[aclug-L] Re: BeOS? What is it?

[John Reinke <jmreinke@xxxxxxxxx>]

OK, being someone with a little Mac/NeXT/BeOS knowledge, I'll cover a few
of these questions:

>I think it is more like MacIntosh, maybe jobs had something to do with it at
>its inception???  yes, it runs on intel, AMD, Cyrix(well nothing really runs
>on Cyrix).

Be was started by Jean-Louis Gassée, a former CEO of Apple. They made those
nifty boxes I described earlier. I'm pretty sure he left Apple after Steve
Jobs was kicked out, and might have even been his replacement. Jobs had
nothing to do with BeOS.

>       Boy, don't let anyone from Be hear you
>mention Jobs & them in the same breath. Mac almost
>went with Be as kernel of their recent OS's (8.0 & up)
>but Jobs convinced them to go with NExT (his company?)
>instead...

Apple had been talking about making major changes to MacOS, and realized
that in order to make the wild changes like protected memory and true
preemptive multitasking, they would have to look outside of the company for
help. (This was a major leap for a company that created and developed most
everything itself, using the term "not created here" for technology they
refused to use because someone else created it.)

The two front-runners were BeOS and NeXT. BeOS was very much still in
development, and NeXT has been in use for over a decade, so Apple went with
NeXT. NeXT also had a few other bonuses: NetObjects, which is used by a lot
of online stores such as Dell, and Steve Jobs. Steve's charisma was much
needed by Apple at that time, which was suffering from poor sales and loss
of market share. I had no money at the time, but wish I could have bought
some Apple stock when it was $12. Right now, it is about ten times that.
Steve founded NeXt after beeing kicked out of Apple, and later founded
Pixar (Toy Story 1 & 2, Bug's Life).

MacOS X (ten) will be released later this year and is based on NeXT. MacOS
X Server has already been out for a while, but those are the first versions
of MacOS that are built on NeXT.

>I don't know if NeXT is based on BSD or not.

I believe it was at BSD 4.3 at the time Apple bought NeXT.

>       Doesn't MacOS run on the Mach kernel?or did it used to
>but not any more?and what happened to that "blue box, yellow box"
>stuff (if anyone but me followed that business). Did it all go by
>the wayside when OS X took over from Rhapsody?(Same time Jobs took
>over from Amelio, more or less?)

MacOS itself doesn't run on the Mach kernel, but OS X and MkLinux do.
Rhapsody was basically the codename during development, I'm pretty sure
that the blue/yellow box stuff is still in there, but they aren't really
mentioned anymore. I think they kinda decided to symplify things so the
general public wouldn't be intimidated by it.

John