I played with BeOS when it was still alive, it was light, nice, and fun, and I miss these cute icons, but frankly, I simply don't see the point of reviving it now.
There an insane amount of stuff to be learned from failures. From my understanding, one of the main reasons behind their demise was their business plan. Version for PCs with <256RAM were free, you paid for 256+MB. However BeOS ran so efficiently that no one ever needed 256+MB so few people bought it.
While it's been ~18 years, this doesn't at all sound correct to me. BeOS was a commercial product from its very beginning. There were free "developer release" versions, but it was sold as boxed software from R3 on. The last official release, BeOS R5, had a free version called "BeOS Personal Edition," which ran as an app inside Windows or Linux, but the full version of R5 was still commercial, at $69.95 (with an upgrade discount). I don't recall any licensing requirements pinned to the amount of RAM you had.
A large part of what did in BeOS was a combination of Microsoft's OEM licensing requirements and Be's steadfast belief that the only path to success was pre-installation on a major PC brand. IIRC, if you offered Windows pre-installations at all, you had to pay for every machine that Windows could be installed on whether or not it was actually installed, and you couldn't offer machines capable of dual-booting. Be concentrated their efforts on BeIA, an "internet appliance" version of the OS, which was dead in the water -- according to a lawsuit Be filed against Microsoft, MS pressured their OEMs not to partner with Be on both BeOS and BeIA. (Microsoft settled the suit for around $24M, IIRC.)
Personally, I think BeOS might have been able to survive as a niche OS if Be had kept their focus solely on it, kept the price competitive with boxed Linux distributions (those were a thing back then), and not been dedicated to the "go big or go home" mantra, but I don't have any inside info to prove (or disprove) that.
I was one of the people who worked at Be, right up to the very end, when the company went out of business, got absorbed into Palm, and I was laid off. I remember all this the same way you do.
... Except that I don't think there is anything they could have done that would have made them successful, at that point in time, other than possibly not playing hardball when Apple came calling. Microsoft's stranglehold on the industry was just too great.
I just wanted to let you know that to this very day I mourn the loss of Be Inc and BeOS. Whatever work you did there I’d like you to know (that for me at least) it was worth it because it left an enduring impression on those of us that had the privilege to use the system.
Unfortunately, I didn't do much to move BeOS further down the field. By the time I got there, the company had given up on BeOS as a standalone consumer product and was squarely focused on BeIA, specifically the Sony eVilla. (you can google it for the whole sad, sordid tale, if you dare.)
My contribution to the ecosystem, if in fact I ever made one, was to write what I thought of as the best USENET newsreader available on the platform.
I'm a huge BeOS fan (my BeBox still works) and in my opinion the one thing that Be, Inc. could have done to stay alive, and the only thing, is this: focus on making innovative hardware.
They didn't - the decided that hardware is too hard, and JLG lost the momentum - but if they'd made a BeBox that people actually wanted, they would definitely have survived in my opinion. A Laptop-format BeBox, for example, would have had an opportunity to really dominate the field video world, in those days.
I also have a working BeBox (dual 133 MHz 603e, 32 MB RAM), but I’m a bit concerned about the IDE drive (640MB). The CD-ROM drive doesn’t work very reliably anymore either, unfortunately. I even have some peripherals I soldered together for the GeekPort way back in 1997-1999.
Beautiful machine. Wonderful operating system. Pity they were so inept commercially. That said, I was also a NeXT user, and I’m convinced that Apple wouldn’t have returned to the forefront if they had chosen “Plan Be” instead of the Steve Jobs option.
> "BeOS R5, had a free version called "BeOS Personal Edition," which ran as an app inside Windows or Linux"
Not quite. While the file system resided on the Windows or Linux partition as a drive image, to run BeOS you rebooted the computer into BeOS natively; the boot loader booted that drive image from the other OS's file system.
In fact, once in the BeOS environment, you could use the BeOS disk manager and installer to create a BeOS native partition on free space on the main drive or a second drive, and install the OS natively to the PC. Effectively, you could run the full OS on its own for free.
