Submitted by It’s no secret OSNews has a bit of a thing for the BeOS. I can only speak for myself, obviously, but relatively speaking, BeOS was the best operating system ever made. The man who started all this was Jean-Louis Gassee, former executive at Apple, who founded Be, Inc. in 1991. In the second half of the ’90s, Apple was looking for a replacement for its heavily outdated Mac OS, after several failed attempts at developing its own – it came down to Steve Jobs NeXT, or BeOS. Be didn’t make it, and Gassee is happier for it.
Apple offered a whopping $200 million for Be, Inc., which was way more than the company was actually worth. Gassée, however, tried to hold out for an even more whopping $275 million. In the end, Steve Jobs swooped in, and convinced Apple to buy NeXT instead, effectively buying Jobs back into the company he was the co-founder of.
The interesting question has always been: what would’ve happened if Apple had bought Be instead? It’s hard to say. NeXTSTEP was more advanced than the BeOS, especially when it came to networking (a rudimentary mess on BeOS) and the programming environment and associated tools. BeOS was, however, much faster and more capable in multimedia like sound and video – not entirely unimportant for Macs. Also, in hindsight, a continually developed BeOS would’ve automatically benefited greatly from the multicore revolution.
Interestingly enough, during the Steve Jobs Legacy event, Gassée mentioned that he was very relieved Apple didn’t buy Be, because he really didn’t get along with Apple’s management. “Thank god that [Apple buying Be] didn’t happen, because I hated Apple'[s management,” Gassée said, “I couldn’t picture myself in there.”
Gassée didn’t seem to have any resentment over Be not winning the deal, even though it did sting at the time, he said, “as it should”. But, he added, BeOS got its moment of glory after that, and “I even got to sue Microsoft so I could put fresh tires on my wheelchair.” Yes, and you squandered something great, but alas. I’m just glad I got to be part of BeOS’ Autumn days.
Anywho, Gassée further noted that which we already know: Apple didn’t so much acquire NeXT – Jobs bought Apple. NeXTSTEP in and of itself was good technology, but it wasn’t good enough all by itself. In fact, NeXT had all but given up on NeXTSTEP, focussing on WebObjects instead – which, although I’m not sure, still powers the iTunes Store to this day.
“Apple acquired NeXT, but in fact Steve took over and we know what happened,” Gassée remarked, “By re-acquiring Apple, NeXTSTEP finally produced the kind of fruit that justified the labor that went into it. This was very nice technology that had trouble finding its footing.”
I always get a little defensive when we’re talking BeOS. Up until this very day, it’s the only piece of software that had a soul, an identity that went above and beyond colour schemes, themes, and icons. Even after ten years, I still can’t explain or put into words the feeling BeOS gave me. Even today, when I see a screenshot or somebody mentions it, my heart makes a little jump.
But, especially with the magic super awesome power of hindsight, NeXT was by far the superior choice for Apple. I think the amount of work required to turn BeOS into a marketable Apple product did not differ that greatly from what NeXTSTEP required (just in different areas), but BeOS didn’t come with Jobs.
And let’s face it. It wasn’t a technology or a product that saved Apple. It was Jobs.
As much as I love BeOS, I’m inclined to agree. BeOS would never have been able to do what the combination of BSD and NeXTSTEP did for Apple on the software side of things, and without Steve at the helm Apple would probably be a nothing company today.
I think back to the r5 days and I’m saddened once again by all the bullshit monopolism on Microsoft’s part that helped cause the downfall of Be Inc.
I agree Thom, it was the best OS of its era if not of all time.
as much as i love beos, i just can’t see how this was MS’ fault
Which is why I said “helped cause”. There were a lot of variables at play, but I personally feel that Microsoft’s manipulation of Compaq was the proverbial nail in the coffin.
Imagine your company already going downhill, and you have this holy grail of a save in a vendor that is willing to do business with you, only to find out later that your biggest competitor flexed their money muscle to scare the vendor into dropping you.
i don’t know what beos you used, but my copy of r5 wasn’t even close to beeing ready for the masses.
all it had going for it was the gui, API, BFS and to a lesser extend the kernel.
everything else was crap, crap with potential, but still crap
I started with the demo of r5, which quickly led to purchasing the full version in a combo pack with GoBe Productive.
For my purposes it was the best OS at the time. As I said elsewhere, Windows ME which came with my computer was crapping out on a daily basis, causing me to lose critical data for work and school. I had messed around with Linux a little, but it wasn’t up to speed for what I needed at the time. BeOS fit the bill perfectly. It supported all of my hardware including my dial-up modem (I had a custom built white box computer with a real modem) and it never once crashed or lost data.
My first XP-based computer was a different story. I had upgraded to one of those strange stingray-shaped DSL modems and it was only supported in Windows at the time. I ended up sharing the connection via ICS to the old BeOS box so it could get online too. The video on the new computer was also unsupported in BeOS, giving me the monochrome screen.
