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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

#111

Post by andrewflnr »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #86
hugi wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Most people I talk with these days seem to agree that the proprietary OS is a liability.

I’ve never heard anyone say Windows is a problem because it’s proprietary. I have heard that having to pay to upgrade is a pain because you (the company) have to budget for it. Even then, you would also need to budget for the downtime and time to verify that it works before deploying the update, and both those have to be done on Linux too (it’s why LTS releases are a thing). Anyways, Windows 10 may have its problems,…

I interpreted then as saying it was a liability to Microsoft.

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

#112

Post by dilap »

slipheen wrote: post #102
dilap wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be business suicide to charge more just so they could offer an obscure OS as an option; in my mind, this is the kind of clear anticompetitive situation it'd be good to use the law to avoid. Instead the DOJ went after MS for bundling a web browser . So dumb.

Microsoft was sued, and settled for $23M. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240052523/BeOS-will-liv...

Hey, that’s neat, but too little too late!

Was it just a strategic misstep for Be to not sue at the time, when it would have mattered? Why did the DOJ care about MS bundling a web browser w/ its OS but not care about MS preventing OEMs from selling any other OS than Windows? The seems wildly, clearly more anticompetitive to me!

And why does no one care about this stuff anymore? Not only does iOS bundle a browser, you cannot install any other browser (you can install alternative UI frontends for webkit, but you can’t ship your own js/html etc engine). Not too mention that they can veto any software on the platform for any reason...

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

#113

Post by dilap »

jackbravo wrote: post #33
dilap wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Who knows. Maybe BeOS also had other nice talented people working there, with good vision for products, that just needed more room and market that apple could provide. We will never know

Maybe! It’s more than just having the talent tho — you need to have a talented leader. Johnny Ive was at Apple for 5 years before Jobs showed up, without too much to show for it.

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

#115

Post by bsharitt »

harikb wrote: post #106

I remember the Palm acquisition. At that time Palm had invested heavily in webOS [1] which wasn't as performant. When they acquired BeOS, I thought it was going to be a turn around. But that didn't happen either. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS

First of all Be was purchased by Palm several years before webOS ever came out. WebOS didn't even exist in the same company. After Palm split into palmSource(software) and palmOne(hardware), the BeOs stuff(along side the old PalmOS stuff) went with palmSource. Later palmOne bought the rights to the full Palm name from palmSource and became Palm again and that Palm came out with webOS.

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

#116

Post by asjw »

hbbio wrote: post #53
aazaa wrote: post #17

> In 1990, Jean-Louis Gassée, who replaced Jobs in Apple as the head of Macintosh development, was also fired from the company. He then also formed his own computer company with the help of another ex-Apple employee, Steve Sakoman. They called it Be Inc, and their goal was to create a more modern operating system from scratch based on the object-oriented design of C++, using proprietary hardware that could allow for…

They thought they would have their chance with hardware+software combo. Indeed, the BeBox should have looked like this to succeed: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Ap... That computer made Apple cool again, and paved the way for their recovery way before the iPhone skyrocket.

Before the eMac, the iPod made Apple cool again, AFAIK

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

#118

Post by saghm »

msla wrote: post #74
philwelch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There also used to be other CPU architectures--though even at the time, enough people complained about "Wintel" that maybe it was obvious that the alternatives weren't ever going to catch on.

People complained about "Wintel" because the 32-bit x86 chips were so fast and cheap they destroyed the market for RISC designs and killed existing RISC workstation and server architectures, like SPARC and HPPA and MIPS. By the time the Pentium came around, the future looked like a completely monotonous stretch of Windows NT on x86 for ever and ever, amen. No serious hardware competition, other than Intel being smart…

> We were perpetually a bit afraid that Microsoft/Intel would pull something like Palladium/Trustworthy Computing [1] and lock down PC hardware but good, finally killing the Rebel Alliance of Linux/BSD, but somehow the hammer never quite fell. It did in the cell phone world, though, albeit in an inconsistent fashion.

I agree that phones are more locked down than desktops/laptops nowadays, but it's worth pointing out that neither Microsoft or Intel are really winners in this area. They both still are doing fairly well in the desktop/laptop in terms of market share though.

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

#119

Post by jedberg »

My favorite part of BeOS was that in the control panel you could turn individual processors on and off. And it happily let you shoot yourself in the foot and turn off the last processor with no warning whatsoever.

I appreciated that the OS didn't coddle you.

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

#120

Post by com2kid »

anthk wrote: post #55
bitL wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think BeOS was the only OS that allowed smooth playback of videos and work at the same time, something Windows was capable 5 and Linux 10 years later :D

Linux could do that in 2001 just fine, and without crashing like Windows. XV was amazing. So was MPlayer.

Windows 2000 was rock solid stable with uptime measured in "how long do I keep running before I get bored if bragging about my uptime?"

No comment in regards to the 9x line. ;)

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