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25 Years Ago, Apple Acquired NeXT and Brought Back Steve Jobs
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I think that was the difference— BeOS felt like a home computer OS, NeXTSTEP felt like a workstation class OS. I was kind of rooting for BeOS at the time too, but I think I underestimated how ready the home computer market was for a serious OS.
And Aqua helped tremendously. The NeXTSTEP GUI looked a lot like a X11 window manager or SunOS, and I couldn’t imagine people would buy into that. Aqua brought it to the masses.
Nah, I’m sure he saw the writing on the wall. I’d imagine your severance package sucks when your company is bankrupt and selling desk chairs in a sidewalk sale.
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There are also builds of x86 Rhapsody online that shows how Apple had internal builds of Mac OS for Intel long before the transition from PPC.
Mac OS X Rhapsody
MacOS X was Apple's replacement for their classic MacOS. MacOS X is based on NeXTSTEP, a Unix-based OS. The first consumer release also featured a new user interface appearance called "Aqua".
winworldpc.com
I can't get it to work in VMWare Fusion though. After I pass the network/PCI driver selection screen and reboot I get an error.
The biggest advantage for Nextstep was the fact that it was running on various lab computers using multiple different processors. Such as Motorola 68030/68040, IA-32, SPARC, PA-RISC. The ability to have this UNIX variant run on multiple processor types through the years allow Apple to conduct major hardware switches compared to other companies, making it a very unique technology example for technology watchers.
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I remember the day well. I was home for Christmas, and my dad came into my room while I was still in bed and told me that Apple had just bought another computer company, run by a former Apple employee. I said “Be, and Jean-Louis Gassée?” Confused, my dad said “no, I think it’s Steve something… .” Overjoyed, I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs to read the newspaper article about the merger. What a great day. The rest, of course, is history.
The first 1/3 OR so of Walter Isaacon's Steve Jobs bio is an amazing read for anyone interested in the early years of Apple.
I give that part of the Bio an A++ grade !
I give that part of the Bio an A++ grade !
Oh, hail yeah. BeOS was awesome. Multi-threaded, clean UI, multiprocessor support, booted in under 15 seconds. Most OS'es of the time took 2 minutes to boot up.
But the BeOS office suite's name terrified a lot of people. Not many people were fans of a program called BeWare.??
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You still see a ton of "NSSuchAndSo" as names in Apple APIs, thanks to NextStep. Using PostScript for a bitmapped screen turned out to be as good an idea as using it for a bitmapped printer page.
Hard to say what would have happened to Apple had they not decided to buy NeXT. I think they would have had a buyer. I am pretty sure that Oracle was ready to pull the trigger at one point and Larry offered to have Steve come back, I think that was in the Issacson book.
Jobs also established the CEO/founder model. Unfortunately boards and executives don't question founders like Zuckerberg or Neumann or Holmes nearly enough.
You are not alone - remember the headlines for BeOS? I recall installing BeOS on something but after using it was disappointed because it was slow. I think I had a version of Doom running on it too. The multi-tasking was nice but I think my hardware was barely acceptable for the OS.
Then, about a week later, NeXT and Steve went to Apple. This was a glorious time - the second coming of Steve.
He shouldn't get any really I was there at the time. I remember his last company wide presentation as CEO about the future direction of mac, it was a mess. This was in the time of the Power Mac 9700 "Power express" that never shipped.
Oh wow… a quarter of a century…
Those early Mac OS X days…. Mac OS X Server Rhapsody, and the Mac OS X “client” Developer Previews… how awesome was that!
I still sometimes fire those PPC builds up using QEMU.. just for nostalgia’s sake. I remeber having a Rhapsody for Intel Running in VMware Fusion (old build though..) somewhere…
I got an orignal “Public Beta” from the MacWorld Paris back in 2000. So cool…
Yes, Apple is enjoying tremendous success Under Tim’s leadership.
But, Steve lay all the foundations. One HUGE one was NeXTSTEP on Mac… >> Rhapsody >> Mac OS X >> iOS etc.
And his Keynotes were so great, not the boring commercials they are now…
Still miss you hugely, Steve.
Those early Mac OS X days…. Mac OS X Server Rhapsody, and the Mac OS X “client” Developer Previews… how awesome was that!
I still sometimes fire those PPC builds up using QEMU.. just for nostalgia’s sake. I remeber having a Rhapsody for Intel Running in VMware Fusion (old build though..) somewhere…
I got an orignal “Public Beta” from the MacWorld Paris back in 2000. So cool…
Yes, Apple is enjoying tremendous success Under Tim’s leadership.
But, Steve lay all the foundations. One HUGE one was NeXTSTEP on Mac… >> Rhapsody >> Mac OS X >> iOS etc.
And his Keynotes were so great, not the boring commercials they are now…
Still miss you hugely, Steve.
How all began... 25 years ago, MACWORLD EXPO in San Francisco -- January 7, 1997
What a amazing speaker Steve Jobs was back then.
What a amazing speaker Steve Jobs was back then.
Very very true. For a little bit there was a server rack with a door on it in the hallway of IL2 that had "AC Markkula's Disappearing CEO Cabinet" taped to it
He was a broken clock that only got the time right once in a day.
that's not even counting the splits. I bought at $13 and sold at $83. If I held on...oh man.
My main experience with BeOS was on a PC after they ported it to Intel. It had a good POSIX layer that could run any UNIX command line app. It's multi-threading capabilities were phenomenal at the time. On my machine it could play four videos simultaneously without a stutter while on Windows it could barely play two. The programming language was C++ which was and still is much more mainstream than ObjectiveC. ObjectiveC at the time wouldn't even have had sugar syntax for properties or anything that made it less verbose. I think it certainly did suffer from having to use GCC to compile apps and also using C++ meant that almost no other programming languages could easily interface with the OS APIs. Still, I sometimes do miss BeOS and will wander over to the HaikuOS site every so often.
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