After the BeOS box gave up the ghost thanks to crappy capacitors, I held on to my install disc and tried it out through the years that followed. The company was long gone by that time though, and it never worked quite as good as on that old K6-2 based system.
Now I’m feeling bad that I didn’t find both time and will to finish a driver for this… this beast.
To be fair, the BeOS’s net_server stack and, more criticial here, the USB stack were not stable enough for that.
So give me half the blame, no more 🙂
Wow! It’s interesting to know I wasn’t the only BeOS user frustrated by this “beast” as you aptly put it.
If I had ever had any ability in programming I would have loved to have collaborated on it. I still don’t know what Alcatel was thinking with that monstrosity.
Sadly every OS around that time was like that.
If you look back at what the competition was like, you’d quickly realise how good BeOS looked even in it’s incomplete state.
OS 9 and Windows ME were simply just awful in every possible way. Linux was even further away from being ready for the desktop than BeOS was and the only OS that had all 3 of: ease of use, desktop application support and stability; was Windows 2000, which wasn’t even technically aimed at home users (though I believe many OEMs ended up shipping Win2k instead of ME)
The early part of this century was a dire period for desktop OSs – which some people forget these days now we have Win7, OS X and a multitude of easy to use Linux distros supporting multiple compositing window managers and desktop environments. Not to mention the open source and hobbyist OSs with native ports of popular open source software.
I honestly think these days we have more choice and a more exciting computing landscape than we’ve had since the days of the Amiga.
Edited 2011-11-15 12:25 UTC
come on, beos couldn’t even play videos without loosing sync between sound and picture
a problem even win 95 didn’t have
Interesting. One of the greatest feats of BeOS when I was using it and something I was proud to show off to others, was being able to have anywhere from three to six video files playing at the same time, perfectly synced audio, no frames dropped. And this was on a K6-2 500MHz machine with 256MB of RAM and a Matrox G200 card, hardly top of the line in 2000-2001.
Granted, if I tried to open more than six video files it would start slowing down, and the same if I tried anything else CPU/GPU intensive while they were playing. But media playback was definitely not an area where BeOS was crippled!
I’m starting to wonder if you might have had a corrupt installation or something.
Edited 2011-11-15 22:04 UTC
no bad install on my side
i had this on 2 completely different systems, but only on longer files
Sorry to hear you had that experience, but it’s not something I’ve witnessed nor heard anyone else suffering from.
In fact BeOS was designed around multimedia and the developers would regularly gloat at how good multimedia playback was.
So all that given, I’m very surprised to read your post
Yes, as a matter of fact it could. Video/audio sync wasn’t an issue with any of the codecs that were included with BeOS (MPEG1, Indeo, Cinepak, etc).
The actual issue was limited to video files that used MP3 for the audio track – which at the time (IIRC) was pretty much limited to DivX. I don’t remember if it was due to issues with the decoder, or with the media_kit itself – but it is worth noting that the DivX decoder was developed by 3rd parties and not Be (or the DivX devs) themselves.
And even that became a non-issue fairly quickly, thanks to the VLC port (which was free of video/audio sync issues).
On the other hand, BeOS was already multi-platform (PPC and X86), and implemented a number of key features in its file system which are now becoming part of OS X.
Yes, saddly, there was the downfall of Be Inc.
I never realised just how much I hated BeOS until I read this post.
Posted from my Amiga 4000.
I’m going out on a limb and assuming you aren’t trolling/joking/snarking. Can you elaborate on why you hate BeOS? I’m genuinely curious; I know the OS isn’t for everyone but generally people reserve the word “hate” for something that has personally wronged them.
For example, I hate Windows ME because its instability and overall uselessness cost me a lot of money over a decade ago. In fact it was one of the catalysts for my love of BeOS when it replaced ME on my computer during college.
Edited 2011-11-14 22:43 UTC
I’d like to claim I was snarking, but the unabashed love letter that Thom wrote really caught me off guard.
“Up until this very day, it’s the only piece of software that had a soul, an identity that went above and beyond colour schemes, themes, and icons. Even after ten years, I still can’t explain or put into words the feeling BeOS gave me. Even today, when I see a screenshot or somebody mentions it, my heart makes a little jump.”
Did… did BeOS have Thom’s child or something? Wikipedia doesn’t back up the assertion that it had a “soul”. Classic Mac, Amiga, and NeXT enthusiasts have been saying basically the same things about their own computers since the late 80s, and it’s just bizarrely arrogant to see someone say BeOS was the “only” piece of software that deserves this title.
