# What Was BeOS, and Why Did People Love It?

<https://www.howtogeek.com/696193/what-was-beos-and-why-did-people-love-it/amp/?__twitter_impression=true>

- Host: [howtogeek.com](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/howtogeek.com/)
- Saved: October 25, 2020 (2020-10-26T01:36:00Z)
- Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/6c32a7ed635e/
- JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/6c32a7ed635e.json

## What Jamie wrote

I still remember getting ahold of BeOS installer forever ago and trying out this new OS. There was a lot of excitement around BeOS and the BeBox, but it ultimately never made it. BeOS and NextStep were making a lot of noise at the same time.

> With its highly-praised tech and close run-ins with success, BeOS is almost a textbook case of painful tech what-if scenarios. Most famously, in 1996, Apple made an offer to purchase Be and its intellectual property with the intention of making BeOS the core of a new Macintosh OS. Be’s executives balked at the price offered (reportedly, around $120 million), and negotiations soon stalled.
> 
> When Steve Jobs got wind of the potential BeOS deal, he offered up NeXT and its operating system, which ultimately won. Thus, Apple’s Mac OS X was born, but its impetus could just as easily have been BeOS had Be accepted Apple’s initial offer.

NextStep lives on inside of every Mac sold. I didn’t know that there is still a hobby project of sort keeping BeOS alive in a project called [Haiku](https://www.haiku-os.org).

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT163: Weekly Thing #163 / BeOS, Management Track, Writing is Thinking](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/163/), Recommended Links

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## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.howtogeek.com/696193/what-was-beos-and-why-did-people-love-it/amp/?__twitter_impression=true