BeOS: The Mac OS That Never Was

This story has been told to exhaustion: Steve Jobs ejected himself from Apple in 1985, founded NeXT, Apple bought that company in '97, Jobs returned, purged half the company… and everything else. But there's a detail most people don't know: the purchase of NeXT almost didn't happen. Why? Because there was interest in another company, Be Inc., known for its development of the BeOS operating system. From its interface to its file system, BeOS had very interesting elements for the time, and some of them survive today in parallel projects.

Steve Jobs wasn't the only high-profile member to leave Apple in those years. While he took the most loyal and talented with him to form NeXT, Jean-Louis Gassée was his replacement in the Macintosh division, but he remained there until 1990, when Apple fired him. Gassée's decision was to found Be Inc. with the help of another ex-Apple, Steve Sakoman (a key member in the creation of the Newton), and they set out to create a new operating system from scratch, prioritizing multimedia production on proprietary hardware. The name of that system was BeOS.

What made it special? Preemptive multitasking, a file system with support for journaling and 64-bit, extensive Unicode use in its interface, and obviously, extraordinary audiovisual support. This was backed by the BeBox, a computer designed to run BeOS natively.

One of the most impressive specs was the use of dual processors. At first, developers favored the AT&T Hobbit (a RISC chip), and some BeBox prototypes even used it, but once AT&T stopped its efforts, BeOS and BeBox followed the PowerPC route.

The BeBox debuted in October 1995 with two versions: Dual603-66 and Dual603-133, priced between $1,600 and $3,000 depending on configuration. Two joystick ports, four MIDI ports (two in, two out), four serial ports, mic and audio RCA inputs/outputs, an experimental connector called «Geekport», and three infrared ports turned the BeBox into a multimedia beast, and BeOS squeezed every drop of it.

The date is significant for a reason: Apple was burning. Copland, the code name for the original Mac OS 8, was a development catastrophe. Apple hired Ellen Hancock (who had nearly three decades of career at IBM) to get Copland in order, but she quickly determined it was unviable. Apple cancelled Copland in August '96, and announced that the new Mac OS 8 would be sought “outside the company”. History tells us Hancock wanted Sun Solaris and opposed the acquisition of NeXT (a detail Jobs thanked her for by making her life miserable)... but BeOS was making a lot of noise, and it appeared on Apple's radar.

In essence, BeOS had everything Apple wanted for Mac OS 8… but negotiations collapsed. Apple offered $125 million, a number BeOS executives rejected immediately. Some believe Apple wanted to get BeOS for a very low price. Others, that Gassée's greed ruined everything by asking for $300 million. A year later, Apple put $429 million on the table for NeXT, with Steve Jobs himself in the package.

BeOS was doomed. The company sold fewer than 2,000 BeBoxes, quickly abandoned its hardware to prioritize software development, adopted x86 as its architecture, and even gave it away for free. None of that helped: Be Inc. laid off its employees in 2001 and fell into Palm's hands, burying the operating system.

Would you like to take a look at BeOS today? If the answer is yes, you're in luck, because the Haiku project is its spiritual heir. Even with 18 years of development under its belt, this OS is still in beta, and it has some advanced installation details (for example, you need to create an empty partition beforehand to initialize BFS on it), but it's definitely worth exploring if you have a spare computer.