So, in short, the logic goes like this: BeOS users appear to be crazy, therefore BeOS must attract crazy people, therefore, as a non-crazy person, I wish to distance myself from it. I’ve used it before, too—I even subscribe to the Haiku RSS feed. It just struck me as a curious little oddity of the past, like QNX or the Atari ST (both brands I don’t have particular fondness for.) Now I’m starting to think that may have been too generous.
You grasp the concept of “opinion”, yes?
Of course I do! But opinions need to be rationalized. The emotional response in the article is very strong, and it looks very weird without an explanation nearby. The creepy kind of weird.
Actually no they don’t. Facts need to be rationalised, however opinions can be based on complete ignorance (and often are) and still be perfectly valid as an opinion.
It’s often hard to explain emotion.
For example, I recently got engaged. If you asked me why I love this woman, then I could probably list off a whole load of properties that she exhibits. However if you asked why I “chose” her as opposed to similar other women demonstrating similar traits, well then I wouldn’t be able to rationalise what drew me to her the most.
The fact is, and by their very nature, emotions are irrational and unscientific. So the moment you start reading terms like “soul” to describe an object or software, you have to take those opinions as an unscientific, emotional judgement.
In answer to your question though:
At the time, the desktop landscape was pretty dire. The dominant OSs were Windows ME for the PCs and OS9 for the Macs. Both were a painfully buggy mess that quite frankly should never have been released. Windows2000 was around, but it took a little while before OEMs started shipping that instead and “Desktop Linux” was pretty much unusable to all but the nerds.
BeOS was fast, clean, stable and simple to use. It never felt like the computer was stubbornly ignoring your requests nor did it secretly trying to do screwy things in the back ground. It just worked and worked well.
BeOS also had a strict styling guide, so everything was unified. Thus it just felt like everything “belonged”. There was no weird step child that looked out of place with it’s own bespoke widgets et al.
Finally (and something that was of a personal interest for me with my awesome BP6 SMP motherboard), BeOS supported multiple processors even when it’s biggest competitors (OS9 and ME) didn’t.
I’m not going to say that BeOS was the best OS ever like Thom did, but it’s definitely up there with the greats
Edited 2011-11-15 14:27 UTC
No. The emotions must come from somewhere.
This is a very heavy-handed attempt at copping out, but it’s wrong at several levels:
1. Humans are not hard-wired to fall in love with operating systems, so the comparison does not hold.
2. Even this hard-wiring has an exhaustively rational basis, consisting of the “whole load of properties” you mentioned, combined with many you may not be aware of (which arise from how she influences your behaviour), combined with the instinctive drive to mate and its chemical effects.
3. By bringing up a human relationship you risk (or are deliberately trying to) making this an unapproachable topic, based on the cultural perception that love is precious and unchallengeable. Please don’t do that in the future.
Emotions are exhaustively rational and scientific and have very specific bases. I can list them off to you if you want. The fact is that every oxytocin cascade must have a neurological trigger caused by a combination of stimuli, and every stimulus must come from somewhere. If you say “I have nostalgia for the Commodore 64 because it reminds me of the time I spent with my dead relative,” then that’s a rationally justified, scientifically explainable emotion. If you say “I love BeOS because it alone amongst software has a soul,” then you have failed at basic introspection, and have an obligation to the reader to explain this extreme claim.
They come from interconnecting neuro-pathways beased upon a life time of experiences. There’s also a degree genetic make up at play and also a degree of chance (right place at the right time). Thus emotions are often far too complicated for us to rationalise.
Actually it does still apply because the same neuro process happens for our tastes in clothes, music and other non-human artefacts as does for our choice in partners. The only difference is you don’t get the same hormonal response so have sex with a TShirt
Which is often then too complex to rationalise.
To be honest I think you’re the one being deliberate obtuse. While human emotions must, at their very core, obey scientific laws, that doesn’t mean that the end result is far more complicated than the average human can mentally decompile (which is also the reason why psychiatrists earn such a good wage)
Pretty much as above but with 1 addition:
You’re assuming that the individual is aware of the connection; this isn’t always the case. Have you ever had a smell that gave you a familiar feeling but you can’t remember why? Or a memory that you can only half remember? Sometimes we make connections that we are unable to consciously self-diagnose.
Edited 2011-11-15 15:30 UTC
Not remembering a smell or faint memory is one thing. Smells in particular are mediated by the lower temporal cortex, which is a more primitive area of the brain that forms extremely strong memories. As a result, it’s inevitable that the significance of a smell lingers long after what it’s associated with. These are the results of things not being important enough to remember. In the case of things so important that we declare love for them, we think about them consciously from time to time, and that prevents the kind of degradation you’re describing.
…to be quite honest, it sounds like you’re saying Thom is cognitively deficient. I may just need to settle for that.
