Bane made an insightful post a few days ago about 'scene' computing vs workstation computing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624912

That has had me rethinking your what-if. I don't think the unix is a big deal - the Be and Haiku terminals feel unixy, and BeOS offered a big subset of the unix system calls even into v3 (time of Apple purchase).

By v4.0 (two years after), BeOS had become a remarkable system for single-user, close-to-the-metal computing. The user experience was very fast and stable. The system gave a skilled developer easy access to video and audio.

I've been trying out haiku again this morning. They've done good work. It now boots on my thinkpad, but, like OSX or Windows, feels sluggish in a way that Be never did. It needs some serious performance tuning. They need to get their out-of-the-box development experience sorted out too. OSX has done an excellent job of that.

What attracted me to BeOS on those days was somehow the Amiga feeling I felt in the platform, hard to explain.

And as someone that will gladly do C++ development, it felt really nice to have an OS done in it.

But I feel Apple would have needed a different type of marketing to attract developers back then.

When I was at CERN they were selling us "It is BSD/NeXT with a nice UI" story.

Thanks for the link, by the way.

See what you mean re unix.

Yeah - I've always been unable to describe that weird connection to the platform, what you call the Amiga feeling.

Going to boot back into haiku now and see if I can get blender working :)

I really think it was the NeXT engineer's tech demos showing that they could run Openstep on different processors and also that they could complete the 'Blue Box' in time.

BeOS had every geek salivating madly with the BeBox. Two processors, man! And it could play two mpegs at the same time!

It was also "unixy" enough without having all the Unix baggage.

I was salivating for it as a former Amiga fan and due to the fact it was(is) a C++ based OS.

and the geekport!

OMFG, the Geekport!