It was supposed to prove BeOS is a good idea. A problem they ran into with the BeBox and again later is that Be had lots of _fans_ rather than developers.

Fans think they're helping. If there's a hardware product then as a fan I should buy it right? Well, no, that's a subsidised development toolkit. Every unit that ships is VC sunk in the hope you'll write like Photoshop or Mosaic or 1-2-3 or something and create a market for this new system. When you instead compile two demo apps, call the support line to ask how to plug a mouse in, and tell all your friends to buy one as well, you are in fact not helping.

This is also because Be's original plan says competing with Windows is suicide (it was). They're going to build a system which is NOT a competitor for Windows, it's a whole separate environment. Maybe you have a Windows PC to do billing and surf that new Web, but in your studio you have a BeOS system and it doesn't matter that it can't print because that's not what it's for.

Be shouldn't have made it to the turn of the century, nowhere close. In 1998 the investors should have said we're sorry, there isn't money for this to continue Jean-Louis, better luck next time, and turn off the lights. BeOS gets sold off to whoever is in the market for pennies. But they got "lucky" they were in the right place at the right time. In 1999 you could raise an IPO for a dog turd so long as the offering paperwork said "Internet" on it and you were based on the US West Coast. The institutions got out, those fans who'd squandered the company's money and opportunity years earlier got in to replace them, and they all lost their shirts. In the process Be Inc. bought itself an extra couple of years runway.

(Edited to fix name)

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 would have been an amazing time. Imagine if SGI had pulled off the first titanium, unibody laptop, designed specifically for 3D. Would Alien-ware?

If there had been a BeLaptop, things might have been a lot different in 2000/2001, when things started to look very, very interesting.

I mean, the fact that Apple shipped a Unix laptop when all the other 'super-' vendors were unable to pull it off.,,

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...

Toshiba was selling Solaris laptops.

Yeah, but were they as sexy as the tiBook?

Like the OP, for me the tiBook was a defining moment. A unix laptop, and it also looked good? Easy, immediate purchase.

Not as colorful,

http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/work/0012.html

https://books.google.de/books?id=wDlUmfY9nQsC&pg=PT11&lpg=PT...

Additionally there were UNIX laptops from NatureTech

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dios0v0n9eY

and Tadpole

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/32324/Tadpole-SPARCbo...

https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/04/01/sparcbook-3000st-the-co...

So no, "I mean, the fact that Apple shipped a Unix laptop when all the other 'super-' vendors were unable to pull it off.,, " isn't how history went.

Other vendors were already at it, while Apple was trying to make Copland work and not being so successful with A/UX.

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 consider moving back to it, 100%. The ride has been good with Apple, but the horizon doesn't look too great ..

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.

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.

I tend to agree. If they had targeted Mac or PC hardware (different at the time!) and perhaps built some nifty gizmos as add-in cards (LED blinkenlights array, GeekPort) they would have saved serious cash.

That was the time period when ordinary users could be persuaded to pay money for their operating systems and major upgrades.

The BeBox had an incredible amount of I/O and little to no professional grade software to take advantage of it.