I promise you, though, that if you sit down with just about any emotion you have and really think about it, you’ll be able to figure out where it came from. Strong emotions are just a little more challenging to distance yourself from, so you can look at them objectively. Undergraduate psychiatry schooling is pretty much just a matter of giving students a boost in developing the skills necessary to do so; you can figure out anything on your own if you ask yourself “Why?” enough.
Nice side stepping there, but you’re missing the point.
If something can trigger an emotional response based upon a memory you’ve forgotten, then it’s impossible to rationalise that emotional response regardless of how scientific you wish to break down the process.
I think you’re over-estimating most peoples ability and desire to over-analyse every thought process.
Sometimes people are just content to have an emotion without needing to know every chemical and neural reaction that generated it
Why is it so strange to say a piece of software has a soul? It is after all a product of human beings, and in that way a sort of indirect way of communicating a philosophy or, yes, an emotional experience from one set of people to another (from developers to users). And yes, emotional. Everything about the design of a piece of software, from the glossy aspects like the color scheme and icons to the most complex interaction processes do indeed draw some kind of emotional response.
I’ll give you that it’s unfair for Thom to claim it’s the “only OS with a soul”. However, the idea of an OS, or any human-made inanimate object for that matter, having a soul, is far from crazy.
I’d say the idea is still very much crazy
(but understandable, as far as humans go, for the reasons you mention)
Edited 2011-11-19 22:27 UTC
That being said, now that the site has mysteriously allowed me to see the bottom half of your post, I accept your thorough justification for the original claim, and would say “that’s the sort of thing Thom should have said/linked in the first place.”
If he had, then he would have been going off topic. This article wasn’t about BeOS specifically nor Thom’s perceptions of it. This article was about Jean-Louis Gassee’s views.
So given the topic of the article, Thom’s own rationalisation is irrelevant. (Plus his (and others) views on BeOS has been posted so many times in the past that most of us have heard it all before anyway)
Hence the option of just linking to it—or does OSNews never expect to get new readers? (Put an emoticon here, of your choice.)
Fair enough point actually
And as we all know, it’s completely rational to hate an OS for no other reason than because one of its advocates a bit too effusive…
It’s obviously the wrong opinion. Amiga’s and their AmigaOS had/have soul.
…sold, early in their life, to the Devil.
The Amiga was intended to be a gaming console. Commodore made it in to a real computer.
It’s difficult to tell which path would have taken it the furthest, but I enjoyed using it as a real computer. Well, it did end up as a gaming console as the CD32, but that wasn’t a long lasting success even though it was at first.
So it’s a bit sad with Steve’s passing away and people looking back computing history seemed to have been about IBM PCs vs Apple Macs. No mention of Commodore, Atari or Sinclair. Nobody I knew or met had a PC or a Mac. Only companies did.
Home computers surely dominated the scene in the 80s and they were a lot more fun than a PC or Mac.
Sure, alas they were still the Devil
(overall; I like how this http://www.osnews.com/permalink?487690 fairly recent comment wraps it up:
;p …something which, curiously, apparently survived the Commodore demise; even intensified. Amiga movement of the 90s and noughties seemed to be largely about few small manufacturers of overpriced and “unique on principle” trash riding on, feeding on, exploiting & exhausting any remains of a following the platform had (a following earned by great value in its time), just to keep themselves alive a bit longer. Glorifying and promoting, to their (nefarious? ;p ) ends, what basically ultimately put the nail in the coffin of Amiga.
While perhaps there were more optimal routes… consider how, for example, the Amithlon – killed by legal scuffles of course – smoked in its days pretty much every “true Amiga” hardware, for much lesser price; and IIRC it could provide a gradual & transparent to the OS shift towards x86-compiled code (but, the community had strong ideological issues with the Evil; ~”well, Apple doesn’t use x86, they use what’s best” turned out funny; but at least part of remaining Amigans, those with MorphOS, finally realized the suitability of old/dumpster PPC Macs); if it can be run on some current hardware, the Amithlon is probably still by far the fastest Amiga at any given point in time.
Regarding this, it seems to me that a vast majority of Amigas were gaming consoles – at least as far as usage patterns go: put a floppy, wait for it to load, joystick in hand until power-off (mouse with some “pre-RTS” & adventures). As for keyboard… there were probably months between purposeful presses of most keys (except the reset combo, IIRC two “Amiga” keys and some third one), unless for some cheat codes.
One of my buddies had CD32. There was really no difference between how he was using the console and how those with Amigas used them – except, the latter were actually used much more actively (having, typically, immensely larger collections of games)
Well, that, and (typically “low end”) Amigas generating ads & announcements channels, in local cable networks, some even genlocking simple GFX & captions in big TV stations. Most people of course not realizing or caring about those.
