While I LOVE LOVE LOVED BeOS. It resonated with me and it was a great experience...it wasn't multiuser and didn't have some stuff that I forget, but seemed necessary for a system to have long-term success. But mam did it cut out the cruft and wring out ALL of the HP of the hardware of the time.

Why was multiuser so important? Apple’s most successful operating system in the Jobs 2.0 era isn’t multiuser either.

BeOS would have been a fine foundation for smartphones and tablets. But of course it’s an open question whether Apple could have got that far in the 2000s without the return of Jobs. I suspect the company would have been acquired or merged with some unsuitable suitor like Sun.

It allows applications to run in different priviledge contexts and allows you inherit privilidges on a network, off the top of my head.

Unless you _want_ your solitare game have the ability to enumerate your contacts and send mail.

macOS and iOS use a completely different mechanism to ensure a game doesn’t read my contacts or make network requests. It has nothing to do with Unix-style users.

They could have built that on top of BeOS just as well as on NextStep.

Unix permissions will allow you do to that perfectly fine.

I agree that iOS isn’t multi-user in any real, like, multiple user accounts intended to be used by real people sense.

I wonder, though, it is based on MacOS somehow, right? Which is based on BSD. Could there be some left over multi-user plumbing sticking around in a technical sense?

Yes, iOS still uses users in the technical "Unix" sense, they're just not mapped to actual physical users, but instead to various services.

Android is in a similar boat. They're still an important way to manage filesystem access of programs.

Android isn't in a similar boat, AOSP has full isolated Multi-User support that is realized through Unix users. You can create new users through Settings and they have their own home screen, apps and files.

Most vendors have this enabled now and things like work accounts/MDM use the same system.

https://source.android.com/docs/devices/admin/multi-user

iOS barely uses that. Processes commonly run as “mobile” or “root”, but it does not matter very much. POSIX users and access permissions are archaic, and, in my opinion, don’t match with how almost any device is being used nowadays. iOS implements its own concepts through entitlements, containers, vaults, sandboxes etc. (Look up the “Apple Platform Security Guide” for details.)

> Shared iPad security in iPadOS

> [...] User data is partitioned into separate directories, each in their own data protection domains and protected by both UNIX permissions and sandboxing.

POSIX users are quite important.

Yeah, it basically doesn't use UNIX permissions at all.

In the very early public slides announcing the iPhone, I believe Jobs referred to iOS as "Mac OS X".

Multi-user would have likely been bolted on one way or another at some point, as had happened when other OSes gained fundamental new features.

Was any operating system actually able to go from single-user to multi-user so easily? Windows NT and OS X were totally rewritten from the ground up relative to their single-user predecessors Windows 9x and classic Mac OS.

NT is closer to a mainframe OS than 9x and it came out in the win3 era

Yeah, I actually used NT 3.51 for some time. However it was the NT line that replaced the 9x line, at least from the consumer perspective.

NT had no predecessor (at least from Microsoft; architecturally it's predecessor would be VMS). It was ground-up multi-user. Mac OS [Classic] was not OS X's predecessor, either -- it was NeXTStep.

You are right on the technical lineage, but I was referring to how these products were (ultimately) presented commercially. The facts that they are both older than one might think and they were developed with specific goals from the start I think more clearly illustrate that you can't just "bolt on" such fundamental differences.

yea, a big one. Once there was an intentionally multi-user-from-ground-up OS called "Multics". Dude named ken thompson or dennis ritchie or something worked on it but was like "bro, so bloated". So dude writes a DISK BENCHMARKING system, single user, called it "Unix" as if to castrate multics. The original unix was disk benchmarking, barebones. So we know how that moved into multi-user

source: kernighans readingbook, "unix a memoir" or something like that, great read

I'm not sure how much that really counts. According to [1], the time that Unix spent as a single-user operating system was intentionally very short-lived. Even the earliest version of the operating system that can be reconstructed today had multiple logins and processes, though only one could be active at a time. It seems that, by the time Unix was written in C, ported to multiple architectures, and spreading outside of Bell Labs, it was already multi-user.

[1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/10908

> Why was multiuser so important?

Because computing devices, and access to them, was not so ubiquitous back then. Families all had to share a single computer. Business users had to share access to large servers. There were no smartphones. Some had to travel to an educational setting just to see or use a computer.

Heh, funny you mention that, considering Be's pivot to BeIA. Some Be engineers also worked on the (unreleased) Palm OS Cobalt, and eventually, Android. (And then Fuschia, but I don't think that OS will ever hit smartphones.)

I can’t think of a better acqui-hire than NeXT + Steve Jobs

You mean when NeXT bought Apple and forced Apple to finance the deal.

A.K.A. that time when Steve Jobs acqui-hired Apple.

Apple looked at it as an acquisition, while NeXT looked at it as a merger.

