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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

#411
post #128

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…

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’m the guy who left a case of champagne at the office one weekend, to celebrate an early release.

Thanks for the memories.

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

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, I don't think most people care about the OS at all , FOSS or otherwise; they care that the UI is something they can use, and that their apps work. If you perfected WINE overnight, I'll bet you could sit 80% of the population down at a lightly-skinned FreeBSD box and they'd never know.

I don't even think you'd need that for most of the population: it's been quite some time since the median user cared about desktop software[1]. I switched my parents over to a Linux Mint install a decade ago when I went away to college, and it lowered my over-the-phone tech support burden to zero overnight. I also had (non-CS but very smart) friends who switched to (ie dual-booted) Linux on their own after seeing how…

I know a decent number of people who have That One Program that they've been using for 20 years and can't/won't leave. It probably varies by population group.

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

#413

I 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 -…

wow, this list is bringing back all the memories. You're right, there was a short wave of enthusiasm, and some apps which were actually very innovative for the time. I remembered that it was actually used in some pro audio and lighting stuff, but I'd forgotten most of those apps. I remember playing around with Moho. what's the name of the 2d illustration software that modelled real wet paint brushes and textured penc…

Gosh. I remember the illustration program you're talking about but can't remember its name, either. :) I was surprised that it seemed to take so long for that concept to show up on other platforms, though -- other than Fractal Design Painter, it didn't seem like anyone on the Mac or Windows was really trying for that same kind of "real ink and paper" approach.

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

#414
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Those people deserve respect and recognition too.” ORLY? Name them. -- Not “great man”. Great vision . Geeks tend massively to overrate the importance technical aptitude, which is what they’re good at, and underrate everything else—business experience, sales skills, market savvy, and other soft skills—which they’re not. Contrast someone like Jobs, who understood the technical side well enough to be able to surround…

Jobs was far more of a "tech guy" than either Sculley or Cook. He understood the technology very well, even if he wasn't writing code. I would also say, Jobs had a far, far higher regard for technical talent than you do. He was absolutely obsessed with finding the absolute best engineering and technical people to work for him so he could deliver his vision. He recognized the value of Woz's talents more than Woz himse…

“Jobs was far more of a "tech guy" than either Sculley or Cook.”

Very true. “Renaissance Man” is a such cliche, but Steve Jobs really was. Having those tech skills and interests under his belt is what made him such a fabulous tech leader and tech salesman; and without that mix he’d have just been one more Swiss Tony bullshit artist in an ocean of the bums. (Like many here I’ve worked with that sort, and the old joke about the salesman, the developer, and the bear is frighteningly on the nose.)

But whereas someone like Woz loved and built tech for its own sake, and was perfectly happy doing that and nothing else all his life, Jobs always saw tech as just the means to his own ends: which wasn’t even inventing revolutionary new products so much as inventing revolutionary new markets to sell those products into. The idea that personal computers should be Consumer Devices that “Just Work”; that was absolutely Jobs.

And yeah, Job always used the very best tech talent he could find, because the man’s own standards started far above the level that most geeks declare “utterly impossible; can’t be done”, and he had ZERO tolerance for that. And of course, with the very best tools in hand, he wrangled that “impossible” right out of them; and the rest is history.

Woz made tech. Jobs made markets.

As for Sculley, he made a hash. And while Cook may be raking in cash right now, he’s really made a hash of it too: for he’s not made a single new new market† in a decade, while Apple’s rivals—Amazon and Google—are stealing the long-term lead that Jobs’s pre-Cook Apple had worked so hard to build up.

--

(† And no, things like earpods and TV programming do no count, because they’re only addons, not standalone products, and so can only sell as well the iPhone sells. And the moment iPhone sales drop off a cliff, Cook’s whole undiversified house of cards collapses, and they might as well shut up shop and give the money back to the shareholders.)

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

#415
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Those people deserve respect and recognition too.” ORLY? Name them. -- Not “great man”. Great vision . Geeks tend massively to overrate the importance technical aptitude, which is what they’re good at, and underrate everything else—business experience, sales skills, market savvy, and other soft skills—which they’re not. Contrast someone like Jobs, who understood the technical side well enough to be able to surround…

Jobs was far more of a "tech guy" than either Sculley or Cook. He understood the technology very well, even if he wasn't writing code. I would also say, Jobs had a far, far higher regard for technical talent than you do. He was absolutely obsessed with finding the absolute best engineering and technical people to work for him so he could deliver his vision. He recognized the value of Woz's talents more than Woz himse…

“Your take is like a professional sports manager saying having good athletes isn't important, the quality of the manager's managing is the only thing that matters.”

