6 ms·

I was lucky enough to have a friend working at BeOS at the very end. This is when they abandoned all hope of getting bought by Apple (erm... I mean gaining pre

by furyg3 12y ago

I was lucky enough to have a friend working at BeOS at the very end. This is when they abandoned all hope of getting bought by Apple (erm... I mean gaining presence on the desktop) and focused on "Internet Appliances" like eVilla. BeOS was really amazing at the time, especially in comparison to 'next generation OSes' like Windows NT, the vaporware that was Copland, Linux (which was unusable for mortals) or Solaris. It was clear to me that the future was going to look like BeOS or NeXT, but I could actually easily download and run BeOS on my mac. It was incredibly useable... I installed it and was able to use it for months. It just needed apps. When Apple went with Jobs (and thus NeXT) I thought that made sense. But when I saw the early releases of Rhapsody I really thought they had made a huge mistake. BeOS was just so much better. It's really fun to fantasize about what the world would have been like if BeOS made it big. There's still a lot of tech there that has not yet made it into desktop OSes.

baldfat 12y ago
There has yet to be a better technology to win in the desktop OS. Examples 1) CPM was so much better than DOS 2) Amiga was 7 years ahead of its time (Though the OS had a ton of bugs the first 18 months) 3) BeOS 4) We still deal with a corporate IT that is 90% Window shops for corporate desktops. (Though Windows has gotten MUCH better) 5) Gnome and GTK+ gained more mind share than KDE :) Okay that one is personal opinion but :)
- dheera 12y ago
  I think in most cases it's due to compatibility reasons. The "better" technology usually comes later and is thus less compatible with the rest of the ecosystem. I used to use Gnome in the Gnome 2.0 / KDE 3.x days. Even though I thought KDE was better, it simply wouldn't play nice with GTK and Gnome apps. Conflicting sound servers would crash, themes and widgets a mess between the two ecosystems, never-ending font issues.
  - Narishma 12y ago
    All those cases mentioned by the post you replied to came out earlier than the "worse" technologies that ended up winning.
- Zardoz84 12y ago
  OS/2
  - baldfat 12y ago
    That wasn't "better" :)
- agumonkey 12y ago
  That's the way of the world. 'better' is a fuzzy term, what catches on 'is' the best, in some way, if that's the metric we observe. Everything that was 'better' failed in some regards, either came too early, wasn't aligned with mass market of users (lisp, smalltalk, sml), neglected some detail that wasn't a detail for the mainstream (why PHP instead of Perl), etc etc. I spent the last 10 years wondering why so much beautiful things died in the past while we suffer subpar systems. And everytime there's a stupid indirect but perfectly valid reason. Less is more, or something of this kind. Nature.
  - romaniv 12y ago
    You're forgetting about external factors that have nothing to do with the product itself. Having better marketing team or deeper connection in the industry does not make your actual OS any better. Survival of the fittest doesn't really apply to human artifacts and especially to art and cutting edge engineering.
threeseed 12y ago
What was amazing was all of what BeOS could accomplish on almost exactly the same hardware Apple was shipping. Pretty extraordinary accomplishment at the time. There are some technologies in NeXT which are invaluable today e.g. the native PS/PDF support and UNIX underpinnings but I think BeOS would've delivered far more bang for the buck in the short to medium term. I agree it's great to look back and wonder what if. One technology that always gets forgotten in this saga was WebObjects. Had Apple actually released it for free it could've been the standard for all web applications built during that time. Absolutely nothing came remotely close to it. Instead it went on to inspire technologies like Hibernate and JSP/JSF which dominated early web applications.
- hedgehog 12y ago
  At one point you could get a version that ran on Apple's own PowerMac hardware. It was an impressive contrast to MacOS 8.
protomyth 12y ago
Of the two, I found NeXTSTEP / OpenStep easier to program and a lot more feature rich. BeOS felt like it had better performance, but was harder to program and didn't really have the development tools. In retrospect, it was good thing Apple bought NeXT, but they sure lost a lot of cool things in the transition to OS X. BeOS seemed like the OS that could have still competed if they had skipped "Internet Appliances" and gone for the sub $500 market. They could be performant on low-end hardware.
frik 12y ago
BeOS was great, but compare Steve Jobs' NeXT presentation (1992) to the BeOS video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk NeXTSTEP is the predecessor of OS X, the rest is history. BeOS filesystem "BeFS" had extended attributes (metadata) with indexing and querying features similar to a relational database and Bill Gates' vision of "information at your fingertips". Though Microsoft failed to complete Cairo-OS as well as WinFS. The BeFS main developer wrote a book about it, as it is out of print now he released it as PDF for free: http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System Check out HaikuOS, an open source BeOS reimplementation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) . And there were two BeOS inspired OS: ZETA-OS and SkyOS with some shady history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnussoft_ZETA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnussoft_ZETA , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyOS Some of the BeOS vs. NeXTSTEP history is documented in Apple Copland OS article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)#Cancellation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)#Canc... Another interesting video is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg (In 1991 Steve Jobs' company commissioned an head-to-head programming competition to show how much faster and easier it was to program a NeXT computer vs a Sun workstation. The NeXT operating system went on to be the foundation for Apple's Macintosh OS-X about a decade later.)
LordKano 12y ago
Gassee really overplayed his hand. Had he been more reasonable, Apple would have acquired Be Inc and based their next generation OS on BeOS. I had a similar feeling when I tried Rhapsody DR1. Yeah, it was kind of cool and had potential but Be had a real working OS that was just waiting for that Apple polish. In the end, Jobs and his vision were probably better for the long term health of Apple but at the time, I too thought that Apple was making a mistake. I still like to muse about what could have been.

