BeOS: The Alternate Universe’s Mac OS X
 

You’re likely familiar with the old tale about how Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple and started his own company, NeXT. Apple then bought NeXT and their technologies and brought Jobs back as CEO once again. However, Jobs’ path wasn’t unique, and the history of computing since then could’ve gone a whole lot different.

In 1990, Jean-Louis Gassée, who replaced Jobs in Apple as the head of Macintosh development, was also fired from the company. He then also formed his own computer company with the help of another ex-Apple employee, Steve Sakoman. They called it Be Inc, and their goal was to create a more modern operating system from scratch based on the object-oriented design of C++, using proprietary hardware that could allow for greater media capabilities unseen in personal computers at the time.

Meet The BeOS
Could you imagine emailing someone a video file in 1995? Be Inc. did.

BeOS was, at the time, a foray into a new way of doing home computing. The features it introduced that were brand new at the time are now ubiquitous — things such as preemptive multitasking, journaling filesystems and an uncluttered desktop design. In a way, it was forward-thinking enough that if you look at a screenshot of it today you’d swear it was just any other modern Linux environment, ’90s graphical aesthetic aside. The main strength pushed by its developers was the multimedia support the platform offered: not only was the operating system designed in such a way that audiovisual formats were easy to work with, but also the hardware itself was built with a variety of I/O ports to accommodate such work.

In a time when dual-core computers were still a distant dream, the very first BeBox prototype was already being developed as a dual-processor AT&T Hobbit system. The Hobbit was a short-lived RISC processor specifically designed for the C language. However, since AT&T stopped the production of the chip, Be Inc. quickly shifted its development to a PowerPC-based system instead, which would become the BeBox we know today.

https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/beos...rses-mac-os-x/