Re:Haiku Activity and Contract Report, October 2023
by _glass on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @10:00AM
(#38277285)
BeOS could have been OS X :)
Re:Haiku Activity and Contract Report, October 2023
by sillywalk on Wednesday November 15, 2023 @04:06PM
(#38282476)
Doubtful. I'm a BeOS fan, and used BeOS Pro v5 as a daily driver around 2000. Even Jean-Louis Gassée thinks (in hindsight) it would've been a bad idea [0].
If Apple had bought Be instead of NeXT, they would've have gotten Steve Jobs, who (arguably) saved Apple from bankrupcy, plus i{Mac,Pod,Phone}
At the time (1995-96?) BeOS was a (cool) tech demo, but wasn't a viable product. It had no developers and no apps. NeXT was mature. BeOS also didn't have critical things like - the ability to print, colour management, multi-user support, etc.. Apple could've added these to BeOS, but...
[0] https://9to5mac.com/2011/11/11/gassee-thank-god-apple-chose-...
The early 2000s really took a toll on alternative commercial OS offerings. OS/2, QNX (on the desktop), BeOS, and others made that time interesting. There were even a lot of mobile OS options (Palm, early Linux handhelds, Symbian, Windows PocketPC/Mobile).
BeOS was always my favorite though. It’s amazing what Haiku has done, but sad that BeOS was shelved 20 years ago.