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I was once fond of referring to BeOS as "the promised land" of operating systems. Well, I wasn't wrong -- it really was, in many ways. Unfortunately, BeOS never attracted enough visitors to turn the promised land into a thriving metropolis. But the best OS in the world ain't worth jack without millions of users, billions of dollars, and kajillions of programmer hours flowing through it.

While OS X can't boast about jaw-dropping performance like BeOS could (although the new Core Audio services offer audio latencies nearly as low as Be's, and in some cases (MIDI and jitter) even better than Be's), and while its file system is mesozoic in comparison to Be's, the "traction" problem that always plagued BeOS is not a problem for OS X. There are users. The world is paying attention. Multi-million dollar companies are releasing polished, mature applications for it. The press is taking notice. The same sort of excitement that filled the BeOS community with eagerness for the future is taking hold in the OS X community.

Do I think Apple should have bought Be when they had the chance? Yes and no. On one hand, Apple would have gotten a fantastic architecture on which they could build their modern OS. And OS X would have a state-of-the-art filesystem and superior multithreading / multitasking today. OS X might have gotten out the door sooner, and it would be a faster, more efficient operating system.

Those observations are in no way meant to disparage Darwin or the many NeXTStep technologies that live on in OS X. Together, they form a rock-solid OS core with a mostly great user experience. Rather, I mean that Be had achieved "the grace of the Mac, the power of Unix" nearly a decade before Apple got OS X out the door, and that many of the complaints I list above would not be issues for OS X today.

But. Apple would not have gotten Steve Jobs back if they had purchased Be. They would have gotten Jean-Louis Gassée and Steve Sakoman instead. JLG is a brilliant man, a rare literate intellectual in a sea of stuffed shirts. Despite the ultimate failure of Be, I think he's got his head screwed on straight, and is a man of true vision -- a fine CEO. But Steve Jobs is Steve Jobs, and Steve Jobs makes things happen. He has pulled Apple out of a long downward spiral, has succeeded in finally dragging Mac users kicking and screaming into the 21st century, and is doing it with tremendous style. While I've said just the opposite in the past, I now believe Apple ultimately made the right decision by going with NeXT and Jobs rather than Be and Gassée.

In software development you don't often get a chance to break all the rules and start over. Being able to start from scratch was Be's greatest trump card. Apple sort of had that opportunity. OS X is a brand new operating system, yes, but it is also a mutt bred from Unix and NeXTStep -- two truly excellent, but also historically laden operating systems. Apple also got dealt the backwards compatibility card, both technologically (so that old Mac apps would continue to run) and psychologically (there had to be enough similarities between pre-X Mac OS and OS X that the existing userbase would not become alienated.

All of that is a long way of saying that I truly love what Apple has created in OS X and am happy to have made the switch. But I also lament that OS X falls so short of BeOS in a few important categories. Now that OS X is out there in the field and developers are busily coding for Carbon and Cocoa, it's going to be much harder for them to change the application binding policy (for example) than it would have been if they had gotten it right prior to release. Not impossible, but much harder.

The trouble with BeOS is that gets under your skin and stays there. BeOS showed the world how much power is really locked away in their computers, and how much efficiency is wasted by bloated operating systems. It showed the world what can be done when a company sits back, examines all the problems in the market's OS offerings, and decides to build something that doesn't have those problems.

At the height of the BeOS revolution that never really happened, it seemed that the world couldn't possibly do anything but see the light and switch to BeOS. In retrospect, BeOS seems like little more than a tremendously expensive proof-of-concept. But that's a pessimistic view of things. I agree with Urban Lindeskog, who recently posted on a Be mailing list:

... in that sense BeOS has not been a waste of time, on the contrary. It has added to the collective knowledge, and showed us some interesting views of the art of computing.

In any case, anyone who has spent time with BeOS is forever spoiled, their expectations for OS technology permanently affected.

As a migrating user, I'm torn between admiration for and frustration with OS X. But I know that, deep down, Jobs and Gassée have similar ideas about creating the ultimate user experience, and about bringing together the ultimate in ease of use with the ultimate in power and flexibility. Gassée never got to finish painting in the details of his vision. Jobs has just gotten started on his.

Many thanks to Irfon Kim-Ahmad, Kurt von Finck, Balatro, Allen Brunson, and Jim Rippie for their comments on and contributions to this piece.

Download PDF/printable version of this article (1.2 MB).

About the Author:
Scot Hacker is the author of Peachpit's The BeOS Bible, as well as well as O'Reilly's MP3: The Definitive Guide. Hacker is the webmaster of The BeOS Tip Server, The Birdhouse Arts Collective, and The Archive of Misheard Lyrics. He has written for web sites and print publications including Byte.com, Wired, PC Magazine, Windows Sources, The Utne Reader, and Cadence Journal of Jazz and Blues. By day, Hacker is webmaster for the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Scot can be reached via email at symlink23@yahoo.com.

1. "Out of the Frying Pan..."
2. "... And Into the Fire..."
3. "Smells Like Home Cookin"
4. "A Lot To Like, First Impressions"
5. "Networking Nirvana"
6. "CD Burning, Disk Images"
7. "Applications"
8. "iMovie, iDVD"
9. "Browsers and E-Mail"
10. "Power Editors"
11. "Community"
12. "The Bad and The Ugly"
13. "File System Shoot-Out"
14. "Application-Binding Policies"
15. "Alien Filesystems"
16. "Miscellaneous Moans and Groans"
17. "All Told, Life Is Good"