Overall, Amiga didn’t seem to depart much from its roots as a gaming console, both when it comes to its internal architecture, and with its “ecosystem” model (at least in pre-NES variant – actually, even more fragile than that, because of diskettes). And while this did give it impressive, in its time, ~”multimedia” capabilities – one can also argue that it severely limited its rate of progress, inevitably resulting in fairly quick demise. Well, that and “Commodore”
Yes, they made Amiga into a real computer (and rather decent one) – but this didn’t bring all that is supposed to come with this status, the fabled “ecosystem” offered virtually only games (typically arcade-ish genres, at that)
This problem was particularly big in typical small & provincial cities (NVM when such city was in (understandably) neglected places undergoing shift to market economies, in “constant crisis”) – no “guru” around, “serious adults” of course without any knowledge and totally dismissive of computers, random scraps of literature or documentation, obviously deep in pre-Internet era, virtually all software available boiling down to basic Workbench and cracked games – what a kid was supposed to do?
Yes, the problem wasn’t exclusive to Amiga, but this consolation wasn’t of much help.
Edited 2011-11-22 00:19 UTC
Well I don’t want to speak for Thom, but I’d assume he was talking about his own experiences with it and the associated emotions he would have, not trying to state as a fact that it was possessed of a soul.
Anyway, yeah the altOS world is full of fanboys and girls. Otherwise what would be the point of a site like this? Take me for example: I grew up with computers in the pre-Windows world. My first computer was a TI 99/4a at five years old, and I’ve since had an Atari 400, Apple //c, Amiga 1000, TRS-80 CoCo2 and Commodore VIC-20 all before using DOS for the first time. Yet my favorite OSes in descending order are BeOS, QNX, OS X, Classic MacOS, GNU/Linux, NeXTSTEP, OS/2 and Windows 7. None of those I used before 1996 with the exception of Classic MacOS, and they are all vastly dissimilar.
So am I crazy because I have enjoyed using each of those OSes and countless others too? I’d say I am curious, geeky and driven, but hardly crazy.
Regarding Thom, I’d be more concerned about his obsession with rainbow farting unicorns than with any particular OS, especially considering he writes about OSes for a living.
“Had”?… You… got rid of… Amiga 1000?! o_O
(I seem to recall you deciding, understandably of course, to ignore lemur2 some time ago; I might just do something similar)
;p
But yeah, there was something warm & fuzzy (also!) about BeOS (and maybe it’s better to not recheck it, not run it today; considering how nostalgia, memories, past & rose-coloured glasses work)
Enough of that “warm & fuzzy” for BeOS to show up, for example, in at least one indy film from few years back; very visibly running on the PC used by main characters (I think it was even mentioned here, or on the blog of Eugenia; alas, I can’t quickly find it) – and not too many niche OS manage such exposure among film makers (even indy ones), I think.
PS. BTW & overall, using niche operating systems (maybe just with the size of some core script-dictated elements – usually, some short text – inflated in size way beyond defaults) in films would seem to me as a much more bearable option than “film UIs”, when there’s a need for something “fancy” and, perhaps, a desire to avoid free product placement and/or legal complications.
Oh well, maybe in some better universe…
Edited 2011-11-19 22:25 UTC
I want Haiku to succeed if for no other reason that it gives users another lightweight OS option that really does not exist at the moment. OS’s like Be, Haiku, and AROS drive innovation in ways that Redmond and Cuppertino just do not “get it” anymore. Cutting edge hardware removes the need for coders to work efficiently and give rise to enormous bloat of Win7 and OS X.
My 2004 vintage Evo still runs XP just fine but there is no upgrade path using Microsoft products that fit this old laptop. So, it now sports Xubuntu and perks along briskly. In truth I would be just as happy running any of the OS’s I previously mentioned, I have used them all before and would continue to do so if they do the job. I do not need all the effing eye-candy that so many current TPM’s feel compelled to spec as required features.
And yes I do have a fondness for all the OS’s mentioned and a few more as well, like IRIX and AIX. I admire them for the work that they allowed me to do and isn’t that what it’s all about?
Hey, another Amiga user! Finally, someone who understands that Be fanboys are morons! (Think twice about that thumbs-down button, buddy — that’s just my opinion.)
Have you been reading OSNews long? After a while, you’ll get used to it, roll your eyes, and say, “Yeah, that’s just Thom.” & maybe one day you’ll bestir yourself to do something about it & contribute something. Most of us just whine about, though. 😛
Edited 2011-11-15 16:24 UTC
I have, I’ve just generally avoided Be-related posts because I didn’t understand the appeal. Serves me right for giving the topic a chance, I guess. It’s just so painful to see a sub-group of the obscure OS fandom not learn from their forerunners. Can’t Be people see the Amiga users and realise how crazy they must sound to everyone else?
… so said the Amiga 4000 user in 2011. C’mon, you’re not less crazy than 90% of the readers here.
Posted from my BeOS R5-powered Dell Latitude C610. Proud to be crazy.
Bitter sarcasm, I assure you!
