logoalt Hacker News

pjmlp • yesterday at 9:59 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

They probably would fail to recover and be another historical company by now.

If not, desktop computing would be taken over by C++ as main systems programming language, and UNIX like computing relegated to servers.


Replies

tialaramex • yesterday at 10:18 PM

Outside of the GUI, Be is a very thin veneer over Unix. There is, no joke, a class named "BStatable" which, if you know some Unix, is just stat, because of course what their OS kernel implements is just stat.

In the places where there's something entirely different going on, such as networking in earlier BeOS, it's trash and you'd obviously want to throw it away and do what Unix did - Be were doing so. So a hypothetical turn of the century fruit-flavour BeOS is probably much closer to "Unix with a different UI" than you're thinking. NeXT changed nothing there.

➕ show 2 replies