diskzero

Right. There were several interesting skins and Finder-esque modifications of Workspace Manager. You may have seen a “Beaker” build of OSX with that. The Kodiak pre-release had the C++ Finder that is still the current Finder with PowerPlant replaced by HIView and some code refactored to use AppKit. No SwiftUI though!

Yeah, a lot of those “blue” features never were adopted or came back. The whole spatial Finder concept was lost.

I hear you. Yes, the 10.0 Finder had swaths of commented out code and missing features that were present in 9. Spring loaded folders comes to mind. They came back at some point.

Haiku is all new source, so they had to figure out how to get the binaries to run. I am not the POSIX expert, but I think it was just an API guarantee not ABI.

There were several companies that had the BeOS source and that source can be found in the wild. It is speculated that yellowTAB ZETA was based on unlicensed BeOS source code.

Your BeBox case was lovingly spray painted in a conference room with inadequate ventilation by us at Be at corporate HQ in Menlo Park. Each one was lovingly assembled by the actual people who designed the hardware and wrote the code.

A strong BeOS selling point was that it was POSIX compliant. I guess that is what you mean by a thin veneer. But we had to write all that code; it wasn’t like we were running Linux or some SCO or other flavor of Unix. It was a written and rewritten and rewritten multiple times.

Yes, the reverse acquisition. Minor correction though, Craig didn’t show up until much later. He missed out on some very tough years and came on when Apple was fully revitalized and printing money. I might even suggest what I consider the decline of Apple software occurred when Avie and Bertrand left and Craig took over.

For release 4, we added private impls with many many virtual declaration placeholders. I still remember the comment in every file: Mmmmmmm, stuffing!

Well, not only former Be but former Finder developer here. The OSX Finder was certainly not a cute Finder-like skin, it was in fact huge amounts of the OS9 Finder source code including a complete copy of a modified Metrowerks PowerPlant C++ framework underneath it all. There was even elements of the old MacApp framework there. It was not a skin; it was a source code behemoth with massive amounts of legacy code.

JLG countered with a $100 million and I thought Apple offered Steve $400 million at first. There was a moment when Apple was just talking to us (Be) and Steve heard about it. Bummed.

> They also implemented the OS API directly in C++, which tied them to a specific C++ compiler

We paid Cygnus(?) millions for that. The multiple virtual inheritance needed for MediaKit was a real joy to get working.

Former Be person here. Excellent summary. To further elucidate the management issue, some of the Be management went to Palm and they weren’t super effective there either. A fun alternative universe would be Apple buying Be, Apple going bankrupt or eaten by the clones, NeXT powering the internet with WebObjects, Microsoft crushed by antitrust and we are all running Linux using Eazel/GNOME.

Thanks and I am very happy for you guys! I hope you both get a lot more time together and that she remains stable, healthy and active.

This is somewhat what it is like for me in Arizona. There is no clock change here, so I just watch my out of state meetings shift around twice a year.

It is good to hear about her changed perspective and that the cancer is currently undetectable. I hope she continues to have health and you both have a good long life together. I lost my wife to cancer over nine months. We had thirty years together, but I certainly wanted more. Best to you both.

Any cognitive scientists here, or actual people with eidetic memory, who can comment how the brain would store everything you ever read or heard and how it can be recalled? What does it feel like to be able to recall and recite the entire text of a Tale of Two Cities?

Lot's of good and bad stories, which are also good. Eazel and Be were quite different but both companies really got jammed up by Microsoft. Microsoft was constantly threatening other companies who wanted to work with us. Be actually ended up getting a settlement out of Microsoft a decade later. I am not sure why Eazel didn't pursue that. It could be because it wasn't in the DNA of Andy to litigate.

Eazel stories are very interesting because the company was trying to interact with the open source movement and this caused some friction several times. Looking back at some of those meetings, it is interesting to compare the youthful idealism of people like Miquel DeIcaza and Nate Friedman to the people they have become today.

The General Magic movie covers some things. It is worth a watch.