Postscript: You misread me. I understand where Jobs was coming from better than you think. But maybe I’m not explaining myself well.

..

When my old man retired, he was executive manager for a national power company overseeing distribution network. Senior leadership. But he started out as a junior line engineer freshly qualified from EE school, and over the following three decades worked his way up from that.

(I still remember those early Christmas callouts: all the lights’d go out; and off into the night he would go, like Batman.:)

And as he later always said to engineers under him, his job was to know enough engineering to manage them effectively, and their job was to be the experts at all the details and to always keep him right. And his engineers loved him for it. Not least ’cos that was a job where mistakes don’t just upset business and shut down chunks of the country, they cause closed-coffin funerals and legal inquests too.

--

i.e. My old man was a bloody great manager because he was a damn good engineer to begin with. And while he could’ve been a happy engineer doing happy engineering things all his life he was determined to be far more, and worked his arse off to achieve it too.

And that’s the kind of geek Steve Jobs was. Someone who could’ve easily lived within comfortable geeky limitations, but utterly refused to do so.

’Cos he wanted to shape the world.

I doff my cap at that.

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

#416
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NeXTSTEP pretty directly evolved into iOS, though, so it was certainly a significant asset in the acquisition, too.

NeXTSTEP appears to have first gotten incorporated throughly into the OS X codebase. Browse through the Foundation library for the Mac - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/ . Everything that starts with NS was part of NextStep.

> Everything that starts with NS was part of NextStep.

Not quite. Everything in Foundation gets the NS prefix because it's in Foundation; only a fraction of it came directly from NeXT.

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

#417
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that time, Linux on laptops was an absolutely great choice. None of your vendors were considered viable - far, far too expensive. However, Linux on x86 laptops at the time was amazing - portable Linux. So when Apple joined that party, and made the hardware neat, it was an easy switch. Portable, PPC-based, Unix. This was a delightful moment. Of course, I still have a Linux laptop around, and 20 years later .. I con…

At that time no one sane was putting GNU/Linux in production to replace battle tested UNIX systems, if they loved their job. What Linux laptops? It hardly worked properly in most desktops. The first laptop I managed to get Linux working at all was a Toshiba in 1999, while these systems were being sold since 1992.

Linux has always worked great if you choose your hardware wisely, and for a long time in the 90's it was perfectly viable to put a Linux machine against an SGI, Sun or DEC system as a workstation. Really, Linux had traction even before the 21st century cloud and 'droid reality came along.

For most of the 90's I was using Linux in some capacity, professionally as well as personally.

I also had a Linux laptop (Winbook, Sony, and then Sceptre..) on which I did a lot of development and for which my carefully selected hardware did in fact work, just fine - it was certainly viable as a dev platform, and for us Unix programmers at the time, a small and light Linux laptop was far more preferable to the pizzaboxes that had to be carried in the trunk .. or more, bigger iron that you would stay at the office to use, instead of having at home.

The point is Linux really did okay in the 90's, in terms of providing Unix devs a way of working away from the computer room. I think this is an underappreciated mechanism behind Linux' success over the years .. you could carry Linux with you pretty easily, but this was not the case for Solaris, Irix, etc.

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

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 existi…

You've left out the part where Apple makes products that have user experiences that are miles ahead of whatever existed at the time.

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

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

tiBook arrived 10 years after BeOS

I know, but want you to imagine what the world would have been like if it'd been a beBook instead. Like, could've happened 5 years sooner, imho.

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

#420
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the way the PC market is makes it basically impossible for a new desktop OS to show up at this point. The hurdle in drivers alone would be insane, and the easy solution to that is to only target a small set of hardware which effectively makes you a hardware company (kinda like Apple), but that probably won't work either since people are a lot less likely to try out your OS if they need to buy a new comp…

> ...the easy solution to that is to only target a small set of hardware which effectively makes you a hardware company (kinda like Apple) Perhaps with this idea the only companies able to do this are Apple, Microsoft and Google. Every other OS aiming to be a new desktop OS has essentially failed. Including the Linux desktop community and everyone else. The desktop OS market only has room for 2 or luckily 3 and alway…

> Perhaps with this idea the only companies able to do this are Apple, Microsoft and Google.

Unfortunately they all have perverse incentives that run counter to everything that makes personal computing valuable.

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