What actually is BeOS, and what are the achievements thereof?

der kopfder kopf
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
It seems to be deeply connected to Apple for some reason. Anyone care to explain?



And while we are at it. Jobs, Steve, after leaving Apple ten (?) years ago, established NeXTstep, which in the end was gobbled up again by Apple (correct me if mistaken).



What are the achievements of NeXTstep? From what I have read, it seems OS X is a direct consequence of the NeXTstep escapade, as are other things made by Apple (the Cube, notably).



Can anybody tell me what kind of products NeXT offered? Or didn't they do that?
«1

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 21
    rick1138rick1138 Posts: 938member
    BeOS was an OS written by former apple engineers-it was far ahead of its time in terms of multimedia capabilities and multithreading capacity-in fact many of its features don't exist in any current OS.It also ran incredibly fast-faster than anything available now.Actually I should say that as far as I know it is still available-either for a free download or for $50 or so.Originally it ran on PowerPC and x86 but Apple refused to give out information on the lower level operation of its hardware,hence Be's support of the PowerPC platform was abandoned.Apple attemplted to buy Be and was planning to use the kernel as the basis for OS X but the deal fell through at the last minute and Apple bought NeXT instead.OS X is basically an expanded and improved version of the NeXT OS.The Cocoa API's are taken directly from NeXT.NeXT's main products were high end hardware systems that were far ahead of their time-too far for most people,so NeXT abandoned the hardware business and concentrated on software.Their products were used mostly in science,industry,and places like Wall Street.
  • Reply 2 of 21
    ibrowseibrowse Posts: 1,749member
    I have a copy of the BeOS, but nothing to run it on.
  • Reply 3 of 21
    jante99jante99 Posts: 539member
    Can the Be OS run on any x68 machine?
  • Reply 4 of 21
    rick1138rick1138 Posts: 938member
    You mean x86.To the best of my knowledge yes-it is known for having low system requirements.
  • Reply 5 of 21
    cubedudecubedude Posts: 1,556member
    <a href="http://download.com.com/3000-2098-2040078.html?tag=lst-0-1"; target="_blank">http://download.com.com/3000-2098-2040078.html?tag=lst-0-1</a>;
  • Reply 6 of 21
    ghost_user_nameghost_user_name Posts: 22,667member
    Be initially sold their own hardware called the BeBox. It had cute little LED CPU guages on the outside of the case too. It used PowerPC processors.



    And the next machines were also ahead of most people's budgets. IIRC, they were terribly expensive. I can get an SGI Onyx cheaper than I can get a Cube with Dimension boards inside of it even today...
  • Reply 7 of 21
    rampancyrampancy Posts: 363member
    As other people have pointed out, Be was a terrific, fast OS that was really suited for stuff like digital media content creation and all that. It was totally buzzword compliant and the interface wasn't that bad.



    I'm no engineer, but from what I understood, what really distinguished it was that it was light, fast and it was the creation of Jean-Louis Gaseé--an Apple exec who was one of the most influential people at Apple during the 80's. Hence, people looked to Be as their saviour as Copland floundered. There were problems though--a lot of the early versions of the OS were half-baked (I don't think they had printer support for a while) and many key technologies (like an equivalent to QuickTime) were missing.



    What the Next OS (aka NEXTSTEP) was known for was that it focused on object oriented programming, which, according to Steve at the time, was going to be the wave of the future.



    Oh, and for anyone interested, I dug up some specs and pricing for the original NeXT cube (courtesy of "Apple Confidential"):



    NeXT Computer (1989)



    25 Mhz 68040

    8 MB RAM (expandable to 16 MB)

    250 Mb Canon Rewritable Optical Disk Drive

    Motorola 68882 Math Co-Processor

    Motorola 56001 DSP

    17" Sony Trintron Monitor



    MSRP: $6500 USD



    (compare to Apple's best at the time, the IIx with 16 Mhz '030 w/ no monitor for $ 7769 USD)



    What I'll always remember about NeXT was a quote by Bill Gates when asked if M$ would develop apps for the NeXT:



    "Develop for it? I'll piss on it."



    EDIT: some stupid typos...



    [ 11-11-2002: Message edited by: rampancy ]</p>
  • Reply 8 of 21
    rampancyrampancy Posts: 363member
    [quote]Originally posted by M3D Jack:

    <strong> I can get an SGI Onyx cheaper than I can get a Cube with Dimension boards inside of it even today...</strong><hr></blockquote>



    If you can find one...from what I've read, the Dimension cards were considered vapourware after the developers abandoned its development.
  • Reply 9 of 21
    der kopfder kopf Posts: 2,275member
    Well, that sheds some light, but raises a new series of questions.



    I always thought copland was a pseudonym for os 8. Apparently this is not so. Can anyone explain what the idea was behind this copland, the general picture, so as to say.



    Also, Rhapsody... the direct predecessor of OS X, but not completely... same questions...
  • Reply 10 of 21
    rodukroduk Posts: 706member
    Copland was Apple’s first attempt at a next generation OS and was meant to be released in 1996.



    Copland, and it’s successor Gershwin, were meant to offer modern OS features like preemptive multitasking, protected memory etc. However, Copland was cancelled in late 1996 due to delays and spiraling development costs.



    NextStep was initially developed to run on NeXT hardware, but when NeXT stopped hardware development, they modified NextStep to run on other platforms, calling it OpenStep.



