Does that include the quality and security perspective as well? ;-) j/k

Having never crossed paths with a former Be employee before, __thank you so much__ for your contribution. BeOS was so instrumental to my perspective on computing and operating systems (and potentially the conception of my disdain for what Microsoft did to the world of operating systems around the turn of the century).

From a user perspective, BeOS was nearly perfect. Great UI and utilities, POSIX command line, so fast and responsive. The "install to Windows" option was amazing for trying things out. BeFS was wonderful (it's nice to see Mr. Giampaolo's work continue in macOS).

That's correct, the IPC in AOSP, Binder, is basically borrow from BeOS

I was sore about it at the time, but I agree that Apple made the right decision by choosing NextStep over BeOS. If for no other reason, because that's what brought Jobs back. It's hard to imagine Apple making their stunning comeback without him.

I’d always heard that after Amiga (and Be) many decided to opt for Linux for philosophical reasons.

Can I assume that the quality issues were somewhat related to that? BeOS devs found it no easier to write thread safe code in C++ than app devs did?

Thanks for the memories.

Yes. Except that it wasn’t acquiring NeXTSTEP that saved Apple’s skin; it was acquiring Steven P Jobs.

True, version 1 had been rough and flakey as hell, and honestly really didn’t work all that well.

But Steve 2.0? Damn, that one could sell.

You may have the finest tech on the planet—and that means precisely squat. What counts is putting bums on seats. Your seats. And keeping them there. Limps of tech are just a vehicle for that; to be used, abused, chewed up, and/or discarded on the road(s) to that end.

Apple could have done better; they certainly did plenty worse (Copland, Taligent, the first Mac OS).

As it turned out, NeXTSTEP proved it was indeed “good enough” to fit a pressing need at the time; and the rest was just hammering till it looked lickable enough for consumers to bite. All it was needed was a salesman to shift it—and Steve 2.0 proved to be one of the greatest salesman in modern marketing history.

That’s what made the difference between selling a tech to a million dyed-in-the-wirewool nerds, and selling tech to a billion everyday consumers. And then up-selling all of those customers to completely new worlds of products and services invented just for the purpose.

..

Want to created a whole new device? Hire Steve Wozniak.

Want to create a whole new world? Oh, but that is the real trick.

And Steve Jobs gave us the masterclass.

..

Had Steve started Be and Jean-Louis built NeXT, we would still be in the exact same situation today, and the only difference would be chunks of BeOS as the iPhone’s bones instead. Funny old world, eh? :)

Jobs was obviously talented, but assuming no matter where he went he would have had the same level of success is discounting a lot of luck in how everything lined up,and who was available to help bring all the things to market jobs is famous for. There's no guarantee the hundreds or thousands of people that were also essential to the major successes of Apple would have been around jobs had he stayed at Next. Those people deserve respect and recognition too.

And unlike v1 v2 seems better on human level as well. We do not need saint. He still parked in space for hadicapped only I guess. But let us admit, it is not just one for all. But all for one.

“But let us admit, it is not just one for all. But all for one.”

Damn straight. Epically focused leadership.

--

(† For all others who aspire to build their own businesses, there is HR procedure and askamanager.org—and do not for the life of you ever bypass either!)

Epically focused indeed.

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 himself with high-quality technical people and communicate effectively with them, but make no mistake: they were there to deliver his vision, not their own.

Tech-exclusive geeks a useful resource, but they have to be kept on a zero-length leash lest they start thinking that they should be the ones in charge since they know more about tech than anyone else. And the moment they’re allowed to get away with it, and you end up with the tails-wagging-the-dog internecine malfunction that plagued Sculley’s Apple in the 90s and has to some extent resurfaced under Cook.

Lots of things happened under Jobs 2.0. That was NEVER one of them.

..

Case in point: Just take the endless gushing geek love for Cook-Apple’s Swift language. And then look at how little the iOS platform itself has moved forward over the 10 years, it’s taken to [partly] replace ObjC with the only incrementally improved Swift. When NeXT created what is now AppKit, it was 20 years ahead of its time. Now it’s a good ten behind, and massively devalued to boot by the rotten impedance-mismatch between ObjC/Cococa’s Smalltalk-inspired model and Swift’s C++-like semantics.

Had Jobs not passed, I seriously doubt Lattner’s pet project would ever have advanced to the point of daylight. Steve would’ve looked at it and asked: How can it add to Apple’s existing investments? And then told Lattner to chuck it, and create an “Objective-C 3.0”; that is, the smallest delta between what they already had (ObjC 2.0) and the modern, safe, easy-to-use (type-inferred, no-nonsense) language they so pressingly needed.