by furyg3 12y ago

baldfat 12y ago

There has yet to be a better technology to win in the desktop OS. Examples 1) CPM was so much better than DOS 2) Amiga was 7 years ahead of its time (Though the OS had a ton of bugs the first 18 months) 3) BeOS 4) We still deal with a corporate IT that is 90% Window shops for corporate desktops. (Though Windows has gotten MUCH better) 5) Gnome and GTK+ gained more mind share than KDE :) Okay that one is personal opinion but :)

dheera 12y ago
I think in most cases it's due to compatibility reasons. The "better" technology usually comes later and is thus less compatible with the rest of the ecosystem. I used to use Gnome in the Gnome 2.0 / KDE 3.x days. Even though I thought KDE was better, it simply wouldn't play nice with GTK and Gnome apps. Conflicting sound servers would crash, themes and widgets a mess between the two ecosystems, never-ending font issues.
- Narishma 12y ago
  All those cases mentioned by the post you replied to came out earlier than the "worse" technologies that ended up winning.
Zardoz84 12y ago
OS/2
- baldfat 12y ago
  That wasn't "better" :)
agumonkey 12y ago
That's the way of the world. 'better' is a fuzzy term, what catches on 'is' the best, in some way, if that's the metric we observe. Everything that was 'better' failed in some regards, either came too early, wasn't aligned with mass market of users (lisp, smalltalk, sml), neglected some detail that wasn't a detail for the mainstream (why PHP instead of Perl), etc etc. I spent the last 10 years wondering why so much beautiful things died in the past while we suffer subpar systems. And everytime there's a stupid indirect but perfectly valid reason. Less is more, or something of this kind. Nature.
- romaniv 12y ago
  You're forgetting about external factors that have nothing to do with the product itself. Having better marketing team or deeper connection in the industry does not make your actual OS any better. Survival of the fittest doesn't really apply to human artifacts and especially to art and cutting edge engineering.

threeseed 12y ago

What was amazing was all of what BeOS could accomplish on almost exactly the same hardware Apple was shipping. Pretty extraordinary accomplishment at the time. There are some technologies in NeXT which are invaluable today e.g. the native PS/PDF support and UNIX underpinnings but I think BeOS would've delivered far more bang for the buck in the short to medium term. I agree it's great to look back and wonder what if. One technology that always gets forgotten in this saga was WebObjects. Had Apple actually released it for free it could've been the standard for all web applications built during that time. Absolutely nothing came remotely close to it. Instead it went on to inspire technologies like Hibernate and JSP/JSF which dominated early web applications.

hedgehog 12y ago
At one point you could get a version that ran on Apple's own PowerMac hardware. It was an impressive contrast to MacOS 8.

protomyth 12y ago

Of the two, I found NeXTSTEP / OpenStep easier to program and a lot more feature rich. BeOS felt like it had better performance, but was harder to program and didn't really have the development tools. In retrospect, it was good thing Apple bought NeXT, but they sure lost a lot of cool things in the transition to OS X. BeOS seemed like the OS that could have still competed if they had skipped "Internet Appliances" and gone for the sub $500 market. They could be performant on low-end hardware.

frik 12y ago

BeOS was great, but compare Steve Jobs' NeXT presentation (1992) to the BeOS video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk NeXTSTEP is the predecessor of OS X, the rest is history. BeOS filesystem "BeFS" had extended attributes (metadata) with indexing and querying features similar to a relational database and Bill Gates' vision of "information at your fingertips". Though Microsoft failed to complete Cairo-OS as well as WinFS. The BeFS main developer wrote a book about it, as it is out of print now he released it as PDF for free: http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System Check out HaikuOS, an open source BeOS reimplementation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system) . And there were two BeOS inspired OS: ZETA-OS and SkyOS with some shady history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnussoft_ZETA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnussoft_ZETA , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyOS Some of the BeOS vs. NeXTSTEP history is documented in Apple Copland OS article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)#Cancellation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)#Canc... Another interesting video is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg (In 1991 Steve Jobs' company commissioned an head-to-head programming competition to show how much faster and easier it was to program a NeXT computer vs a Sun workstation. The NeXT operating system went on to be the foundation for Apple's Macintosh OS-X about a decade later.)

LordKano 12y ago

Gassee really overplayed his hand. Had he been more reasonable, Apple would have acquired Be Inc and based their next generation OS on BeOS. I had a similar feeling when I tried Rhapsody DR1. Yeah, it was kind of cool and had potential but Be had a real working OS that was just waiting for that Apple polish. In the end, Jobs and his vision were probably better for the long term health of Apple but at the time, I too thought that Apple was making a mistake. I still like to muse about what could have been.