Additionally, NeXT shipped several x86 releases of NEXTSTEP and its successor OpenStep (NEXTSTEP 3.1–3.3, 1993–1995; OpenStep 4.0–4.2, 1996–1997) prior to the acquisition, all of which also run under virtualization with some effort — though I'd personally recommend the Previous emulator[2] for running older NEXTSTEP builds, as it runs reasonably fast on modern hardware and quite a bit of historically interesting NEXTSTEP software exists that was never released for versions of NEXTSTEP running on non-NeXT hardware (Mathematica 1.0, Lotus Improv, WordPerfect, and the original CERN WorldWideWeb browser come to mind, though source ports of the latter exist).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
[2] https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=2642.17...
Those twin vertically arranged CPU usage LEDs running up the sides of the case, pulsing as the box churned through multiple windows of buttery smooth video playback, while the operator simultaneously read and wrote to the disk, accessed the network, and manipulated the filesystem–without ever stuttering, dropping frames, or beachballing–was really quite something at that time. BeOS could multitask in a way nobody else was doing, and macOS still cannot match it.
Still think it would have been interesting to not let some of that tech die on the vine.
It certainly was not. It was single user only - no way to log in with different users, no accounts, just a single default user.
Networking performance was awful in R3 and R4. In R5 they replaced the user space network stack with BONE, an in-kernel IP stack that promised better performance. By then, too late as the Palm sale was around the corner. I remember talking to JBQ (Jean-Baptiste Queru) on IRC about this and how that effected their micro-kernel design and JBQ stated that their claim of micro-kernel was for marketing purposes only.
It was a multimedia first system designed by multimedia geeks. Fun for its time and had a lot of great ideas.
BeOS was interesting but also kind of a joke. I remember trying it out and receiving error messages written as not-helpful haikus. I could only think that this was not a serious OS, and that was the end of BeOS for me. Here's a few:
"Errors have occurred. We won't tell you where or why. Lazy programmers."
"The code was willing. It considered your request, But the chips were weak."
"Cables have been cut. Southwest of Northeast somewhere. We are not amused."
As a programmer at the time, I was confounded by these awful error messages. It just made the whole thing seem like a joke. I had no time for this. I'd never consider writing software for a platform that obscured the error behind a haiku.
Sometimes there just isn’t more context available to an error. This was even more the case 30 years ago, when errors were often nothing more than a numeric code — and then you look it up and it’s just some “unspecified data error.”
BeOS tried to make light of that quandary.
As I recall, there were some early UI efforts that essentially copied the Classic MacOS feel (the MacOS 8/Copland look) onto NextStep, but they were dropped in favor of OS X's Aqua design (which took inspiration from the iMac design)