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Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

BeOS (the OS Haiku is a reimplemntation of) has an interesting history. It was an OS that has a fully async C++ API (very novel for it's time and even now). The fact that it was async made the OS much more responsive and had a better CPU utilization.

BeOS was another company that Apple considered to purchase but they ended up buying NeXT instead. IIRC they ended up going with NeXT because BeOS didn't have networking back then.

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IIRC, BeOS had networking but no multi-user or printer support. The latter was pretty important for Apple's pro market at the time, which was mostly desktop publishing.

Just the other day I found a BeOS Revision 3 manual in a closet. It was the first version that Be released on x86 after getting snubbed by Apple.

Ah, you are right. Networking didn't sound right.

The owner of all files was Baron: http://web.archive.org/web/19980520213923/http://www.be.com/...

It had printer support since at least R4. As I recall it even had some support for printing to network printers. There was an office package called Gobe Productive which was pretty nice for a BeOS application. Similar to AppleWorks or Microsoft Works.

R4 shipped in November 1998. Apple was shopping for BeOS in autumn 1996. The feature gap compared to NeXT was real at that time.

I wrote third party software for BeOS for a few years, I don't remember anything being asynchronous. BeOS was quite the opposite; everything was threads. Threads were cheap so it didn't matter if you blocked one. One of the demos rendered and displayed realtime video by spawning a new thread for every frame.

Window messages were done using a MessageReceived() function with message codes that was almost exactly like WndProc on Windows. Very C-like despite being a C++ API.

Plus, the owner of BeOS wanted more than the 125$ million that Apple was willing to pay for it. BeOS was eventually sold to Palm for a "tiny" 11$ million.

Also: Steve Jobs founded NeXT (which didn't hurt the prospect of a sale IMHO)

Also also: Be Inc. was founded by another ex-apple exec, Jean Louis Gassée. It was in many ways a better fit for Apple's core market (design pros and students who wanted a really slick, single-user multimedia workstation) but Gassée wanted too much money and (speculation here) likely still had bad blood with too many other Apple execs.

He is in agreement https://9to5mac.com/2011/11/11/gassee-thank-god-apple-chose-...

The BeBox had dual cpus, too, iirc

Multiple Hobbits as a prototype, Multiple PowerPC 603s in production.

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