[qubex]

Nostalgic BeOS user here and I can absolutely relate. BeOS enshrined the design epitome of the time — nineties cartoonish icons and draggable yellow tabs on windows — and ran rings around existing software on similar hardware. BeOS was multithreaded and was designed from the ground up to support multiprocessor architectures at a time when even true preemptive multitasking, well-understood though it was, wasn’t implemented in the predominant consumer OSes of the time (pre-95 Windows and Classic MacOS). I keep trying to imagine a future in which Apple had acquired BeOS and had used that as the basis for their next-generation OS rather than purchasing NeXT and going the route that they took but Apple lacking the Second Coming of Steve Jobs is such an imponderable I cannot really draw any even wildly speculative conclusions as to how things might’ve played out…