I am trying to think of something interesting that hasn't been mentioned before. One thing I keep thinking about, when comparing it to other companies I have been at, is that I really liked the founders and the people there. So much in fact, that I ended up working with subsets of them at other companies a few more times. There was definitely stress and overwork and unpleasant things like that, but I never ended up feeling abused or treated poorly in the ways I experienced at Apple, Amazon, other startups or DreamWorks actually.

I'll have to rewatch, but I remember watching and debriefing with others and no one seemed like it misrepresented much. The movie created drama and tension and told a neat story. I do wish we had that cool electronic music playing in the background all the time. That might have helped us get more work done.

It was a really interesting group of people, with Pierre Omidyar and Tony Fadell going on to make large impacts in the tech world in different ways. Everyone there was really interesting and smart, even the ones who continued to build and work without all the publicity.

Sure, if you can find the opportunity and the means to do it.

My observation about being in Silicon Valley in the 80s/90s was the overall changing environment and ethos of the people there. I am sure there are going to be some massive simplifications here, so bear with me.

One is the overall environment back then. Things weren't cheap, but rent was much more affordable in relation to pay. NeXT paid well, you could rent in decent place in Burlingame, Foster City, Redwood City, etc. The commute down Seaport was fairly quick and traffic was light. Things seemed less crowded and frenetic and that made going into the office less of a chore. The cost of living in Silicon Valley is pretty intense. The tiny townhouse I bought in Cupertino near the current Apple campus was $150,000. It recently sold for 1.2 million. I haven't charted it, but the relation between compensation and housing costs have to be wildly out of proportion to when I bought the place. I was pulling a very good salary at the time and a lot of that money went into savings and investments. Now, I imagine a lot of that income would go into mortgages and expenses. Maybe current residents can comment.

The overall attitude seemed to be more about doing new and interesting things and maybe the money will follow. There wasn't as much of a go to Silicon Valley and get rich doing a startup. Maybe this was just an echo of some Berkeley hippie vibe that was present in a lot of the tech startups back then.

The new and interesting things also seemed more accessible. It seemed like there was less gatekeeping and more ways to get involved with "cool" stuff. Maybe this was also an echo of the Homebrew Computer club and early computer hacker ethos.

I do work person to person in a company, but I feel super lucky to have gotten this role. Really good in-person roles just seem super rare. The ones that I have been exposed to at Amazon, Google, Facebook and other current hiring centers just seem miserable to me. Please correct me if I am wrong and am missing the big picture.

> What would be the purpose of acquiring both? Was the idea to acquire Be only for the talent and not for the OS?

A bit of both and it is a fascinating thing for me to think about, because of the knock on effects. Because Steve was insightful, even if JLG was on board with it, Steve probably would have told Amelio, don't bother, because we can scoop up the people later on. Steve did something later on with Eazel, although with Andy Herzfeld's request to do so, and ended with much of the Safari team, Finder/Spotlight team, key CoreGraphics and iPhone team members and more.

If all of Be had went to Apple, perhaps Apple would have use used elements of the Media Kit, the file system (Dominic ended up at Apple doing the new file system, and more anyway), the UX team (Bill Bull ended up at Apple anyway), etc. But the effect on the industry would have been interesting. Danger, Inc. and the Hiptop wouldn't have happened, Android under Andy Rubin wouldn't have happened, Hiroshi would have ended up an exec at Apple and not running Android for Google, Eazel probably wouldn't have happened (not such a big deal). Benoit would have been an exec at Apple and not Google, Erich Ringewald would have ended up an exec at Apple and not Amazon, etc. These are must minor fluctuations I guess, but fun to think about.

Oh wow, I wish I was in that meeting to see that. You are completely correct about the printer drivers and so many other elements of BeOS. BeOS was very incomplete and very shallow. I also shiver to think about what would have happened when the kernel and driver code was audited. It would be a very interesting experiment to get ahold of the leaked BeOS 4 source code and use a LLM to compare the driver code against the Linux source code of the same era.

> The 100x more value is only in hindsight, no?

Well, honestly, in hindsight, let me correct to 10000x! But seriously, this is a discussion about a historical event, and that is what my comment expressed.

> If this had been known by Apple beforehand, then wouldn't Be have been worth $0, and the sale price irrelevant?

