diskzero

Right. There were several interesting skins and Finder-esque modifications of Workspace Manager. You may have seen a “Beaker” build of OSX with that. The Kodiak pre-release had the C++ Finder that is still the current Finder with PowerPlant replaced by HIView and some code refactored to use AppKit. No SwiftUI though!

Yeah, a lot of those “blue” features never were adopted or came back. The whole spatial Finder concept was lost.

I hear you. Yes, the 10.0 Finder had swaths of commented out code and missing features that were present in 9. Spring loaded folders comes to mind. They came back at some point.

Haiku is all new source, so they had to figure out how to get the binaries to run. I am not the POSIX expert, but I think it was just an API guarantee not ABI.

There were several companies that had the BeOS source and that source can be found in the wild. It is speculated that yellowTAB ZETA was based on unlicensed BeOS source code.

Your BeBox case was lovingly spray painted in a conference room with inadequate ventilation by us at Be at corporate HQ in Menlo Park. Each one was lovingly assembled by the actual people who designed the hardware and wrote the code.

A strong BeOS selling point was that it was POSIX compliant. I guess that is what you mean by a thin veneer. But we had to write all that code; it wasn’t like we were running Linux or some SCO or other flavor of Unix. It was a written and rewritten and rewritten multiple times.

Yes, the reverse acquisition. Minor correction though, Craig didn’t show up until much later. He missed out on some very tough years and came on when Apple was fully revitalized and printing money. I might even suggest what I consider the decline of Apple software occurred when Avie and Bertrand left and Craig took over.

For release 4, we added private impls with many many virtual declaration placeholders. I still remember the comment in every file: Mmmmmmm, stuffing!

Well, not only former Be but former Finder developer here. The OSX Finder was certainly not a cute Finder-like skin, it was in fact huge amounts of the OS9 Finder source code including a complete copy of a modified Metrowerks PowerPlant C++ framework underneath it all. There was even elements of the old MacApp framework there. It was not a skin; it was a source code behemoth with massive amounts of legacy code.

JLG countered with a $100 million and I thought Apple offered Steve $400 million at first. There was a moment when Apple was just talking to us (Be) and Steve heard about it. Bummed.

> They also implemented the OS API directly in C++, which tied them to a specific C++ compiler

We paid Cygnus(?) millions for that. The multiple virtual inheritance needed for MediaKit was a real joy to get working.

Former Be person here. Excellent summary. To further elucidate the management issue, some of the Be management went to Palm and they weren’t super effective there either. A fun alternative universe would be Apple buying Be, Apple going bankrupt or eaten by the clones, NeXT powering the internet with WebObjects, Microsoft crushed by antitrust and we are all running Linux using Eazel/GNOME.

Thanks and I am very happy for you guys! I hope you both get a lot more time together and that she remains stable, healthy and active.

This is somewhat what it is like for me in Arizona. There is no clock change here, so I just watch my out of state meetings shift around twice a year.

It is good to hear about her changed perspective and that the cancer is currently undetectable. I hope she continues to have health and you both have a good long life together. I lost my wife to cancer over nine months. We had thirty years together, but I certainly wanted more. Best to you both.

Any cognitive scientists here, or actual people with eidetic memory, who can comment how the brain would store everything you ever read or heard and how it can be recalled? What does it feel like to be able to recall and recite the entire text of a Tale of Two Cities?