That's exactly what I did for the first few months I used BeOS back in 2000; I was so taken with the OS I bought the full version and tracked down a hard copy of the BeOS Bible and Be Advanced Topics, both of which are still on my bookshelf.
> "I don't recall any licensing requirements pinned to the amount of RAM you had."
There were no licensing restrictions that I was aware of, however it wouldn't run on machines with more than 768MB without a patch.
Back in the mid-to-late nineties I had the fortune of using both BeOS and NeXTStep. I loved both operating systems and recognised their differing strengths and weaknesses.
I must say I was hugely disappointed when Apple chose not to pursue “Plan Be” and opted to purchase NeXT instead. The operating system seemed like overkill and not a good match for Apple’s use-case (single-user machines, media-focussed workflows, with an obvious advantage to be drawn from pre-emptive multitasking and almost real-time multimedia processing). NeXTStep struck me as a much more “workstation-type” OS that would have had little resonance on the consumer and professional market.
It turned out I was wrong: Moore’s Law has made the heavyweight NeXTStep an eminently shoulderable burden, and that it is now so “lightweight” in relative standards that its direct descendant (iOS) can comfortably run on (albeit unimaginably powerful) mobile devices.
I wrote elsewhere in this thread that with the benefit of hindsight I don’t think Apple’s resurgence could have happened had they had chosen Plan Be.
Yes, they picked Steve Jobs, and NeXTSTEP was quite advanced with ObjectOriented-UI and its UI-builder - most of the stuff is still there with a new Theme and called MacOS X. Companies like Pixar used NeXTSTEP.
BeOS was quite interesting too. Though it lacked multi-user support, and had a small user community. Its BeFS filesytem had an indexing feature that dwarfs all desktop search features even today - and Windows "Cairo" (1996) / WinFS (2006) that tried to accomplish it too, turned out as vamporeware.
Both NeXTSTEP and BeOS were ahead with multimedia support like real time video player and WYSIWYG editor.
"... "Vaporware" was coined by a Microsoft engineer in 1982 to describe the company's Xenix operating system, and first appeared in print in a newsletter by entrepreneur Esther Dyson in 1983. It became popular among writers in the industry as a way to describe products they felt took too long to be released. InfoWorld magazine editor Stewart Alsop helped popularize it by lampooning Bill Gates with a Golden Vaporware award for the late release of his company's first version of Windows in 1985.
Vaporware first implied intentional fraud when it was applied to the Ovation office suite in 1983; the suite's demonstration was well received by the press, but the product was never released. ..."
I've been part of the BeOS community since 1998 and I have no idea what he's talking about. Other than R5 Personal Edition, x86 BeOS was never free.
Be failed because it existed in the times of Microsoft dominance, Apple didn't buy it, and it had some major technical deficiencies (many of which have been addressed in Haiku).
That document mentions that R5 Personal Edition had a disk partition size of 512MB. That's disk, not RAM.
R5 PE had that partition size because it installed to a 512MB file within your Windows partition, then booted from that file. Personal Edition was meant to give a way to try BeOS without having to have a second drive or do any partitioning. Once booted into it, you could just launch the Installer app and install to any size partition you pleased.
Be was essentially dead decently before R5 was released, so I disagree with the author's conclusion.
You are right, its been a while and my memory is hazy. It's not that I cant tell them apart, it's more that I read it a couple years ago and it just doesnt come up and I apparently can't be fucked to look up the docs.
NeXTSTEP never caught on and was a commercial failure. macOS is based on it.
Netscape Communicator was open-sourced after it fell to Microsoft and later became Firefox.
Not everything that dies deserved to. Successors are not their predecessors. BeOS provided a good base for developers to work towards, so the project wouldn't get bogged down in trying to be "something new".
The same has been said countless times over the decades for things like "Unix", or "Linux" or heck .. even Windows in some quarters.
I don't think there's anything 'wrong' per se with having alternative operating systems - they may not get mainstream approval, but a lot of what is now mainstream started out as fringe/horizon technology. And in that regard, we ought to encourage the fringe to share their discoveries - it does eventually trickle down.
(Disclaimer: you can have my BeBox when you pry it from my cold dead hands..)
