What Was BeOS, and Why Did People Love It?

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.