When the Apple smartphone project started, the key decision was the choice of software engine. Should Apple try to make a ‘lite’ version of OS X (as it was then known)? Go in a completely new direction?
It appears that a new direction may have been tempting. At the time that Apple’s smartphone project began, an Apple employee and former Be engineer offered Palm Inc. $800K for a BeOS “code dump” - just the code, no support, no royalties. The engineer was highly respected for his skill in mating software to unfamiliar hardware; BeOS was a small, light operating system; draw your own conclusion… Palm, which had purchased Be a few years before that, turned him down.
Interesting historical footnote. This would be the second time that Apple tried to buy BeOS. I’ve been told that while Forstall (who wanted OS X) and Fadell (who wanted the iPod’s Pixo) were battling it out, a former Be engineer then working at Apple wanted to prove BeOS was a viable iPhone candidate, and thus tried to buy it. As history knows, Forstall won out, and only after the fact did the Apple engineer inform the higher-ups of what he tried to do. Apparently, this happens more often inside Apple’s culture.
I will never get my hopes up again. I will forever be a depressed prick. News like this is like the Amiga X1000, yeah i bought one, and using it to write this, but yeah!
Talking about this feels like talking about politics for Hillary supporters, fucking depressing.
Maybe you could write a short piece for OSNews about what its like using an Amiga X1000 on a daily basis. It doesn’t look like there has been one yet (http://www.osnews.com/search?q=x1000), and I’m sure it would get a lot of interest.
Yeah, would be cool!
Why is is a secret, whose name it is? Giancamo (BFS and HFS+ guy).
Assuming this pre-selection tech vetting would have all happened before or during the ROKR development with Motorolla, before anything concrete for what the iPhone would actually become existed, that would put it in the 2004-2005 ish time-frame.
More than likely the individual knew folks at Palm, and there may have been some ‘political’ reasons in addition to the ‘business’ reasons the deal didn’t go through.
I think the smart bet would be on Sakoman.
No BE and no Palm so we see how that worked out. Phew.
Access Co. owns it. Why Palm didn’t just open source the thing was amazing. Maybe Access would open source it for a price.
P.S. It was smarter to use mac osx as the basis for iOS.
I wonder who the engineer was. Anyhow Forstall won the day.
Edited 2016-12-07 04:50 UTC
BeOS would have brought some amazing features to the iPhone. Down-scaling an OS is incredibly difficult and leads to a lot of bloat. BeOS wouldn’t have has so much of that (in part because it was designed for much lighter hardware than OSX).
It offered no ability to do cross platform dev with Mac OS. That’s why it lost out. I didn’t say it didn’t have smart ideas in it.
They can’t. It contains too much proprietary code still. It contains some GPL code that was probably iffily licensed back before the GPL crowd made a big song and dance about that kind of thing. When you strip out the third party code, you won’t have a working OS anymore.
The main reason it wasn’t very appropriate for the iOS was that it only ran on x86 by the end of life. They had broken the PowerPC build and changed things to no longer be compatible with MetroWerks C compiler, so no one was checking it was cross compiling still from what I can tell.
We coulda had a phone based on Hobbit chips! ;-D
Now that would have been an interesting product… basically an Apple-Be Cell-Phone.
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On a more personal note – you keeping up with Haiku at all?
IMO even if that ex-Be engineer managed to buy BeOS from Palm, on behalf of Apple. There would have been no guarantee they would have seen it fit for purpose, or chosen it. The original iPhone was an SMS/voice phone with a touch screen and a web browser. The web and networking were never BeOS’s high point.
Except, it was based on the OPENSTEP OS, which ran on 3 different processor lines, including the Motorola 68000 16-bit processors, and ran with less than 16MB RAM at the time. As I understand it, the OS was always running on Intel, from the time Rhapsody existed, but it was not public.
I get what JPG is saying – lazy programmers will strip out “un-needed” code so they don’t need to support it (I’m looking at you Be Inc), and I guess they could have literally purged the 68000 support, which obviously meant lower powered processors were less likely to be supported. But, come on, really? Also – the BSD tuff that then got baked in to OS X is bloody BSD – runs on anything, probably toasters!!
As long as that toaster does not have the same AI/Personality as the red dwarf thoster, yo quote liseter “That toster is smeggin mental”, we don’t want that in any device
To my knowledge the earliest NextStep needed a 68030 (or at least a 68020 with additional MMU coprocessor 68851) because a MMU was mandatory right from the start.
The 68030 was always full 32 Bit.
Even the MMUless 68000 was 32 Bit internally but had only a 16 Bit memory interface and ALU.
But of course it is true that the first NextStation had very little RAM to work with … from todays perspective: 8 MB
1990 this was huge – DOS could only address 640 KB
Edited 2016-12-09 16:34 UTC
68020 was the first full 32 bits cpu. But lacked integrated pmmu (68851) and fpu (68881) which was provided 3 years later with the 68030.
no: the 68030 had an integrated MMU but no FPU.
You still had to buy an extra FPU-Chip. (And I did so.)
The 68040 finally got both: FPU und MMU.
But my point was, that the first Nextstation was powered with a 68030, and that its very very unlikely that any version of NextStep would run on an 68000, due to its missing (and also not upgradeable) MMU.
Or they just wanted to buy it so no one else could use it to build a competitor….