My A4000 electrocuted itself years ago.
…now I’m down to 3 A2000s and an A1000.
hay, do not be so hard on thom!
I guess that BeOS is OS of his youth
(as GEM was mine 
)
While I am not a huge fan of Apple in General I found the video to be a really good watch. Particularly the Surfing analogy which is such a good summary of innovation.
Anyone else feeling that Haiku doesn’t give them the same fuzzy feelings BeOS did? When I used Dano/Zeta I always got a feeling that I was in control, that the OS worked for me, that .. damn, it is indeed hard to put into words that feeling. Not the same with Haiku, sadly
That said, I’m glad Apple didn’t pick Be. They’d probably be gone by now. They didn’t need a new OS as much as they needed Jobs back.
I’ll admit, Haiku isn’t “doing it for me” quite the way BeOS did. I think it’s more that the world has moved beyond the need for an OS like BeOS or Haiku, rather than any real fault in Haiku itself (incomplete as the OS is).
I say that because I can run real BeOS r5 full screen in a VM, faster than it ever was on my 2001 era hardware, and with full virtual device support (well, VESA Accepted video mode, but everything else is fine). It just doesn’t have that zing that it had back in those days. I do still enjoy playing in it and comparing it to Haiku though!
Never got that feeling from Zeta. It was like Dano, only it sucked.
I used Dano and sucked pretty bad. Zeta was better by comparison but not much. If you used Zeta and never used BeOS, you were missing out.
Came too late to the BeOS party, I believe it was 2005 or 2006 when I heard about it. Used Zeta for a while (guess how much I enjoyed using my computer?
) then after all the legal problems went back to Windows and Linux 
It’s just the feeling of the whole “alpha” thing. That will get better.
Oh, don’t kid yourself, they needed a new OS, and badly. Jobs was just gravy
Looking back, without Jobs they’d probably not be as successful as they are today. Heck, maybe they wouldn’t even exist anymore.
I think that’s the general consensus. I still remember the first time I saw the original iMac in person; I was elated that it wasn’t another boring beige box connected to a generic monitor. Even though the OS hadn’t changed, the hardware was breathtaking (at the time). And I wasn’t really even into Macs or the MacOS that much back then.
It’s true, I agree, but without a modern OS, they wouldn’t have survived either. MacOS was woefully behind it’s competitors at the time, without virtual memory, and a few failed attempts to build a new OS, they were doomed if they didn’t buy something.
Edited 2011-11-16 11:49 UTC
I agree. I’ve been following Haiku for the past 10 years (even before it was called Haiku) and I’m sad to say it still isn’t as good as BeOS R5. My computer dual boots Haiku and BeOS – and I keep going back to BeOS because it’s more responsive, more stable (I HATE “kernel debugging land”!) and more… “professional”. (lacking the little bits of “clunkiness” you see in Haiku)
I’ve given up waiting for Haiku. I’m not waiting around until 2016 to see Haiku finally get as good as 2001 BeOS. (just like I’m not waiting until 2018 for AROS to finally get as good as 1993 Amiga Workbench)
Some BeOS fans think BeOS was along the lines of R4.5 at time. BeOS was in a far more incomplete state. It didn’t even support printing.
NeXT had a robust TCP/IP stack, printing and in general was a much more mature, production ready OS.
I think buying Be would have set the Mac back a decade.
Note: I loved the BeOS. Just sayin’.
When I started using the BeOS, I was working in Microsoft tech support. I remember the first time I saw that big 500MB demo video… how cool was that! I made some artwork and themes for it, lots of fun, they were even included on a CD. It was neat to have a 200Mhz system boot in seven seconds (after POST) to a desktop with HDD activity stopped. That blew some minds when I would demo it…
It had its issues, but I still won’t part with my BeOS install media.
I have moved on (grown up?) to a Linux install with Windows in a VM for one app.
I remember checking BeNews daily for the news…OS News fills that gap nicely.
I love BeOS..
i am always sadden by the fact that it is not the base of the osx today..
as always in the tech world, the best product might not be the best selling product..
In what regard was BeOS a “better” product than NeXTStep?
Other than its file system, BeOS was rather pedestrian when compared to what NeXT was bringing to the table.
Perfect blue wallpaper and cute yellow tabs are not enough for you?
Seriously: Easy of use-right click and you have all OS.
Nextstep was the most regarded OS+apps at the time but Next was already lost. I thinks they never sold more than a few thousand boxes, I doubt they sold many of the $700 Openstep kits either, I was tempted though.
BeOS had the potential to get so much better than what most people were using and was available for $100 and sort of free with the PE version. Apple’s decline was Steve’s great fortune to rebuild Next inside Apple, a great symbiosis I suppose.
Actually NeXT was doing relatively well with their WebObjects stuff. A lot of Apple’s focus on the internet/client-server/services stuff comes from that.
