT looked at it as a merger. NeXT didn’t buy Apple obviously, but Steve Jobs and his lieutenants took over the most important positions within Apple. Which made sense given the situation Apple found itself in.
faefox 2y ago
For sure, it was pretty clearly the right call at the time and objectively so with the benefit of hindsight. But BeOS was just too good to be allowed (forced, really) to die on the vine the way that it did.
- tiledjinn 2y ago
  No need for hindsight. BeOS is still alive. A Haiku for you.

nine_k 2y ago

Some other company would release the iPhone then!

Damogran6 2y ago

While I LOVE LOVE LOVED BeOS. It resonated with me and it was a great experience...it wasn't multiuser and didn't have some stuff that I forget, but seemed necessary for a system to have long-term success. But mam did it cut out the cruft and wring out ALL of the HP of the hardware of the time.

pavlov 2y ago
Why was multiuser so important? Apple’s most successful operating system in the Jobs 2.0 era isn’t multiuser either. BeOS would have been a fine foundation for smartphones and tablets. But of course it’s an open question whether Apple could have got that far in the 2000s without the return of Jobs. I suspect the company would have been acquired or merged with some unsuitable suitor like Sun.
- xattt 2y ago
  Multi-user would have likely been bolted on one way or another at some point, as had happened when other OSes gained fundamental new features.
  - kbolino 2y ago
    Was any operating system actually able to go from single-user to multi-user so easily? Windows NT and OS X were totally rewritten from the ground up relative to their single-user predecessors Windows 9x and classic Mac OS.
    - hypercube33 2y ago
      NT is closer to a mainframe OS than 9x and it came out in the win3 era
      - kbolino 2y ago
        Yeah, I actually used NT 3.51 for some time. However it was the NT line that replaced the 9x line, at least from the consumer perspective.

pzautke 2y ago

As someone who loved BeOS at the time, past discussion here on HN leads to believe that Apple's adoption of it would have had some real challenges. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002062

postmodest 2y ago

I suspect that without Jobs, Apple is dead by 2002. Turned into an arm of, like, RIM. Then Google comes out with the Android phone and it's all over for everyone including Microsoft.

nailer 2y ago
HTC G1 the original Android phone, was basically another sidekick. We’d have this shitty Android and WinMo for a decade longer and eventually things would get good.
- monocasa 2y ago
  The slate form factor was already being explored by other manufacturers before the iPhone came out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
  - selectodude 2y ago
    Sure, but unlike the iPhone, that thing was an unbelievable piece of shit.
    - pathartl 2y ago
      It's not hard to extrapolate that something would have entered the market. I assume it would only have been a couple of years later.
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    Microsoft had been doing it since 2000 but never made it cool. Here's one from 2004: https://www.theregister.com/2004/11/03/review_hp_ipaq_6340/ https://www.theregister.com/2004/11/03/review_hp_ipaq_6340/ I had one since 2000 as a daily driver and I loved the thing, but the app library was horrible. The funny thing is, iPhone launched with no support for 3rd party apps. It took damned near a year for the first apps to arrive.
hylaride 2y ago

pndy 2y ago

Right innit? It's not just Apple using BeOS but wondering how everything else would be different. You actually need to... think different at this point, aye?

pjmlp 2y ago

Assuming Apple would still be successful, and not close shop. It would have settled C++ as the main systems language on desktop OSes, between Windows, and Mac Be OS. Objective-C would have died, and Swift would never come to be. Clang and LLVM probably would never had gotten Apple's sponsorship. POSIX would have died on the desktop, as Be OS like other non UNIX OSes wasn't that keen in being UNIX like. There wouldn't be a flock of Linux and BSD developers rushing out to buy Apple hardware, instead of sponsoring OEMs shipping PCs with those distributons.