..

Look, I don’t doubt eventually Apple will migrate all but the large legacy productivity apps like Office and CC away from AppKit and ObjC and onto Swift and SwiftUI. But whose interest does that really serve? The ten million geeks who get paid for writing and rewriting all that code, and have huge fun squandering millions of development-hours doing so? Or the billion users, who for years see minimal progress or improvement in their iOS app experience?

Not to put too a fine a point on it: if Google Android is failing to capitalize on iPhone’s Swift-induced stall-out by charging ahead in that time, it’s only because it has the same geek-serving internal dysfunction undermining its own ability to innovate and advance the USER product experience.

--

TL;DR: I’ve launched a tech startup, [mis]run it, and cratered it. And that was with with a genuinely unique, groundbreaking, and already working tech with the product potential to revolutionize a major chunk of trillion-dollar global industry, saving and generating customers billions of dollars a year.

It’s an experience that has given me a whole new appreciation for what another nobody person starting out of his garage, and with his own false starts and failures, was ultimately able to build.

And I would trade 20 years of programming process for just one day of salesmanship from Steve Jobs’ left toe, and know I’d got the best deal by far. Like I say, this is not about a person. It is about having the larger vision and having the skills to deliver it.

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 himself. He gathered the original Mac team. If he had, say, a random group of Microsoft or IBM developers, the Mac never would have happened. Same with Next, many of whom were still around to deliver iOS and the iPhone.

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.

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.)

And neither of them would've mattered a jot if they were born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or if they were medieval peasants, or if Jobs hadn't been adopted, or or or ...

Luck is enormously influential. There thousands of Jobsalikes per Jobs. Necessity isn't sufficiency.

Jobs was an outstanding product manager who sweated all the details for his products. And in contrast to Tim Cook, Jobs was a passionate user of actual desktop and laptop computers. He sweated the details of the iPhone too, but his daily driver was a mac, not an iPad. Cook is less into the product aspect, and it really really shows. Cook is a numbers and logistics guy, but not really into the product.

That's a thing I think Apple has fixed recently with some reshuffling and putting a product person (Jeff Williams) in the COO role. The COO role is also a signal that he'll be the next CEO when Tim Cook retires.

To be clear, I don't disagree that Jobs was a great marketer. But that stemmed from his own personal involvement with the product design of the mac--and later the iOS devices--rather than some weirdly prodigious knack for marketing.

You shouldn't talk about Sun like that.

OSX/macOS/iOS is the latest evolution of NeXTStep/Mach which originated in the Aleph (and other) academic kernels.

(of course OS's evolve pretty far in a few decades...)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel))

It's wrong.

Original NeXT classes were prefixed NX_. Then NeXT worked with Sun to make a portable version of the GUI that could run on top of other OSes -- primarily targeting Solaris, of course, but also Windows NT.

That was called OpenStep and it is the source of classes with the prefix NS_ -- standing for Next/Sun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep#History

This is why Sun bought NeXT software vendor Lighthouse, whose CEO Jonathan Schwartz who later became Sun's CEO.

Unfortunately for NeXT (and ultimately for Sun), right after this, Sun changed course and backed Java instead.

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

Neither OS had the kind of security that is really useful today for this usecase, which is per-application.

Personally I don't know Android innards deeply, but when I was trying to backup and restore a rooted phone I did notice that every app's files have a different owner uid/gid and the apps typically won't launch without that set up correctly. So it would seem they implemented per-app separation in this instance by having a uid per app.

Imagine a world where Google had chosen to build on a kernel that had spent many decades with no filesystem permissions at all. Perhaps they'd have to pay the same app compatibility costs that Microsoft did going from 9x to NT kernel, or changing the default filesystem to ACL'd-down NTFS.

Someone else pointed out that BeOS allegedly had "quality and security" problems in general (I myself have no idea), so that may indeed have led to problems down the line, whereas BSD was pretty solid. But I agree with the OP and don't think POSIX security in particular is much of a factor today.

Of course, that was in back in the days when an entire platform from hardware to userland could be exclusively optimized to utterly and comprehensively smash it in just one very specific and precisely targeted market. Which is, of course, exactly what the iPhone was.

Just as the first Apple Macintosh a decade earlier eschewed not only multi-user, multi-process, and even a kernel; every single bit and cycle its being being exclusive dedicated to delivering a revolutionary consumer UI experience instead!

In comparison, NeXTSTEP, which ultimately became iOS, is just one great huge glorious bodge. “Worse is Better” indeed!

..

