An actual demo video for BeOS! I remember reading a lot of magazine articles about it, and I tried their x86 downloadable version in the later era of BeOS when they were flailing around for an alternate market, but this is the first time I’ve seen video promotional material for it.
Some thoughts:
- The intro was weirdly disappointing from a modern perspective. Reading about symmetric multiprocessing in PC Magazine was exciting. Seeing some guys in an office and going oh, it was just another Menlo Park startup is depressing.
- Half the stuff they tout in the video is so mundane I forgot it used to be an actual issue (playing music while doing literally anything else on the computer without it skipping) and half of it is genuinely impressive (streaming a bunch of audio tracks from disk with various spatial filters being adjusted in real time.)
- BeOS let you set a different color depth on each virtual desktop so you could easily preview your work at 256 colors vs 64k colors vs millions of colors. This is completely wild. I had no idea it could do that. I’ve never heard of another OS that supported this.
...most of our residual interest in computers and programming died with it. we are only getting back into things extremely slowly, after a couple decades.
it felt like the last gasp of a certain...I dunno, style of computing where it was expected that your OS would have everything you needed to play with it, including documentation for its own API, all ready to go, with a minimum of muss and fuss. and no, I don't think any Linux experience I've had is even remotely like that.
~Chara
we ran BeOS on our laptop in college for a while and it was really good. there was an IM client wherein your buddy list was just a file browser window pointed at your contacts, and the backend daemon manipulated those files according to their online status, because the filesystem was a true database and this was supported
BeOS could have been the post Classic future of Apple, but they bought NeXT instead...
I think its polish and usability improved with time but my interest in Apple machines withered once Steve Jobs came back and the operating system turned into this "lickable" thing that honestly looked and behaved more someone reskinned Windows than anything I felt was really Mac-like. "hey look the window buttons are red yellow and green like traffic lights! and they're all close together so you can hit the wrong one accidentally!!" "so, what's the advantage of this new arrangement?" "....they're lickable! and they look like traffic lights!"
I guess we're dating ourselves here. we were genuinely fond of 1990s Apple, which at least seemed like they were interested in innovation sometimes instead of slick repackaging.
~Chara
Personally, I think OS X was a really good idea, and building UNIX into the OS certainly has upsides.
…but a lot of early choices with the user interface definitely were rough around the edges. When Apple decided to drop skeuomorphism for a bit, the OS finally got a chance to fix a lot of those long standing issues. Though they're starting to backslide with the new Settings app.
But it's also quite interesting to think about what could have been with BeOS. Alternate history sure is something.
I don't have fond memories of how creaky and crashy Systems 7 and 8 were, but OS X didn't have to abandon the older principles of Macintosh user experience. they had always had the option of preserving "look and feel" while replacing the underlying mechanisms, but they didn't: and as a result they established a very bad trend because Microsoft copied Apple's heedless abandon in tossing away its old UX for something completely different, based on half-arsed new design principles.
now, everything looks like it's designed chiefly to look good in screenshots, with brand new UX every few years.
(also the fact that UNIX is regarded as a good thing is...well, let's not start that argument
As far as UX, it hasn't fundamentally changed. There are more toolbars, yes there's now a dock, and the biggest change is where the window buttons are placed. But: You still have the menu bar, you still have Finder, you still have quick controls (only now in the menu bar), everything still has a vague Macintosh look and feel.
What's changed is more the details, the design. The aesthetic.
Arguably the major changes to the UX beyond that initial leap to 10 are very rare: Launchpad, Finder redesign, Mission Control, Dashboard, App Store, Separation of iTunes, and now Control Center & Settings.
Everything else has been a coat of paint. Functionally, the experience remains untouched. macOS, at its core, is still macOS.
Now, Addendum: Realistically, a lot of what Jobs brought to the table was order. Apple's Newton was practically revolutionary in what it could do, in many ways being the iPhone before the iPhone. But it tried to do too much when the technology wasn't there, and where contemporary devices knew this and stayed with what could work. Many classic Macintosh machines are looked upon quite fondly, but so many of them were artificially limited in some fashion just to sell a slightly better model at a slightly higher cost. Nothing had quite the polish of the original Macintosh.
Hell, Johnny Ives almost left the company because the horrendous flop that was the Tenth Anniversary Macintosh was his baby. — The man has always been more into making art pieces and goods for the well and do, more than he has consumer friendly designs.
What Jobs brought to the table wasn't the tech or the brains. What he did was bring the marketing. Things were lickable, things were brushed, things were skeuomorphic, etc. — The amazing technological advancements were still there, under the hood. But they were packaged so innocuously that you'd never even notice.
I don't think Apple would be what it is today if it chose BeOS. If anything, the odds are it would have gone the way of Copeland. As interesting as it is to think about what could have been.
Apple made a lot of missteps with Jobs. But one need remember that had Jobs not came back there likely wouldn't be any Apple today at all.
It's easy to look fondly on Apple of the 90s, and forget or ignore that Apple was spiraling towards the ground. The clone system was hurting their core product, because consumers cared more about cheap computers than well built computers; besides, clones could "do more" right? Newton was too much too soon, and couldn't really accomplish what it set out to do. The Macintosh line was floundering, as rather than pare down the product line into a few select options, improving each choice over time with more features, they continually opted to further fragment the line with slightly altered variants that were half thought out, further hurting the product line's viability.
BeOS was cool, and it's easy to think Apple would have been better off without NEXT. But let's be honest: BeOS was made to court Apple, by an ex-Apple engineer, and for all its benefits, it was by no means perfect. Apple at the time meanwhile lacked a strong, robust lead that could point the company in the right direction; it had the talent, but not the teamwork, to put it all together. It also constantly chased market trends rather than setting them.
So the bitter reality of it all is that, had BeOS been the chosen one, and NEXT fallen into obscurity, Apple likely would have botched that too. It would have been A/UX all over again, and Apple itself wouldn't have made it long into the 200Xs. It would have been interesting; but as a train wreck more than a technical marvel. A thing retro techtubers would have filmed essays on, made retrospectives about, but nothing more.
the assumption being: Apple's continued existence is a good thing.
myself...when all is said and done, I would have preferred a timeline in which Apple had never existed; whatever good they did, their overall influence on corporate computing has been tremendously damaging. in particular they tried as hard as possible to make personal computers (and related devices) into disposable things—once it breaks, throw it away and get a new one, is the Apple way.
but then this gets into "I don't think any corporate should ever have existed" and that gets even messier. the point is, I'm not impressed by any logic that runs along the lines of "it was okay for Steve Jobs to inflict himself on us again, because otherwise Apple would have gone out of business", because...well, maybe Apple should have gone out of business.
every corporation on the planet thinks they're entitled to eternal life. I don't. I want to scythe every single one of them down, and I'll dance on their graves when they drop.
(coughs)
~Chara
