Makosuke said:
Then again, running a BeOS version on my old 6500 showed me what Copland COULD have been if Apple had gotten its but in gear--like OSX, but running on a fraction of the hardware.
What makes you think that a newer version of the BeOS done by Apple would have been any better than what we got with Mac OS X?
I've run Mac OS X Server 1.2 (Rhapsody 5.6) on a PowerBook 3400c/200 (which is slower than the slowest 6500... the 6500/225) and the only reason I am not still running it on that system today is the 800x600 display (Rhapsody really needs a minimum of 1024x768). The first version of Mac OS X was released in 2001 while the last updates to the BeOS were made in 1998.
I highly doubt that a 2001 BeOS would have had the same fractional requirements that the 1998 version had. But my 1998 version of what would later become Mac OS X (Rhapsody 5.1) runs great on an IBM ThinkPad 760ED (Pentium at 133 MHz with 80 MB of memory)... which is also significantly slower than your 6500.
Comparing the system requirements of the BeOS on Intel with those of NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP on Intel... the BeOS requirements (specially in the area of graphics cards) were quite high. I ran NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Rhapsody on many systems that fell below the minimum requirements for running the BeOS.
Plus NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Rhapsody ran on a wide range of laptops (and in the case of Rhapsody, PowerBooks too) where as the BeOS was unsupported for laptop use. And another illustration of the higher system requirements of the BeOS shows in the fact that you can't run the BeOS in VirtualPC where as NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Rhapsody could be run in even very early versions (I used all three in VirtualPC 3.0).
Further, Copland was killed off by the applications barrier to entry.
As originally designed, Copland was to be a fresh start... but developers told Apple that they would not rewrite their existing apps for a new operating system (specially one which had no users). This set Apple into years of development on creating an application environment for Copland that would allow developers to use most of what they already had in their existing System 7 compatible apps.
Even after spending all that time on that environment for Copland, Apple still required another 5 years to get it fully functional when applied to Mac OS X as Carbon.
Even if Apple had gone with the BeOS, the same steps would have had to have been made... the development time for Carbon (or what ever they would have called it) would have been about the same too.
I'm not complaining about where we ended up, though--even the earliest versions of 10.0 were amazingly stable for me (yeah, the beta was pretty flakey, but it was a beta, and least we got to try it!). The BeOS might have had more potential in some ways, but having a *nix kernel has a lot to be said for it in terms of interoperability, and we did quite well with backward compatability between Carbon and Classic.
Both Carbon and Classic were pre-existing Apple technologies... Carbon was the application environment from Copland and Classic was based on the Macintosh Application Environment (MAE) for Unix systems. Both of these would have most likely been applied to the BeOS had Apple taken that rout.
This leaves us with comparing the native application and development environments of the BeOS with that of NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP. Not only was the environment in NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP more mature, is was highly sought after in the industry (Sun had invested many years and tons of resources on moving Solaris to this application and development environment).
Additionally, what NeXT offered that Be couldn't was immediate revenue.
NeXT became
Apple Enterprise and continued to sell OPENSTEP, OpenStep Enterprise, Enterprise Objects and (most importantly at the time) WebObjects. The price that Apple paid for NeXT wasn't just for the foundations of a future operating system and Jobs... it was for existing product lines including a product that would let Apple cash in on the growing popularity of the web.
Still, I'd be interested in hearing why you think the BeOS had
more potential in some ways.
Had Apple not bought NeXT, Sun would have taken the shared technology and run with it. If NeXT would have gotten any weaker (though once relieved of supporting an operating system I doubt they would have had too many problems until the bursting of the .com bubble) Sun would have bought them for sure.
When Apple didn't buy Be, they sued Microsoft for anticompetitive practices (Microsoft threaten OEMs who had considered preinstalling the BeOS on their systems) and then looked to the embedded software market. When they were bought by Palm, Palm didn't seem to put any of that potential to any good use.
