Monday, April 18, 2005

what could it have BEen?

Browsing the web tonight I found a couple of things from my past:

CyberDog! Any mac enthusiasts out there remember OpenTransport and all the magic-box component-architecture network goodies that Apple was pushing back in the day? I never fully understood what they did, but as I look back on them now they seemed to make sense.

That got me browsing. What ever happened to Copland? That was Apple's "revolutionary" new operating system that stopped revolving into Be around about '96, bit the dirt, and was ousted just before Jobs came back. I was a bit sad to see it go (and the genuine pure Gershwinesque Rhapsody too) but both technologies would have dragged Apple into the pit of dispair.

I kind of wonder what would have happened if Apple had gone the BeOS way instead of the NeXT way (notice the shady capitalization on both names? hm....) Would Apple still be around? Would I be typing this on a spiffy 12" PowerBook right now? Would my OS be a billion times faster (like Be) but still stable as hell (Be + OS X)?

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