BeOS is the operating system that almost killed Apple

[[135855]]

In 1997, Apple acquired NeXT, and Jobs returned to Apple after 12 years. Under his leadership, Apple was reborn, becoming the leader in the consumer electronics market and the most valuable public company in the world.

But if it weren't for a certain choice back then, maybe we wouldn't see Apple today. When Apple was considering acquiring a company, there was actually another option, which was a startup company founded by employees who left Apple - Be Inc., which developed the most popular operating system in the world at the time.

The company was founded in 1990 by former Apple COO Jean-Louis Geis and former Apple hardware engineering director Steve Sakoman, who was also responsible for the birth of Apple's first mobile computer Newton. Initially, the company also sold its own hardware product, BeBox, but Apple wanted their BeOS operating system.

BeOS was a really fast and efficient operating system at the time. It could boot up in 10 seconds, supported dual processors, and had a special feature: it could run and play multiple videos at the same time. Today, you might think this is nothing, but compared to the conditions at the time, when Windows took several minutes to boot up and it was good to play one video at a time, BeOS was really jaw-dropping.

BeOS attracted a large number of fans at the time. The science fiction writer called it the "Batmobile" of operating systems in his book "In the Beginning Was the Command Line". However, BeOS was not fully developed in 1997. At that time, compared with Apple's valuation of Be Inc., Gass and his supporters wanted to get more for Be Inc. In the end, Apple chose NeXT, and OS X was developed based on NeXTstep. Apple no longer paid attention to Be.

Later, Be failed to gain a foothold in the market, and even when they later sold BeOS as an independent product, they could not change the decline. The company believed that this was due to Microsoft's intervention, and sued Microsoft for antitrust in 2002. In 2003, the lawsuit ended with Microsoft paying 23.3 million in compensation. However, it was too late for Be because they had been acquired by Palm.

PalmOS 6 is based on BeOS, but no Palm device uses it. The intellectual property is currently owned by Access, the company that acquired Palm Source in 2005.

However, BeOS did not disappear. A German company continued to sell this operating system for several years. More importantly, open source clones appeared, and most importantly, Haiku was compatible with BeOS, which continued the life of this operating system.

At the same time, the engineering team of this operating system is still influencing the entire operating system industry. Many Be engineers joined a company called Danger, and the founder of this company, Andy Rubin, left in 2003 and founded Android. Later, when Google acquired Android, many developers also joined Google. Some of them are still involved in the development of Android. There is also Dominic Giampaolo, who is the developer of the Be file system, which was one of the reasons why BeOS was widely praised at the time. In 2002, Giampaolo joined Apple and participated in the development of the file system and Spotlight features.

Now, Gass admits that he is very happy that Apple acquired NeXT instead of Be. But we have to imagine, if Apple had chosen another path, what would the technology industry look like in recent years?