Honesly, poor Be was just really unlucky in timing: a few years too late to usurp SGI; a few too early to take the vast online rich-content-streaming world all for its own. Just imagine… a BeOS-based smartphone hitting the global market in 2000, complete with live streaming AV media and conferencing from launch! And Oh!, how every Mac OS and Windows neckbeards would’ve screamed at that!:)

My guess is that by now in 2020, it would have at some point had an OSX moment where Commodore would have had to chuck it out, since both Apple and Microsoft have effectively done exactly that since then. Still, I'd love to peek into Amiga OS 9 descended from continual usage.

It's a bit how DragonflyBSD is slowly converging to.

Since inter-process communication in Amiga OS was based on message passing with memory-sharing, it was impossible to add MMU-based memory protection later. As far as I know, even Amiga OS 4 (which runs on PowerPC platforms) is not able to provide full memory protection.

There was also only minimal support for resource tracking (although it was originally planned for the user interface). If a process crashed, its windows etc. would stay open. And nobody prevented a process to pass pointers to allocated system resources (e.g. a window) to other processes.

The API was incomplete and tied to the hardware, especially for everything concerning graphics. This encouraged programmers to directly access the hardware and the internal data structures of the OS. This situation was greatly improved in Amiga OS 3, of course far too late. Amiga OS 3 was basically two or three years too late. As far as I know, Apple provided much cleaner APIs, which greatly simplified later the evolution of their OS without breaking all existing programs.

Finally, the entire OS was designed for single-core CPUs. At several places in the OS, it is assumed that only one process can run at a time. This doesn't sound like a big issue (could be fixed, right?) but so far nobody has managed to port Amiga OS to multi-core CPUs (Amiga OS4 runs on multi-core CPUs, but it can only use one core).

I have been the owner of an Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200, but to be brutally honest, I see Amiga as a one-hit wonder. After the initial design in the mid-1980s, development of the OS and the hardware basically stopped.

Why can't you do shared memory message passing with MMU protection? There is no reason an application in a modern memory protected OS can't voluntarily share pages when the use case is appropriate. This happens today. You can mmap the same pages, you can use posix shm, X has the shm extension...

If you never evolved account based security, you never built the infra for even evaluating application permissions in the first place.

Separating admin user from non admin user always has advantages and I do it even on Windows.

Edit: gotta love HN! I try to be helpful to someone else that was downvoted to heck with an explanation of why that was the case (based on past replies I’ve seen) and now my post is the own with a negative score. Cheers y’all!

We used to be able to trust intentionally installed programs not to exfiltrate data. It's sad that we still can't.

Median is literally the middle, like a highway.

For example, suppose five computers have 1 user, 1 user, 1 user, 3 users, 300 users. The median is 1 user.

The claim of "median 1 user" just means more than half of computers has a single user.

I love everything I've read about BeOS but to be honest I must mention I couldn't understand how to use Haiku (I've never used the original BeOS) once I've tried - id didn't feel intuitive at all. And I'm not really stupid, I've been using different flavors of Linux as a primary OS for over a decade.

> 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 classic Mac OS on that front.

Some times I miss the days of Windows 95 so much. I wish desktop OSes could be more simple, i.e. without multi-user and file access rights. When it's my own personal computer all I want of it from the security perspective is to prevent others from unlocking it or recovering data from it and to prevent any network communication except that I authorized. Sadly Linux still doesn't even have a decent implementation of the latter (Mac has LittleSnitch).

Windows 9x did pretty well for me - I've never caught a virus, never corrupted a system file and it was easy to fix for others who did.

Have a look into Oberon and its successor A2/Bluebottle.

http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/

https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/46523.html

So while it might not have been quite ready for the median System 7 user's expectations, it was pretty solid.

I was able to do most of the CS course work projects normally done on my University's Sun workstations on BeOS instead. Most of these of courses were data structures, algorithms, compilers, etc projects in C, and not things that required platform specific APIs.

But arguably, BeOS' overall model - a single user desktop OS built on top of but hiding its modern OS underpinnings like memory protection and preemptive multitasking - is far more similar to what eventually became MacOSX than Linux. Which isn't so surprising since it was built by ex apple folks. Remember that consumer OSs before this point had no memory protection or preemptive multitasking.

Linux, though it had the same modern OS features, was far more closely aligned in spirit with the timeshared modern multi-user Unix OS's like what ran the aforementioned Sun workstations (it's "Linus' Unix after all).

Also, let’s keep in mind that Windows95 (released that same year) featured preemptive multitasking on a desktop user OS (albeit not a strong memory protection model), and WindowsNT has been available for a couple of years by then (having first shipped in 1993, If memory serves) and was a fully ‘modern’ OS (indeed it serves as the basis for the latter Windows), albeit with a comparatively large footprint.