NeXT didn’t buy Apple obviously, but Steve Jobs and his lieutenants took over the most important positions within Apple.

Which made sense given the situation Apple found itself in.

For sure, it was pretty clearly the right call at the time and objectively so with the benefit of hindsight. But BeOS was just too good to be allowed (forced, really) to die on the vine the way that it did.

No need for hindsight. BeOS is still alive. A Haiku for you.

Some other company would release the iPhone then!

As someone who loved BeOS at the time, past discussion here on HN leads to believe that Apple's adoption of it would have had some real challenges.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002062

I suspect that without Jobs, Apple is dead by 2002. Turned into an arm of, like, RIM. Then Google comes out with the Android phone and it's all over for everyone including Microsoft.

I suspect if Apple and NeXT never "merged", the phone market would be RIM vs (a very different) Android, but we'd be worse off.

Blackberries were OK at the time, but my god RIM was so culturally conservative and Google at the time had no design sense that we'd probably be 10 years behind where we are now - and if we even had software keyboards they'd be terrible.

Outside US, it would keep being all about J2ME, Symbian, Windows CE/Pocket PC, Bada OS.

Which keep being forgotten, in these kind of discussions.

RIP PalmOS you died before your time. Best mobile gaming OS I've used and ran for a week on some AA batteries

Nokia would still be around

They probably would still be the #1 phone manufacturer, still making terrible Symbian phones with terrible developer support. I was working for Nokia (and a shareholder) on their future phones c. 2004-2005 and it was horrible all the way down. Apple deserved to eat everyone's lunch.

HTC G1 the original Android phone, was basically another sidekick. We’d have this shitty Android and WinMo for a decade longer and eventually things would get good.

The slate form factor was already being explored by other manufacturers before the iPhone came out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

Sure, but unlike the iPhone, that thing was an unbelievable piece of shit.

It's not hard to extrapolate that something would have entered the market. I assume it would only have been a couple of years later.

Microsoft had been doing it since 2000 but never made it cool. Here's one from 2004:

https://www.theregister.com/2004/11/03/review_hp_ipaq_6340/

I had one since 2000 as a daily driver and I loved the thing, but the app library was horrible.

The funny thing is, iPhone launched with no support for 3rd party apps. It took damned near a year for the first apps to arrive.

Hard to argue with that. Still remember a co-intern telling me "Steve Jobs returned to Apple!" and just shrugging.

Right innit? It's not just Apple using BeOS but wondering how everything else would be different. You actually need to... think different at this point, aye?

Assuming Apple would still be successful, and not close shop.

It would have settled C++ as the main systems language on desktop OSes, between Windows, and Mac Be OS.

Objective-C would have died, and Swift would never come to be.

Clang and LLVM probably would never had gotten Apple's sponsorship.

POSIX would have died on the desktop, as Be OS like other non UNIX OSes wasn't that keen in being UNIX like.

There wouldn't be a flock of Linux and BSD developers rushing out to buy Apple hardware, instead of sponsoring OEMs shipping PCs with those distributons.

Apple would have died.

I love BeOS.

I love BeOS more than you.

I love BeOS more than Jean-Louis Gassée.

BeOS wasn't ready. I was there I used BeOS as my daily driver on a maxxed-out Power Macintosh 6400. I have, today, that machine still running BeOS. I also have a second dual-PII running BeOS.

BeOS wasn't ready.

Apple was making a decision in 1996 for a deal that had to be struck and struck fast (1997). I started using BeOS in 1997 with one of the first Power Macintosh releases.

Those days (my days) it wasn't ready-- you had to pile patch on top of patch on top of community fix on top of some set of drivers some dude in Boise made in order to get things functional. I spent more time browsing BeOS listservs and download sites fixing things (at 56k) than using it.

Everyone is remembering fondly the R4.5/R5 days in late 1999. Three years after the December 1996 announcement of the NeXT acquisition. By then BeOS was... better. It was running on PCs and had a much larger user community. In 1996/7? Just a handful of BeBox owners and Mac users dumb enough (me) to try it.

Managment would have been professionally negligent to choose it over NeXTStep.

In 1996, when Apple was up against the wall, NeXTStep was almost ten years old. All they had to do was buy the company, port it to PPC, and change some copyright messages and icons around. Took about two years.

BeOS would have required way more time, money, and expertise.

BeOS had no multi-user, no security (at all), an "aspirational" level of posix compliance, drivers that were a disaster, a network stack specifically designed to frustrate you, and no "companies that actually matter and no Gobe doesn't count" application support.

I get it. It was pretty. It was fast. French electro DJs loved it because it was low latency, and some audio tools were ported to it.

A userbase of French electro DJs doesn't pay the bills.

