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Comment by msimpson | Hacker News Reader

"I’d argue that this is probably the single most important tech acquisition of all time."

However, it was not Apple's first choice. They first attempted to acquire Be Inc. (BeOS) but Jean-Louis Gassée held out for $275 million and lost the deal in a surprise move when Apple, instead, bought NeXT.

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Now that would be an interesting alternate timeline!

/ MacBook Pro with Blinkenlights bar /

The Mac would not have been a huge success probably in that scenario.

You never know... Amiga diehards would have gone 100% Apple. Whether that's a good thing or not I don't know... :-)

I don't know. A BeOS foundation for MacOS would have made it even better at multimedia production. The tradeoff of course is that it probably would have been late to the whole Internet thing that was becoming something of a big deal around that point. BeOS's network stack was different enough from Berkeley sockets that porting network apps was a challenge. It lacked a version of Netscape at a time when even FreeBSD had a native version for example. In the late 90s this was not acceptable. Apple's engineering culture wasn't one of embracing open standards either, they could have very well stuck with the Be network paradigm and made it a headache to port any POSIX application.

Be's heavily multitasking kernel would have been quite a boon for Apple when off the shelf processors started going wide though. They could have been really reaping the benefits from C2Ds and beyond.

> They first attempted to acquire Be Inc. (BeOS) but Jean-Louis Gassée held out

And completing the circle: Gassée was partially responsible for Jobs leaving Apple, and was promoted to Jobs' former position after Jobs resigned. He founded Be after also being forced out of Apple.

Silicon Valley really can be thoroughly incestuous at times.

I knew at the tine that Gassee was making a huge mistake. Be had some fantastic tech but it wasn't otherworldly.

A MacOS based on Be would have been amazing, at the time.

X ended up being a better way to go, the other changed made when Jobs came back turned me off of Apple's products but I can appreciate the overall improvements.

Be rocked the socks off Next.

But Be was really really fast and the demos showed its power. It had a tidy C++ API for application development as I remember?

I still remember sitting there with my mouth hanging open watching 4 quicktime movies play at the same time after I installed the BeOS Preview Release on my 6400.

What I particularly liked was how BeOS would run on any PCI PowerMac. The Rhapsody DR1 release had much smaller supported hardware and it was later than BeOS.

Gassee overplayed his hand and lost big time.

I LOVED Apple stuff. A BeOS based MacOS would have been phenomenal.

Heh, threw out my last BeOS floppies yesterday in a cleanup.

Nooooo! BeOS was really great. If only the wxWidgets port for it continued and we'd have easy cross platform software for it.

I see the package manager addition to Haiku and wonder if this was what was really intended for BeOS - it always struck me that it was more akin to the Mac and DMGs on there instead of a Linux-style package system.

LOL, as I look over at my BeBox on a shelf, wishing I had a use for it. I learned so much about c++, SMP, threading, etc from BeOS.

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