@brentsimmons Oh man, I was always so fascinated by BeOS but never got to play with it. Also, I remember being a kid and trying out Cyberdog because I kept reading about it, but not quite understanding what it was or how to use it, at least at first. I definitely used Netscape when I did start going online more seriously.
@brentsimmons @gerwitz Thanks! I knew it was what all the cool kids used, but that was before my “playing a developer on IRC” days, so I’d never seen it :-)
@DrOct When I got my PowerComputing machine, it was promised as shipping with BeOS as well as Mac OS…it did not, but ~6 months later I got the latest BeOS release in the mail, repartitioned the disk (yay HFS Plus non-destructive repartitioning) and installed it. It was…interesting. I don’t think I ever figured out how to get NetPositive to go online, so there was very little to do, and that partition eventually went away….
@smokey I ran BeOS full time for over a year (on an Intel machine, not a PowerPC one), and still remember most of the software I used: a great code editor (Pe), an office suite (GoBe Productive, whose authors had written Claris Works and later went back to Apple to work on iWork), e-Picture (an amazing graphics editor, which actually won MacWorld's "Best in Show" when it was later ported to the Mac). It was way ahead of its time in some respects.
@smokey I had a power computing computer too but I’m pretty sure it means before they were offering Be. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of an alternate history where Apple bought Be instead of NeXt.
@chipotle Oh, nice. I always wanted to see how the fully-complete BeOS worked, because I continued to hear good things about it (and I know there was a functional Mozilla port for Zeta and Haiku still in the late 2000s). It was 96 or 97 when I got my CD, so it was a DR or PR and not much for an end-user to play with ;-) // @DrOct
(Those ClarisWorks people were,…crud, the word is on the tip of my brain and I can’t shake it loose, so…productive for a long time; didn’t they start with something on the Apple II?)
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of an alternate history where Apple bought Be instead of NeXt.
Most of us here (which wouldn’t be here at all) would be using some kind of Linux on the desktop (or maybe IRIX?), with the others on Windows XP 12, our PDAs would run Windows CE, our phones BlackBerry (some would have Symbian), AltaVista and Yahoo! would be battling it out over web search, and there would have been no NetNewsWire, so RSS would never have caught on. (And I guess maybe everything would still be written in Sun’s cash cow, Java.) 😂