The C++ API bound forever to the gcc 2.95 ABI IIRC was also an "interesting" choice. Sure with success they would certainly have engineered a way forward, out of necessity, but if I would have had to give my opinion about that for Apple at the time...

The Haiku project folks worked out ABI compatibility for newer GCC releases. Current builds of Haiku support binary backwards compatibility with the 2.95 ABI while also supporting newer GCC ABIs at the same time. So at least we know it is (and would have been) possible.

i think you missed the greater point. apple with beos would not have turned Enterprise dead end that it is today.

that market was what jobs had to pivot to (there's a great video where he pushes the rationalization of going to academia and Enterprise workstations) so that next could survive. and it infected apple from the inside.

the timeline everyone missed with beos is exactly apple not becoming the mix of ibm and Microsoft it is today.

Everyone also forgets that JLG was a horrible manager and his decision to keep Macs obscenely high priced was what ultimately almost killed Mac.

And Steve Jobs as the founder of Apple had a political capital than JLG would have ever had.

While I know that the measly $250 million that Microsoft invested in Apple didn’t “save it”, only SJ could make peace with MS (only Nixon could go to China) and make the tough choices.

Founders are given a lot more leeway to make huge changes than any other manager.

I have a spare machine to do some offline work on running Haiku OS, the open source successor to BeOS. Even today it simultaneously feels 20 years ahead and 20 years behind.

Good example, the interface is incredibly snappy but no Wifi. I love the vision of BeOS but it probably would have been the death of Apple if they had gone with it.

Haiku does support WLAN adapters (even USB ones), through the support isn't as extensive as Linux or the BSDs. You might want to use the current nightly builds instead of the latest beta version, though, which was released in December 2022.

https://hardware.besly.de/index.php?hardware=Wireless_Networ... https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/support-for-realtek-usb-wifi-...

I agree both with @snakeyjake and with @faefox.

I'd love to see what Apple would have done... but at the same time I fear very much it would have killed Apple.

BeOS was amazing, but its dev tools were nothing special while NeXT's were state of the art, industry-beating. That means no way to win Mac developers over to the new OS.

BeOS was as insecure as Classic MacOS, so no way to crack the server market (not that that worked) and no way to build nice locked-down little gadgets like iPhones.

And while Be had JLG, a very smart cookie, NeXT had Jobs, who had more vision in a day than JLG in a year.

Me, I wish a disappointed Be had done a deal with Acorn and ported to Arm.

Arms in the hundreds-of-MHz range were there and gigahertz-class was coming soon. Acorn had prototype multi-processor machines. Be had the best SMP support in the business in the late 1990s.

They could have reskinned BeOS to look more RISC OS like, run RO in a VM like OS X ran Classic in a VM, and offered both the thinnest lightest Web-capable laptops in the world, and compellingly-priced multiprocessor desktop workstations that didn't need a dozen cooling fans and could have gone to 4-way or even 8-way at an affordable price, which x86 and PowerPC chips could not touch.

Many moons ago I read that Apple came super close to buying Be, but Jean-Louis Gassée wanted to much money and negotiations fell apart.

I reckon it was the star power of Jobs more than the OS as such that saved Apple in the late 90s.

Jobs' ability to do the deal with MS to get MS Office on the Mac and a cash injection of $150m saved Apple at the time.

We were well into the 2000s before OSX really began to make a difference to Apple's fortunes, and no one could have predicted that OSX would be the foundation for the iPhone OS.

It wasnt even a given that OSX would be the OS for the iPhone during development.

But absolutly, NeXT was the best choice, even if the OSX Beta and 10.0 were almost unusably slow and buggy!

I was at the Paris Mac Expo when Jobs launched the beta, and the excitement was amazing!

Same year as the Key Lime iBooks IIRC. They rose up our of the floor on a pedastal if I'm remembering it right LOL.

I worked at Apple in the 90s, and saw all the demos of early releases of OSX and the confusing stack of platforms and tools. Jobs did the right thing ditching that!

Finally, I remember being at the Mac Expo in London and BE was there. We were standing around admiring the cool light bars on the front of the Be Box and its multitasking abilities.

If I'm remenbering right the lights on the front went up and down to indicate CPU usage. I could be imagining that?

Someone correct me if I'm misremembering :-)

The $150 million had nothing to do with saving Apple. They had already secured a billion dollar line of credit and besides, the same quarter Apple spent $100 million to buy out PowerComputings Mac assets and license.

It was years before Apple became profitable and the $50 million was a drop in the bucket

We kind of live in an alternate to that alternative reality.

A lot (most?) of Be engineers ended up at a company called Danger, which was bought by Google a few years later, and they all went on to be the original core team of Android. Some BeOS technologies even ended up in Android such as its Binder, which from memory the Be engineer working on it open sourced it just before Palm bought Be, and then he used the same code in Android.