snakeyjake 2y ago

Apple would have died. I love BeOS. I love BeOS more than you. I love BeOS more than Jean-Louis Gassée. BeOS wasn't ready. I was there I used BeOS as my daily driver on a maxxed-out Power Macintosh 6400. I have, today, that machine still running BeOS. I also have a second dual-PII running BeOS. BeOS wasn't ready. Apple was making a decision in 1996 for a deal that had to be struck and struck fast (1997). I started using BeOS in 1997 with one of the first Power Macintosh releases. Those days (my days) it wasn't ready-- you had to pile patch on top of patch on top of community fix on top of some set of drivers some dude in Boise made in order to get things functional. I spent more time browsing BeOS listservs and download sites fixing things (at 56k) than using it. Everyone is remembering fondly the R4.5/R5 days in late 1999. Three years after the December 1996 announcement of the NeXT acquisition. By then BeOS was... better. It was running on PCs and had a much larger user community. In 1996/7? Just a handful of BeBox owners and Mac users dumb enough (me) to try it. Management would have been professionally negligent to choose it over NeXTStep. In 1996, when Apple was up against the wall, NeXTStep was almost ten years old. All they had to do was buy the company, port it to PPC, and change some copyright messages and icons around. Took about two years. BeOS would have required way more time, money, and expertise. BeOS had no multi-user, no security (at all), an "aspirational" level of posix compliance, drivers that were a disaster, a network stack specifically designed to frustrate you, and no "companies that actually matter and no Gobe doesn't count" application support. I get it. It was pretty. It was fast. French electro DJs loved it because it was low latency, and some audio tools were ported to it. A userbase of French electro DJs doesn't pay the bills.

temac 2y ago
The C++ API bound forever to the gcc 2.95 ABI IIRC was also an "interesting" choice. Sure with success they would certainly have engineered a way forward, out of necessity, but if I would have had to give my opinion about that for Apple at the time...
- timschmidt 2y ago
  The Haiku project folks worked out ABI compatibility for newer GCC releases. Current builds of Haiku support binary backwards compatibility with the 2.95 ABI while also supporting newer GCC ABIs at the same time. So at least we know it is (and would have been) possible.

firecall 2y ago

Many moons ago I read that Apple came super close to buying Be, but Jean-Louis Gassée wanted to much money and negotiations fell apart. I reckon it was the star power of Jobs more than the OS as such that saved Apple in the late 90s. Jobs' ability to do the deal with MS to get MS Office on the Mac and a cash injection of $150m saved Apple at the time. We were well into the 2000s before OSX really began to make a difference to Apple's fortunes, and no one could have predicted that OSX would be the foundation for the iPhone OS. It wasnt even a given that OSX would be the OS for the iPhone during development. But absolutly, NeXT was the best choice, even if the OSX Beta and 10.0 were almost unusably slow and buggy! I was at the Paris Mac Expo when Jobs launched the beta, and the excitement was amazing! Same year as the Key Lime iBooks IIRC. They rose up our of the floor on a pedastal if I'm remembering it right LOL. I worked at Apple in the 90s, and saw all the demos of early releases of OSX and the confusing stack of platforms and tools. Jobs did the right thing ditching that! Finally, I remember being at the Mac Expo in London and BE was there. We were standing around admiring the cool light bars on the front of the Be Box and its multitasking abilities. If I'm remenbering right the lights on the front went up and down to indicate CPU usage. I could be imagining that? Someone correct me if I'm misremembering :-)

scarface_74 2y ago
The $150 million had nothing to do with saving Apple. They had already secured a billion dollar line of credit and besides, the same quarter Apple spent $100 million to buy out PowerComputings Mac assets and license. It was years before Apple became profitable and the $50 million was a drop in the bucket
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

aryonoco 2y ago

We kind of live in an alternate to that alternative reality. A lot (most?) of Be engineers ended up at a company called Danger, which was bought by Google a few years later, and they all went on to be the original core team of Android. Some BeOS technologies even ended up in Android such as its Binder, which from memory the Be engineer working on it open sourced it just before Palm bought Be, and then he used the same code in Android.