BYTE.com > The Be View > 2000 > October
A BeOS View Of Apple's New OS X
By Scott Hacker
October 31, 2000
(A BeOS View Of Apple's New OS X
: Page 1 of 4 )
The history of Be is heavily steeped in Apple culture.
Be CEO Jean-Louis Gassée was a high-level Apple exec before leaving the mothership to create his own OS, and many of the primordial Be engineers were either ex-Apple patriots or third-party MacOS developers. BeOS first ran on PowerPC hardware (in the form of the original BeBox) and later on PowerMacs and their clones. When Steve Jobs recaptured the reigns of the Apple empire, all of that changed. With one stroke, Jobs killed the clone makers and turned off the "info spigot" that let Be keep BeOS harmoniously running on PowerPC hardware. These days, BeOS on PowerPC is pretty much a dead concern.
It's no secret that I've never been a big MacOS fan. While I appreciate Apple's aesthetics, I've always found MacOS slow, unstable, and unresponsive. The lack of a decent virtual memory system, basic memory protection, or even a command-line shell have kept me running x86-based operating systems throughout the years.
It is precisely this list of deeply seated and difficult-to-correct technical issues that inspired the development of BeOS to begin with. And, of course, it is the same list that has had Apple scrambling for a replacement OS for half a decade.
Ever since Apple first announced OS X, I've received letters from BeOS users asking what I thought about OS X, and whether I would keep using BeOS once it became available. My usual response has been along the lines of "Sounds great, can't wait to see it, but keep in mind that OS X will pretty much be the result of two 15-20 year old operating systems (NextStep and MacOS) glued together. I'm not worried about OS X outperforming BeOS, but I'll reserve my judgment until I've had a chance to play with it."
I now realize that this is not quite a fair assessment of the situation. One could just as easily complain that a new Maserati is based on century-old Ford technology, because both use internal-combustion engines. The fact is that OS X is a new OS that just so happens to incorporate foundational principles of some older OSes.
BYTE.com > The Be View > 2000 > October
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