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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 dai

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.
1oooqooq 2y ago
i think you missed the greater point. apple with beos would not have turned Enterprise dead end that it is today. that market was what jobs had to pivot to (there's a great video where he pushes the rationalization of going to academia and Enterprise workstations) so that next could survive. and it infected apple from the inside. the timeline everyone missed with beos is exactly apple not becoming the mix of ibm and Microsoft it is today.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Everyone also forgets that JLG was a horrible manager and his decision to keep Macs obscenely high priced was what ultimately almost killed Mac. And Steve Jobs as the founder of Apple had a political capital than JLG would have ever had. While I know that the measly $250 million that Microsoft invested in Apple didn’t “save it”, only SJ could make peace with MS (only Nixon could go to China) and make the tough choices. Founders are given a lot more leeway to make huge changes than any other manager.
DaoVeles 2y ago
I have a spare machine to do some offline work on running Haiku OS, the open source successor to BeOS. Even today it simultaneously feels 20 years ahead and 20 years behind. Good example, the interface is incredibly snappy but no Wifi. I love the vision of BeOS but it probably would have been the death of Apple if they had gone with it.
- randkyp 2y ago
  Haiku does support WLAN adapters (even USB ones), through the support isn't as extensive as Linux or the BSDs. You might want to use the current nightly builds instead of the latest beta version, though, which was released in December 2022. https://hardware.besly.de/index.php?hardware=Wireless_Network_Cards https://hardware.besly.de/index.php?hardware=Wireless_Networ... https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/support-for-realtek-usb-wifi-adapters-now-in-nightlies/11981 https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/support-for-realtek-usb-wifi-...
lproven 2y ago
I agree both with @snakeyjake and with @faefox. I'd love to see what Apple would have done... but at the same time I fear very much it would have killed Apple. BeOS was amazing, but its dev tools were nothing special while NeXT's were state of the art, industry-beating. That means no way to win Mac developers over to the new OS. BeOS was as insecure as Classic MacOS, so no way to crack the server market (not that that worked) and no way to build nice locked-down little gadgets like iPhones. And while Be had JLG, a very smart cookie, NeXT had Jobs, who had more vision in a day than JLG in a year. Me, I wish a disappointed Be had done a deal with Acorn and ported to Arm. Arms in the hundreds-of-MHz range were there and gigahertz-class was coming soon. Acorn had prototype multi-processor machines. Be had the best SMP support in the business in the late 1990s. They could have reskinned BeOS to look more RISC OS like, run RO in a VM like OS X ran Classic in a VM, and offered both the thinnest lightest Web-capable laptops in the world, and compellingly-priced multiprocessor desktop workstations that didn't need a dozen cooling fans and could have gone to 4-way or even 8-way at an affordable price, which x86 and PowerPC chips could not touch.

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.

1oooqooq 2y ago

i think you missed the greater point. apple with beos would not have turned Enterprise dead end that it is today. that market was what jobs had to pivot to (there's a great video where he pushes the rationalization of going to academia and Enterprise workstations) so that next could survive. and it infected apple from the inside. the timeline everyone missed with beos is exactly apple not becoming the mix of ibm and Microsoft it is today.

scarface_74 2y ago
Everyone also forgets that JLG was a horrible manager and his decision to keep Macs obscenely high priced was what ultimately almost killed Mac. And Steve Jobs as the founder of Apple had a political capital than JLG would have ever had. While I know that the measly $250 million that Microsoft invested in Apple didn’t “save it”, only SJ could make peace with MS (only Nixon could go to China) and make the tough choices. Founders are given a lot more leeway to make huge changes than any other manager.

DaoVeles 2y ago

I have a spare machine to do some offline work on running Haiku OS, the open source successor to BeOS. Even today it simultaneously feels 20 years ahead and 20 years behind. Good example, the interface is incredibly snappy but no Wifi. I love the vision of BeOS but it probably would have been the death of Apple if they had gone with it.

randkyp 2y ago
Haiku does support WLAN adapters (even USB ones), through the support isn't as extensive as Linux or the BSDs. You might want to use the current nightly builds instead of the latest beta version, though, which was released in December 2022. https://hardware.besly.de/index.php?hardware=Wireless_Network_Cards https://hardware.besly.de/index.php?hardware=Wireless_Networ... https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/support-for-realtek-usb-wifi-adapters-now-in-nightlies/11981 https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/support-for-realtek-usb-wifi-...

lproven 2y ago

I agree both with @snakeyjake and with @faefox. I'd love to see what Apple would have done... but at the same time I fear very much it would have killed Apple. BeOS was amazing, but its dev tools were nothing special while NeXT's were state of the art, industry-beating. That means no way to win Mac developers over to the new OS. BeOS was as insecure as Classic MacOS, so no way to crack the server market (not that that worked) and no way to build nice locked-down little gadgets like iPhones. And while Be had JLG, a very smart cookie, NeXT had Jobs, who had more vision in a day than JLG in a year. Me, I wish a disappointed Be had done a deal with Acorn and ported to Arm. Arms in the hundreds-of-MHz range were there and gigahertz-class was coming soon. Acorn had prototype multi-processor machines. Be had the best SMP support in the business in the late 1990s. They could have reskinned BeOS to look more RISC OS like, run RO in a VM like OS X ran Classic in a VM, and offered both the thinnest lightest Web-capable laptops in the world, and compellingly-priced multiprocessor desktop workstations that didn't need a dozen cooling fans and could have gone to 4-way or even 8-way at an affordable price, which x86 and PowerPC chips could not touch.