There is also the fact that Apple did not buy the NeXTStep OS, as much as they bought the whole company; that brought one of the best the technical staffs in the industry at the time to Apple, and of course they got Jobs and his management team.
The tech from NeXT actually satisfied exactly what Apple needed: a developer-friendly, multiuser/multitasking OS, which was scalable from the desktop to the server.
BeOS and BE were simply not in the same league: a fledging product that had gathered ZERO traction, mainly because it had no real value proposition whatsoever. The amount of work/time/investment needed to get BeOS to do what Apple needed (scalability, stable APIs, multiuser, secure, network stack, etc) would have probably surpassed what they ended up paying for NeXT to begin with. And they would not have gotten neither Jobs nor the NeXT technical team.
Anything has potential really, so that is irrelevant… In the end apple wasn’t really saved because of a single specific choice in the direction of their OS. Sure it did not hurt having OSX as an offering, but having Jobs at the top and the reorientation he performed turning Apple into a consumer product company is what made the difference.
Actually, kudos to Gasee for recognizing that.
Edited 2011-11-15 23:59 UTC
I suspect most of the long time BeOS fans would agree with the decision that Apple took and with the superiority of the Next framework at least for business use, it just hadn’t been affordable to the masses.
It wasn’t obvious back then that the turnaround would work out so well and that Apple would outdo just about all consumer companies. At that point both companies were going nowhere.
The best that BeOS could have hoped for was as a niche alt OS platform, but there’s no real money in that.
I liked BeOS, BONE networking was a bit more stable than the one shipped to regular users.
It needed a better webbrowser and a proper USB stack.
The first versions of OSX were not fast and stable and multiuser. People seem to forget that.
BeOS is history – long live Haiku! Keep your heads up and proud guys and don’t ever give up!
Edited 2011-11-15 09:59 UTC
I have Haiku rc3 on an old dual-core Intel box. I’ve read some of the BeBook reference material. It looks slick. But what now? At least AROS has a lot of software ported to it.
I am looking forward to the graphically accelerated version of Haiku rc4 or final if it makes the grade though. I’ve even got an idea for a nested filesystem for BFS for use in implementing code with the same GUI as the rest of the filesystem uses.
We will probably never know all the behind-the-scenes that led to that decision. But Gassee’s protestations sound a little hollow. Sure, he didn’t like Apple’s management. Who said he had to go along with the company he sold to Apple? Sell the outfit, then go “spend more time with your family”. It happens all the time.
For the unitiated, BeOS was a special moment in computing history. Some of us still can’t read the words “focus shift” without a pang of regret for what might have been.
If Haiku doesn’t do it for you, here is the solution: dig in! Haiku needs **everything** from C++ coders to icon artists. If you have no C++ skills you can contribute in Python, or Perl, or yab. You can translate instructions , you can make wallpapers, you ncan write manuals. It is an opportunity to get involved, to really create something.
Will it take over from Windows, OSX and Linux? Probably not. But it’s ours and we love it.
Jobs also disliked the management (and the board), in fact it was a condition for him to take on the role as interim CEO. If I am not mistaken he replaced almost the entire board, and did changes in management as well.
Gil Amelio was CEO when NeXT was acquired. Steve Jobs was brought back as an “advisor,” and there was a question as to whether he would come back to Apple at all after the acquisition. As “advisor” Jobs did ensure that NeXT’s senior personal replaced the equivalent people at Apple. It wasn’t until Amelio fell flat on his face in a Director’s meeting and at MacWorld that the board ousted him and Jobs took over as interim CEO. One of the first things he did after becoming interim CEO was replacing all but 1 or 2 of the Directors.
Most interestingly, from few bits of info from / linked by Wiki ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Amelio#1994.E2.80.931997:_Apple_Co… ), not only it was Gil Amelio who identified, during his short tenure as CEO, the problems in the Apple of the 90s[1] and made large part of decisions credited to Jobs for “saving Apple brand”[2] – also the “fell flat on his face” moment was, supposedly, very related to a major Apple stock low …one apparently at least partially caused by Jobs. Classy.
1. Those which… Steve Jobs “reveals” here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY&feature=player_detailpag…
or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EY&feature=player_detailpag…
2. because, really, was the company still Apple after barely-not-folding, killing most of product lines, bringing lots of Next tech (basing the future on it, and on some new projects), and such coup?
Sad to see some ex BeOS users say such hurtful things about it because back in the day it really was the light at the end of the tunnel compared to the utter crap that was the Windows (or even MacOS) experience. Yes BeOS needed much more work, more developers, drivers and apps too.
For the Amiga fans don’t feel so bad, remember that BeOS was strongly inspired by Amiga as well as MacOS and took many practical ideas from Windows and Unix too while defining its own character. JLG tried to take over Amiga but formed Be instead with a clean sheet of paper. BeOS is really the Amiga redone by MacOS people.
