Most people at the time felt that BeOS was the better choice. BeOS was ready and could have replaced MacOS the next day, it was already being marketed as a replacement for MacOS and I think that is why Gassée tried to kill the deal, I think he truly thought that people where going to buy a Mac and switch to BeOS. The only thing that BeOS was missing was apps, had he been able to convince more flagship app makers like Photoshop to develop their apps for BeOS he may have succeeded, it really was the only thing that was missing. Meanwhile NeXT was reworked over the next couple of years just to get it running on the hardware and then the first versions of OSX where horribly slow. So Apple spent lost 2 years and had a slower product by going with NeXT when BeOS was ready to go, most people at the time did not see the logic. Today history has plaid out and the truth is they where not just buying an OS they needed much more.
BeOS was arguably less ready than NeXTSTEP, lacking a network stack and printing (as has been pointed out elsewhere), and had very few apps and very few users, whereas NeXT was already deployed and in use by a lot of people.
> and could have replaced MacOS the next day
Not at all. One of the main points that MacOS had to support Mac application. There is no way that Apple ever would have released a Mac operating system (be it Copland, Rhapsody or MacOS X) without a "yellow box" MacOS System 8 layer.
Didn't happen with NeXTSTEP either -- a lot of stuff, like QuickTime and Finder, had to be ported over first.
I do not remember BeOS lacking networking, it may have lacked TCP/IP at one point, but so did MacOS at the time, you had to get it and a PPP app via a third party application. My memory could be failing me on this one, but I don't seem to recall not having networking in BeOS. My point though was not to compare BeOS to now, but BeOS to the Mac OS that was shipping in which case, besides for a few items and apps, BeOS was ready and would have been a huge improvement with little investment in development. They would have needed to provide a virtulization environment for the old OS, printing support as well as a few other odds and ends. Remember most OS's of the time where not multiuser, security was not at the forefront and most where on dial-up. Comparing what OSX became to what they where trying to accomplish at the time is a little bit of apples and oranges. They where touting shared memory and symmetric multiprocessing. It was still at that basic of a level that the old MacOS was so far behind on. To many observers BeOS fit the bill perfectly and would have had the users on a modern OS in short order. In the end they made the better choice but many, I would dare to say most of us just did not see the logic at the time.
> I do not remember BeOS lacking networking, it may have lacked TCP/IP at one point, but so did MacOS at the time, you had to get it and a PPP app via a third party application. My memory could be failing me on this one, but I don't seem to recall not having networking in BeOS.
BeOS had a networking stack at the time; the problem was that it was notoriously buggy and incompatible with the standard POSIX APIs.
Be was working on a replacement to it when they were sold to Palm, known as BONE. You can find a bit of information about it here: http://wiki.bebits.com/page/WhatIsBone
At the time period we're talking about, it was clear that the writing was on the wall about the internet being the future, and the poor networking stack on Mac OS was going to be a major problem going forward. NeXT had a mature stack based on BSD; BeOS had an immature stack that was in dire need of being ripped up and rewritten.
On that front, NeXT's networking was a clear step forward, and Be's barely a step sideways.
On that front, NeXT's networking was a clear step forward, and Be's barely a step sideways.
I am not saying they made the wrong decision, quite the contrary I am saying they made the right one, but I was just adding some historical context to the discussion that many of us at the time thought Be was the better choice. History has proven that we where wrong, but none the less a lot of us thought Be fit the bill. I no longer hold that position given what the future became, but I would be lying if I said, I and many people saw the logic back then.
Originally, Carbon was not in the plans at all (the yellow box corresponded to what is nowadays referred to as Cocoa). Adding that was a substantial additional task, but probably well worth it.
And the "yellow box" stuff had already been ported to run on top of Windows NT, which probably suggested those layers were pretty loosely coupled to the rest of the NeXT OS, and might be easier to integrate with Mac OS or whatever they came up with.
On this thought I left out the classic runtime because it was needed with either direction, my point was many at the time saw BeOS as the shorter path to a modern OS. Because NeXT needed and got a reworking from the ground up. It is now apparent that that was the plan all along but from the arm chair quarterbacks, back then it seemed like a foolish move, a fair percentage of Mac users back then where rooting for Be because it had almost mystical quality for the time, it was like Amiga in it's day. I am not saying Apple made the wrong decision, just that back then most people including myself could not understand the decision. If you can find any of the old Mac User or Macworld rags from that period there where articles and articles lamenting over how they could not choose such an advanced OS as Be.
