What about BeOS?

[mentaluproar]

With the advent of a new OSX, have any of you wondered what we would have if Apple had chosen to use BeOS rather than NeXTstep?

I only used BeOS briefly, but thought it had a great deal of potential. It was certainly hideous by today's standards, but was a hell of a tinker toy. Do any of you think it would have aged well?

 

[grahamperrin]

… Do any of you think it would have aged well?

Yes, I do – and in the past, I might have imagined BeOS (or the like) ageing well in the hands of Apple, but my confidence in Apple has sunk.

 

[maflynn]

Given the best thing apple got when they purchased NeXT was Steve Jobs. Its clear that they would have lacked the innovation that brought them back from the brink of bankruptcy.

 

[campyguy]

I had wondered, past tense. Really past tense.

I had it installed on my 8600 tower and a Centris 650. Nifty stuff at the time, reminded me of one of the UNIX interfaces being used at the university I was attending at the time, but I threw my hat in to DOS and OS 8/9. After BeOS disappeared into Palm my interest waned. You can always check out the latest alpha of Haiku - it's only about 2 years old, but since the first alpha came out in 2002-3, and looks exactly like BeOS did 15 years ago I wouldn't expect to see it running on a current machine even though it had been ported to x86 over a decade ago.