it's one Microsoft's greatest business achievements to have won against the OS/2 and BeOS competition and it's one of Microsoft's biggest business failures to have not won against Google's Android.
BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
281–290 of 430 posts
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#282> What’s left for us now is to wonder, how different would the desktop computer ecosystem look today if all those years ago, back in 1997, Apple decided to buy Be Inc. instead of NeXT? Would Tim Berners-Lee have used a BeBox to run the world’s first web server instead?
For this hypothetical scenario to ever had been possible, BeOS would’ve had to time travel, as TBL wrote WorldWideWeb on a NeXT machine in 1990[0]. BeOS was initially developed in 1991 per Wikipedia[1] and the initial release of BeOS to the public wasn’t until 1995.
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#283Ah, 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…
I used to work for Be in Menlo Park in a previous life and I can confirm that the code base quality would have made for a very bad outcome for Apple. Security was the least of the numerous serious issues. That said BeOS somewhat still exists in spirit as a lot of folks from Be went to build/contribute to Android.
I too used to work at Be (Hi!) as well as developed applications for BeOS. I also worked at Apple on various releases of OS X. NextStep was far ahead of BeOS on multiple fronts. BeOS was a lot of fun to work on, but only scratched the surface of what was needed for a truly commercial general purpose OS. If Apple would have acquired Be instead of Next, who knows what the world would be like today. Apple ended up with a large number of former Be employess as well (some directly and others from Eazel.)
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, so this is the big BeOS thing I've heard. What technically enabled this on such limited hardware? Was there lack of security/containerization/sandboxing that made os call much faster and context switches better?
Other people mentioned the real preemptive scheduling — and the general overall better worst-case latency — but another factor was the clean design. The other operating systems tended to be okay in the absence of I/O content but once you hit the capacity of your hard drive you would find out that e.g. clicking a menu in your X11 app did a bunch of small file I/O in the background which would normally be cached but ha…
Yes. This always amazed me with BeOS. It would play 6 movie simultaneously making my PC very slow but still responsive. As if the framerate just went down.
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
The money wasted on the BeBox killed BeOS
Apple began to re-kick ass when they made an amazing laptop (tiBook). This was the first truly viable Unix laptop, with promise to be a cut above the competition (there was none) in terms of style and usability. tiBook was bonkers. Suddenly, I didn't really need to sit in the room, surrounded by boxes, but rather could go to the park and access the room from under a tree. If Be had managed to capture that, I think it…
Agreed. One small pedantic nit. TiBook was not unibody. They did not machine the frame from one giant chunk of titanium. I had one and loved it also, but it was made from a bunch of parts. Fantastic laptop. Still have mine.
More info for the curious: https://www.macworld.com/article/2918513/the-powerbook-g4-ti...
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#286I was another former Be "power user." And I think that was probably accurate -- if you weren't in the "BeOS lifestyle" during the admittedly short window that it was possible, it's hard to understand how much promise it looked like it had. When I tell people I ran it full-time for over a year, they wonder how I managed to get anything done, but... - Pe was a great GUI text editor, competitive with BBEdit on the Mac -…
You may have hinted at it, but I think Apple's subsequent turnaround after acquiring Next was mainly due to their founder, Steve Jobs, coming back to Apple.
Absolutely. Even though I honestly think Gil Amelio gets dumped on more than he deserves, I doubt he could have really saved them in the long run.
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
The anti competitive business practices of Apple make it hard to imagine the world could be worse. Instead of competition, Apple survives off marketing medium quality products at high prices. I'm not sure how that's good for anyone unless they own Apple stock.
You don't get to Apple is (large market cap, high customer satisfaction scores, high reviews in the tech press, etc.) because of marketing. If it were that easy, companies would just copy their marketing or load up on marketing and they would be successful. And a huge part of Apple's current success is based on the tech and expertise they got from NeXT. That work underpins not just laptops and desktops but phones, ta…
Perhaps you only get to where Apple is with world-class marketing.
Apple's iPod wasn't the first mp3 player, and it for damn sure wasn't technically superior.
The iPhone was not the first smartphone, nor the first phone with a touchscreen, nor the first phone with a web browser, nor the first phone with an App Store. It arguably had a better UX than incumbents, but better UX doesn't win markets just by dint of existing.
The iMac was a cute computer that couldn't run prevalent Windows software and didn't have a floppy drive.
Recent MacBook Pros have an awful keyboard, not just aesthetically but with known hardware problems. I understand at long last they're reverting to an older, better design.
Tech and expertise don't win just because they exist.
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#288"The features it introduced that were brand new at the time are now ubiquitous — things such as preemptive multitasking"
Without taking anything away from actual new things introduced in BeOS, preemptive multitasking and dual CPUs were not "brand new". Computer system had been doing these for a long time before 1995, or even 1991 when BeOS was initially developed. Heck, minicomputers were doing this stuff in the 80's!
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Amiga had preemptive multitasking in the 80's. (No memory protection though.)
So did the Lisa even earlier (and Xenix, which was a derivat of Unix Vers. 7, anecdotally also seen on the Lisa).
Is that true? I see contradictory information about Lisa OS. Some posts claim it was cooperative, like the original Mac System. Example: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/lisa-os-2-and-3
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
BeOS would also let you do that while playing them backwards ; useless, but a nice demo of the multimedia capabilities of the OS.
This would be challenging with modern codecs using delta frames. The only way I can see it work is precomputing all frames from the preceeding keyframe. Doable, but decent effort for a fairly obscure feature. But did video formats back then use delta frames?
I never saw BeOS do that with video, but I heard it do it with MP3 files. SoundPlay was a kind of crazy bananas MP3 player -- it could basically act as a mixer, letting you not only "queue up" multiple files but play each of them simultaneously at different volume levels and even different speeds. I've still never seen anything like it outside of DJ software.