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BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

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Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#61

Post by ulfw »

beagle3 wrote: post #26
pjmlp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how everyone blames Microsoft for what was OEMs doing a race to the bottom. OEMs had an option, yes they would had to pay more for licenses, but no one pointed them a gun, or did visits mafia style to forbid them to sell other systems.

Microsoft, the incumbent, offered OEMs cheaper Windows licenses as long as there was no dual boot, or a windows license was paid for every machine sold regardless of what it ran. Under these terms, it was suicide for OEMs to offer anything except “only Windows”. I was actually working for another company whose software was killed by Microsoft by a similar “or else” threat from Microsoft at the time. Microsoft was a b…

And what would have stopped OEMs to offer the same device with a different SKU with BeOS AND Windows for say x USD more?

(kind of like Dell does with their Linux lappies)

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#62

Post by rvz »

rayiner wrote: post #28

Oh man! I first tried BeOS personal edition when it came on a CD with Maximum PC magazine. (Referring to same demo CD, though the poster is not me: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1067159&s... . Also, how crazy is it that Ars Technica’s forums have two decade old posts? In 2000, that would be like seeing forum posts from 1980.) I remember being so happy when we got SDSL, and I could get online from…

> What would a modern BeOS look like?

Haiku. (0)

But if you change your question to "What would a modern OS look like?"

Fuchsia. (1)

The only relationship that they have is that a kernel engineer called Travis Geiselbrecht designed NewOS (Haiku's modified kernel) and Zircon (Fuchsia's Microkernel).

[0] https://haiku-os.org

[1] https://fuchsia.dev

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#64

Post by specialist »

dilap wrote: post #11
dwmcqueen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, you didn't get it because Jean-Louis asked too much when Apple inquired.

We still wouldn't have it; no way Apple w/o Steve Jobs but w/ BeOS survives.

I mostly agree.

Jobs was able to squeeze Microsoft. In a way I don't think any one else would or could.

Referring to Microsoft outright stealing Apple's IP and Gates' subsequent settlement. The $150m investment. The commitment to maintain Office on Mac. Forever license to all of Microsoft's API, enabling Mail.app to have pretty great integration with Exchange, for example.

BeOS was probably the better tech. But Jobs had the better strategies and the better team.

Compare this to Jonathan Schwartz cotemporaneous mismanagement of Sun's amazing IP, snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. Schwartz just wasn't a bare knuckled brawler like Jobs.

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#65

Post by all2 »

rusk wrote: post #16
kccqzy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Impressive. But it makes me think how far we've come; it's long been possible to do a rotating cube with video using pure HTML and CSS.

Remember when the Amiga bouncing ball demo was impressive? Ironically 3D graphics ended up being the Amiga's specific achilles heel once Doom and co came on the scene.

That's curious to me. Doom is specifically not 3D. Was it a publishing issue (that Doom and co weren't produced for the Amiga), or a power issue, or something else?

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#66

Post by deepaksurti »

mumblemumble wrote: post #35

Ah, memories. Used to use BeOS as my primary OS for a year or two. I think it's the only OS I ever found to be truly intuitive and pleasant to work with. That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen Be over NeXT. The elephant in the room is security: NeXTSTEP, being Unix-based, has some amount of security baked in from the ground up. BeOS didn't; it was more akin to Windows 95 or cla…

AYBABTU = All Your Base Are Belongs to Us, which is a mangled or broken translation in English of a Japanese phrase from a Japanese game `Zero Wing` [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us

Edit: removed the extra A in the acronym

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#67

Post by deepaksurti »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #63

That was actually a fairly awesome OS (for its day). Many folks thought Apple would buy it. When they purchased NeXT, instead, a lot of us were disappointed. However, all these years later, I'm very glad that BeOS wasn't selected.

I have never used BeOS, can you explain why you are glad now that it wasn't selected?

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#68

Post by danans »

_red wrote: post #41
mumblemumble wrote: post #35

Ah, memories. Used to use BeOS as my primary OS for a year or two. I think it's the only OS I ever found to be truly intuitive and pleasant to work with. That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen Be over NeXT. The elephant in the room is security: NeXTSTEP, being Unix-based, has some amount of security baked in from the ground up. BeOS didn't; it was more akin to Windows 95 or cla…

Also, the the familial relations of MacOS and Linux made it possible to share code fairly seamlessly between both (providing not talking about hardware integration). In a world where we there was 3 separate universes: Windows, BeOS, and Linux it's possible Linux would've become more isolated.

BeOS had a regular Unix like (even posix IIRC) dev environment.

I was able to do most of the CS course work projects normally done on my University's Sun workstations on BeOS instead. Most of these of courses were data structures, algorithms, compilers, etc projects in C, and not things that required platform specific APIs.

But arguably, BeOS' overall model - a single user desktop OS built on top of but hiding its modern OS underpinnings like memory protection and preemptive multitasking - is far more similar to what eventually became MacOSX than Linux. Which isn't so surprising since it was built by ex apple folks. Remember that consumer OSs before this point had no memory protection or preemptive multitasking.

Linux, though it had the same modern OS features, was far more closely aligned in spirit with the timeshared modern multi-user Unix OS's like what ran the aforementioned Sun workstations (it's "Linus' Unix after all).

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#69

Post by beagle3 »

ulfw wrote: post #61
beagle3 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft, the incumbent, offered OEMs cheaper Windows licenses as long as there was no dual boot, or a windows license was paid for every machine sold regardless of what it ran. Under these terms, it was suicide for OEMs to offer anything except “only Windows”. I was actually working for another company whose software was killed by Microsoft by a similar “or else” threat from Microsoft at the time. Microsoft was a b…

And what would have stopped OEMs to offer the same device with a different SKU with BeOS AND Windows for say x USD more? (kind of like Dell does with their Linux lappies)

Lack of demand (for BeOS at an extra cost; or for Windows by people who wanted BeOS)

Also, some of the time Microsoft simply forbade dual booting as a condition for OEM licensing.

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#70

Post by fartcannon »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #60

I feel like the biggest missed opportunity of the “mobile revolution” ten years ago was BeOS. It seemed clear to me that Android would be a bust for smartphone manufacturers (nobody has really made money off of Android except for Google and Samsung, the latter of whom accomplished this by dominating that market). If Sony, for example, had gotten ahold of BeOS and tried to vertically integrate in a manner similar to A…

I think Microsoft made quite a lot off Android.
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