I too hoped for Apple buying Be
I was a registered Be & Apple developer way back then
While Be might have been more interesting it wasnt in great financial shape and Apple buying Be would have been a bailout
Apple killing the clone market was Be’s death knell and Palm buying it just put it in the ground
In many ways too bad as Be did have some VERY interesting stuff
I was there the morning they previewed the first support for the Daystar Genesis MP+ systems
They showed the screen with 2 CPU monitors running
Then they turned one off one CPU and everything ticked along
Then they turned one off another CPU and everything ticked along which made everyone go “WTF?”
Then they scrolled the screen up to show the other two hidden CPU monitors ticking away
This was the first showing of their support for the 4 CPU MP+
The presenter literally said “We just got this working last night”
Why do you think so? I have owned NeXT hardware with NexTSTEP and it was the most sluggish system I have ever used. Compare that with the SGI hardware from the same era running Irix or with BeBox running BeOS.
It was the NeXTstation Turbo Color. I don’t remember much about it, but it was a let down for me.
I once had a large collection of computers. I had the most SGI workstation models, Atari MegaST, Atari TT, Atari Falcon 030, Apple Network Server running AIX and many older IBM Power workstations.
Currently I only have SAM Coupé fitted with hard drive interface and almost full catalog of software, various MSX models, some Soviet PDP clones, some Soviet Spectrum clones and many Alpha servers and workstations.
Oh the original black boxes were, compared to everything else of the day, amazing
We had them at University and they were the envy of all the freshman (since they never got to touch anything like that until at least 3rd year)
Compared to the Suns & SGI’s of that time they were fast & slick
But that was the later 1980’s (I think it arrived in late 1988 or 89)
Yeah our university had one of the original black boxes too. Display Postscript, even in just black and white, was pretty darn amazing and put every other computer the university had to shame. What could have been.
I loved Motif, first seen in Geoworks Ensemble on my XT later 386 in the End of the 80ies, beginning of the 90ies. Then rediscovered at university in the End of the 90ies on one of the Workstations there (I think it was a Sun). But I was already on the Windows NT4 train. But I follwed the Apple drama, the urgent need for an Classic MacOS replacement, the first Mac Server based on Next but with Classic Mac Interface and finally the departure of Mac OS X Aqua around 2000 or 2001.
BeOS was recogniced as a niche OS for Multimedia but I never got warm with its UI/UX
we had SGI’s (~Iris Indigo, long time ago…) and during a presentation on a Gouvernements site where we did not have any network, we had to copy plotter-files via Floppy to a PC that was connected to a plotter. Creating the plot-files took quite some time (especially on a benchmark-presentation…) and that Irix had a bug that did a ‘move’ instead of a ‘copy’ when draging files from one volume to another. Something went wrong with plotting but we no longer had those files… Beside of this, Indigos were impressive!
BeOS (I remember some presentations with Jean-Louis Gassée) was impressive as well - but the most impressive presentation was that one with Steve Jobs were he showed NextStep’s developing methods