I don't really understand this comment. I mean, Be actually ended up being worth about 11 million as a result (the Palm acquisition). Apple, meaning Gil Amelio, Ellen Hancock and the other business and technical people who met with us at Be, and our counterparts at NeXT, had to to an analysis and predict the future as to which technology would replace the current Macintosh OS and eliminate the failing Taligent, Pink and whatever else efforts were going on. And even then it wasn't easy; there was infighting between the Apple teams and the NeXT teams that didn't get resolved until Steve came out of limbo during the 18 months he was acting as a advisor to Gil Amelio.

What isn't commonly discussed, is there was an option for both acquisitions to happen, but a combination of JLG, the Be board and shareholders and Steve made that not happen. Instead, Be went into making internet appliances, audio hardware and the company and its stock price slid into decline. Be did get one additional windfall of 23 million in 2003 which was the result of lawsuit settlement, so I guess the overall company value ended up being 34 million.

Most of us would have preferred to work with the NeXT people at Apple and convert our Be shares into Apple shares, instead of seeing the stock price fall and the code become irrelevant.

I was at Be then, and the biggest botch was JLG asking for too much money IMHO. Steve ended up asking for 4x as much and Apple got 100x more value than what Be would have given them. I loved BeOS; I helped make it! But it had so many flaws, missing features and shallow implementations, OSX would certainly never have shipped. The NeXT team was very good, the code was much more mature and comprehensive and much less work needed to be done to mold it into OSX. Many of the key Be people ended up at Apple over time.

Were the shaders written in “script”? :) We had to deep dive into that runtime a reverse engineer and fix it during the fun you must have missed during the 32 to 64 bit transition we did right around Bee Movie timeline.

Cool observations and he said and did similar things in pretty much every meeting or demonstration we did in the UX team when I was at Apple. I only wish we had more of those and less of the nasty comments and personal abuse he was so good at dishing out. We also got a lot of that every meeting too.

He was a sales guy, a charismatic visionary, an abusive cult leader, a passionate motivator, a single-minded steam roller, an obsessive product manager, an introspective thinker, a borderline sociopath, a company builder, an insightful analyzer of design, music, pop culture, architecture, fashion and more. He was deeply flawed, but definitely more than only a “sales guy”.

He was abusive before NeXT, after and sadly, almost to the day he died. As Andy Herzfeld says, he was the best possible boss and the worst possible boss. Working for Steve was exhilarating and deeply traumatizing.

I experienced these environments first hand, not at NeXT, but at NeXT adjacents like Apple, General Magic, Danger, Be, Eazel and other startups. What I miss is the shared vision and energy put into a project with a team of people who unify to accomplish a very difficult goal. You could seemingly tackle these projects with a small group and make great progress. We had building blocks, but many of the other fundamental pieces needed simply didn’t exist. You felt like you were constantly discovering something new.

Maybe this is how early Google people felt or how early OpenAI felt. I don’t know. They do have an embarrassment of riches, but I am sure they also felt they were doing great things.

I also worked at modern-ish Amazon and it sucked. Horrible office environment, tedious tasks and overall sense of oppression is what I felt. It is such a huge company, maybe there were pockets of joy.

My current job is back working on hardware products and the software that runs in them. It isn’t quite the same feel as 80s computer companies, but some of the joy is there.

It ebbed and flowed with Bill. He would tackle super hard tasks at Apple or General Magic and isolate and hyper focus. I saw this from others at General Magic, Be, Apple, Danger, and even more current Amazon. You can even read about this in Soul of a Machine. I suppose the trait of someone on a critical path doing this has been going on forever.

Bill also had some different definitions of “getting stuff done”. At General Magic when others were driving super hard to get things done, he would make soup and ensure that everyone was eating and not totally driving themselves into the ground.

We all had to imagine making our next show using each others pipeline and that was fun. In the end, I think Richard, Jono and other PDI folks ended up having a bit more influence because Shrek was so darn successful.

Custom vs. commercial was a constant issue. Were you around for the whole NextGen effort? DWA spent a fortune on some custom tools that only were used on a show, or maybe just a few sequences, before they were replaced with commercial tools.