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Comment by mvkel | Hacker News Reader

Define big. They're one of the biggest companies in history. You're saying that if they appealed to 1% of the market that already uses Macs... what? And then they have to support these users?

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A small percentage very loyal and very loud customer base has been the success ingredient of Apple for decades

And it wasn't enough, they got very lucky with NeXT reverse acquisition.

They got Steve Jobs, so it was probably the right decision, but I will wish they'd bought Be instead. It was super fast, instead of the (still!) super slow Nextstep.

I wonder how macOS would've turned out then. For me, the Smalltalk-ness of Objective-C is one of the things that makes it feel so much different than the likes of Windows and Linux. So much of the UX falls naturally out of it that I doubt we'd have ended up anywhere similar otherwise. What could Be have been like?

That's true, and Interface Builder is quite a step up from what I had seen GUIs do before.

Mind you that this (me dabbling around with it) was 2004, with most other GUIs still in stone age, and I think it was developed back in the Nextstep days.

Delphi and VB were quite comparable.

As were Hypercard, Smalltalk and Lisp environments.

Interface Builder was originally a Lisp application, before being acquired by NeXT.

https://vimeo.com/62618532

You would have had a C++ userspace, and POSIX would likely not be as relevant as it is today.

Note that BeOS wasn't POSIX compatible, that came with Haiku rewrite.

However without UNIX/POSIX to sell Apple to those frustrated Linux users looking for shinny UNIX laptops, and the management skills from Steve Jobs (vs Gassé), probably Apple would be no more instead.

Haiku has archived what BeOS programming looked like,

https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/programming_the_be_oper...

Looks very Windowsish... which makes me even more grateful for Objective-C! Not to mention that C++ is far more difficult to mix with other languages, too.

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