    When Apple purchased NeXT in 1996 a new project (Rhapsody) was started, this being a combination of OpenStep and a Mac GUI. It eventually developed into Mac OS X, with support for legacy Mac OS applications being added.
  • Reply 11 of 21
    gambitgambit Posts: 475member
    According to some reports I've read and some Apple engineers I've spoken to (years ago, mind you), the reason NeXT was chosen over Be was because Be, as fast as it was, was also ridiculously feature-incomplete. It was said that to port or write from scratch all of the Mac technologies that made the Mac a Mac, would take a serious amount of time, longer than the transition from NeXT to OS X. And not only that, but making Be as feature complete as NeXT or the Mac would slow Be down considerably, therefore losing Be's speed advantage.
  • Reply 12 of 21
    bellebelle Posts: 1,574member
    <a href="http://www.usc.edu/isd/publications/networker/96-97/Nov_Dec_96/innerview-gassee.html"; target="_blank">Here</a>'s an old interview with Gassée.



  • Reply 13 of 21
    rick1138rick1138 Posts: 938member
    Also NeXT had the advantage of Objective C and the Cocoa APIs over Be's C++.
  • Reply 14 of 21
    keshkesh Posts: 621member
    And it had Steve Jobs in the package deal. <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" />
  • Reply 15 of 21
    jeffyboyjeffyboy Posts: 1,055member
    I remember someone making the statement that much of the early web was created with NeXTstep or on NeXT boxes.



    Was that true?



    Jeff
  • Reply 16 of 21
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    A couple more tidbits from my take on this piece of history:



    Be failed in the same way that NeXT did, but took less time in doing it ;-) Both were companies trying to code an operating system from scratch to run on their own hardware. Be OS originally ran on dual 603e Be Boxes and also came bundled with some Power Computing machines. My mac clone shipped with a bundled BeOS. Just as NeXT eventually tried to survive by dropping hardware development and switching to x86 hardware, so did Be.



    Prior to OS X, there was much rumor mongering surrounding a possible Apple purchase of Be OS technology. No official word has ever been released about how serious or near fruition this process may have been. Instead, Apple chose to buy NeXT for around 440 million. It then took Apple and NeXT engineers about 5 years to retool OpenStep and existing Mac APIs into what we now know as OS X.



    There are incredibly devout supporters of both platforms. NeXT truly was at least 10 years ahead of the industry but also 10 years ahead of market demand. Their computers were better, much better, but also too expensive to ever make a profitable business model. Although some might argue that it worked out, with the NeXT take over of apple now complete ;-)



    I loved the BeOS but it was probably the correct decision for apple to go with the OpenStep route for OS X. BeOS was speedy but feature incomplete. Having taken less time to fail than NeXT, the BeOS hadn't fully matured and was buggy as hell. Also, while BeOS was praised for its performance and great low level technology such as filesystem meta-data, it wasn't nearly as brilliant at the API design level. To see what I mean, compare Cocoa/Objective-C's object tree to Java's object tree. The Cocoa one is much smaller yet with the same functionality. (BeOS was in c++, another discussion entirely) BeOS had great potential in many areas but the complete system never matured into a marketable product.



    Anyone know of a recent OS/Hardware from-stratch startup that is gaining a religious following? Hmmm, transmeta almost qualifies right? These companies are fascinating!
  • Reply 17 of 21
    bellebelle Posts: 1,574member
    [quote]Originally posted by jeffyboy:

    <strong>I remember someone making the statement that much of the early web was created with NeXTstep or on NeXT boxes.



    Was that true?</strong><hr></blockquote>

    Yup. In the <a href="http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory.html"; target="_blank">words</a> of Tim Berners-Lee himself:

    [quote]One of the things computers have not done for an organization is to be able to store random associations between disparate things, although this is something the brain has always done relatively well. In 1980 I played with programs to store information with random links, and in 1989, while working at the European Particle Physics Laboratory, I proposed that a global hypertext space be created in which any network-accessible information could be refered to by a single "Universal Document Identifier". Given the go-ahead to experiment by my boss, Mike Sendall, I wrote in 1990 a program called "WorlDwidEweb", a point and click hypertext editor which ran on the "NeXT" machine.<hr></blockquote>
  • Reply 18 of 21
    stupider...likeafoxstupider...likeafox Posts: 1,618member
    And in the Words of John Carmack, who used NeXTSTEP (NS) to develop Doom and parts of Quake:



    [quote]We developed lots of products under dos (mostly borland c++), and never want to again. We went through five major iterations of our tools under DOS, and they are all junk below our first iteration of NS tools. You can't really just point at specific things and claim superiority. It is the complete package that has the appeal. NS is the best tool I have found for MY development work.<hr></blockquote>
  • Reply 19 of 21
    hotboxdhotboxd Posts: 125member
    "Develop for it? I'll piss on it."

    <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" /> <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" /> <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" /> <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" /> <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" /> <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" /> <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
  • Reply 20 of 21
    smithjoelsmithjoel Posts: 240member
    [quote]Originally posted by hotboxd:

    <strong>"Develop for it? I'll piss on it."

    <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" /> <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" /> <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" /> <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" /> <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" /> <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" /> <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" /> </strong><hr></blockquote>



    Carful Mr. Gates, that is a high volage machine.
Sign In or Register to comment.