I still get that warm fuzzy feeling thinking about BeOS vs Win2k. I use Haiku on occasion and prefer it to anything else out there BUT I find myself mostly running Win7 instead even though I curse it at every turn. Why, apps, apps and more apps plus its the devil I know, life is imperfect. I could as easily have flipped to Linux or OSX for the apps too and probably less cursing.
I expect to return to Haiku though when I can get twin head working, when Paladin has integrated debugging and when more Media apps come along. That’s the irony now, Haiku is not much of a media OS since VLC, CLamp don’t really work anymore and I doubt it can rip media either, sad.
While BeOS was never ready for the masses, in my opinion Windows is only ready for the masses because it is already preinstalled. If it wasn’t, the vast majority of users would be clueless about installing or maintaining it. Tech support for Windows usually comes from someone nearby.
This is why I will be so happy to see us all move beyond the app-centric paradigm and into the document/workflow-centric model. It’s going to take a complete rethinking of how software is written, licensed/sold and distributed, and it may only ever come to fruition in the FOSS world where money isn’t a catalyst. But I still have hope.
I think we are stuck with apps for ever, so why do we have app stores? Personally I’d like to see the desktop completely disconnected from the underlying OS as in Linux. The underlying OS only needs a built in light desktop with option to launch to something we can choose and more useful for each of our purposes.
My problem with Windows is that every alternative to the Explorer seems to be even worse or just half assed broke. I’d like to have seen KDE for Windows with Qt get some traction.
Even better I had hoped that OpenTracker could have been ported, I know that’s only half the BeOS experience but at least we’d have zillions of apps even if built with MS APIs, perhaps the Haiku APIs could be there too much like Qt, GTK have been multi ported. I am pretty much agnostic about the under the hood stuff but I really care about the desktop as the primary app.
Was going thru my house’s basement and ran across my BeBox; dual ppc603 processors, if memory serves.
Is there a PPC version available for the most recent version?
Alas, the house is rented, so Box was relegated to basement.
I may be wrong but I believe my r5 Pro disc could boot and install on PPC or Intel. I might just have to drag it out of the closet to see.
And I just did that. “Version 5.0.3 / Intel & PPC”. So if you can get your hands on a BeOS 5.0 Pro disc, you’ll be golden.
Unfortunately Haiku doesn’t have a PPC release yet, but I think once R1 is out there they will work on it.
Except, I’ll add that running R5 on a BeBox may be a bit disappointing compared to something more modern such as a Pentium II/III…
It does run, but it’s no speed demon
If BeOS were used, the interface would probably have been much better. As an occasional Mac user, I find the interface much like some weird minimalist X Windows desktop from the ’90s that’s only 270K big. Much prettier of course, but still weird (KDE user here).
If the interface were standardized around one OS’s influence, sure. The fact of the matter was that BeOS and its brainchild, Haiku, are more efficient about the way they use the screen real-estate.
(A MacOSX 10.6 user here.)
I think the purchase of BE might have downed Apple in the end. It was Job’s conversion of the company into a consumer device provider (and linked services) that saved it.
I am unsure any other CEO around that time would have taken an established PC hardware company in that direction. I am basing this on the Tiny, Gateway and all the other PC makers who fell by the wayside trying to compete with IBM/Dell, not one I can think of tried to enter/create a new market.
There was nothing wrong with the BEOS itself. NextStep didnt have all that to shout about at the same timeframe. Apple neeeeeded to replace OS9, I dont think anyone disputes that, and a little work on BE would have provided as good an OS as OSX when it first came out. Although we think of it as quite good Now, 10.0 was.. shocking and 10.1 was barely feature matching with OS9 (it still wasnt the default OS when you booted up a new mac until a fair few system updates into 10.1 and even then most waited for 10.2)
If Commodore had bought Apple, they wouldn’t have needed a new OS as badly since they would have been running AmigaOS.
Apple even hired Carl Sassenrath after he helped write AmigaOS. He suggested they trash Mac System 1 and start over. Then they wouldn’t have needed either NeXT or BeOS.
There are all sorts of what-if’s that can be applied to situations like this.
Apple did not buy BeOS and Gassee is happy about that? It killed BeOS! BeOS never had any kind of future after that, it staled and never to be heard again.
I love people like that, happy that things went wrong and that there product died….
Configure a linux kernel for low latency, and all your oldschool needs will evaporate.
More specifically movable tabs [eh, titlebars]. I like stacking windows in BeOS and dragging the application tabs so that all the windows were quickly reachable. Might not have to do it that way but I found it cool and usable.
And burdensome; manually doing it, that is.
Only Chrome, I think, refined it and really brought it to the masses (in a sensible way, and in a scenario where it really makes sense)