I was an avid BeOS user (and coincidentally a NeXT user too) and I was enthralled by its capabilities, but in terms of system architecture it was a dead end.

Unfortunately this meant BeOS was perpetually behind the curve on stuff like the World Wide Web. I had a native FreeBSD build of Netscape long before Be managed to get a decent browser.

> Several processes can exist at one time, and they appear to run simultaneously because the CPU is multiplexed among them. The scheduler decides what process should use the CPU at any one time. It uses a generally non-preemptive scheduling algorithm. This means that a process wlll not lose the CPU unless it blocks. (…)

> A process can lose the CPU when one of the following happens:

> • The process calls an Operating System procedure or function.

> • The process references one of its code segments that is not currently in memory.

> If neither of these occur, the process will not lose the CPU.

In other words, non-preemptive, unless the OS becomes the foreground process, in which case it may block the active process in favor of another one currently in ready or blocked state.

[0] https://lisa.sunder.net/LOS_Reference.pdf

Surely it had a cli, UNIX like directory navigation and a couple of UNIX command like utilities.

But good luck porting UNIX CLI software expecting a full POSIX environment.

If I am not mistaken, Haiku has done most of the work regarding POSIX support.

I was also able to get most my CS homework done in BeOS. But I definitely needed to keep FreeBSD around for when I hit a wall.

I regretted having to move away from BeOS, it was by far the most pleasant OS I’ve used, but the lack of hardware and software support killed it.

Having a shell that looks like UNIX, and a couple of command line utilities similar to the UNIX ones, does not make an OS UNIX.

But you have to consider what else was going on at the time: Microsoft was actively moving away from the DOS lineage. OS/2 had been in development since the mid-1980s, and, while that project came to an ugly end, they had also released the first version of Windows NT in the early '90s, and, by the late '90s, they were purposefully moving toward building their next-gen consumer OS on top of it.

Apple needed to be making similarly strong moves toward a multi-user OS with concerns like security baked in deeply. BeOS had the memory protection and the pre-emptive multitasking, which were definitely steps forward, but I don't think they would have taken Apple far enough to allow them to keep up with Microsoft. Which, in turn, would have allowed Microsoft to rest on its laurels, probably to the detriment of the Windows ecosystem.

Anyways, Windows 10 may have its problems, but Microsoft the company is doing pretty well. Their stock is up about 50% this year (200% over the past 5). And that’s not to mention the fact that they’ve open sourced .NET among many other things.

I also had (non-CS but very smart) friends who switched to (ie dual-booted) Linux on their own after seeing how much better my system was than a Windows box. A decade later, one of them is getting her PhD in veterinary pathology and still dual boots, firing Windows up only when she feels like gaming.

[1] My impression is that committed PC gamers aren't a large portion of the desktop user population, but I may be wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us

Edit: removed the extra A in the acronym

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.

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, tablets, set-top boxes, and more.

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.

The fact that it isn't a net good for users in most cases doesn't mean that it's trivial to do.

Maybe good marketing is really hard and you can't just "copy Apple"?

This is very true. macOS and the iPhone, for me, went from being "obviously the very best of the best" to "the lesser of all evils".

When my 2015 rMBP finally gives up the ghost and / or when 10.13 loses compatibility with the applications I use, I have no idea what I'm going to do - probably buy another working 2015 rMBP used and pray that the Linux drivers are livable by then.

I know it's ridiculous, but it helps me fall asleep at night sometimes.

- I still have mostly USB 2.0 peripherals. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

- I'm still hung up on the MagSafe adapter.

- I love the form factor. The 13" display is the perfect size, for me. I could've switched to a 15" 2015 rMBP with better specs, but I hated how big it was.

- I have no interest in using any version of macOS beyond 10.13, at present.

I'm really glad that they brought the Esc key back, especially as a pretty serious vim user. I don't know, maybe I'm stuck in the past. I'm certain that many, many people are really enjoying the new Macbook Pro 16; I just really, really like this laptop. It's the best computer I've ever owned.

- The TouchBar is terrible

I hope they'll bring back a non-TouchBar configuration when they release the "new" keyboard on a 13" MacBook Pro. I could live with both a 13" or 15" laptop, but right now the list of drawbacks is still 1-2 items too long.

This seems like a failure of imagination.

I'm not a huge Apple fan, but I lived through the Bad Old Microsoft of the '90s, and grew up on stories of IBM of the '80s.

Apple is nothing like them.