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.
I am greatly enjoying the juxtaposition of a comment asserting that obviously BeOS was so far from POSIX that Haiku had to do loads of work to get there and your comment that BeOS was POSIX compliant.
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.
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.
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.
That is amazing to read. I never knew. I thought it was Workspace Manager, adapted to feel more Mac-like. There is even a clear line of descent:
1. The Rhapsody developer previews, which are NeXTstep with a menu bar at the top and desktop icons, and a Platinum skin.
2. Mac OS X Server 1.x which has cascading finder windows, an icon view by default, and some other things much like that.
3. Mac OS X 10.0, which I used, or tried to use, as a daily driver, with a broadly Mac-like experience with an Apple menu, but with app names next to it containing global "about" and "quit" options, and so on.
It never did acquire any of the nice stuff that came in with System 7 (e.g. drag-and-drop customisable Apple menu stored in folders in the System Folder) or MacOS 8 (e.g. folder drawers that shrink to tabs).
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 didn't mean that the 10.0 finder was a reskinned NeXT GUI file management application (as you point out, it clearly wasn't and was a huge thing that had a bunch of heritage code), but that the entire 10.0 GUI was a kinda-MacOS-9-like GUI on top of the NeXT bsd-heritage unix-like base. If you were to take a 10.0 system and put it side by side for comparison with the CLI environment perspective, file tree, system libraries with the last NeXTSTEP releases or rhapsody.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah it's interesting how similar what happened with Palm OS 6 was to Copland. They had a working, but outdated OS that had been hacked onto a new platform as a stopgap, then they couldn't get the rewrite meant to take full advantage of the new hardware out the door. Palm OS 6 was at least finished, but it never got used on a shipping device. There's an interesting Reddit post going over how the OS design was fundamentally flawed when combined with the ARM processors that were available at the time: https://www.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/1422bqy/palm_os6/jn5o...
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.
I just celebrated my 9th wedding anniversary but my wife and I have been together for 15 years. She lost her mom to cancer a couple years ago so that’s been in the back of my mind, randomly freaking me out.
I'm so sorry for her suffering and your loss. I've been married about as long and my wife is currently carrying Stage 4 cancer that seems to be stabilized with the treatment she's on. But it's always going to be there and it certainly changes our attitude to time and life.
reply