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setopttoday at 6:53 AM2 repliesview on HN

If I recall directly, Apple was between buying BeOS and NeXT. Would be interesting what would have happened if they went the Be route instead of the Unix route. (But given that MacOS and BeOS were both fringe at the time, perhaps they would just have gone bankrupt…)


Replies

ab5tracttoday at 7:34 AM

Considering that Steve Jobs came with NeXT, the general consensus has been that their recovery would not have been nearly as significant.

The real what-if for me is pondering what might have been had HP and other vendors not caved to the Wintel cartel in abandoning their plans to include BeOS as a preinstalled OEM option. Microsoft was sued by Be in civil court and Be won their case, but it was too little too late.

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panick21_today at 7:42 AM

I think at the time everybody agree that BeOS would need a whole lot more work put into it compared to NeXT. That said it still took a huge amount of work to evolve NeXT to OSX.

So I can well imagine Apple fucking this up and getting aquired.