7 ms·
As I recall, BeOS was asking on the order of $80 million, NeXT was acquired for $400 million. I found this reference, so 80 valuation, Be wanted upwards of 200
by bluejekyll 2y ago
As I recall, BeOS was asking on the order of $80 million, NeXT was acquired for $400 million.
I found this reference, so 80 valuation, Be wanted upwards of 200, “In 1996, Apple Computer decided to abandon Copland, the project to rewrite and modernize the Macintosh operating system. BeOS had many of the features Apple sought, and around Christmas time they offered to buy Be for $120 million, later raising their bid to $200 million. However, despite estimates of Be's total worth at approximately $80 million,[citation needed] Gassée held out for $275 million, and Apple balked. In a surprise move, Apple went on to purchase NeXT, the company their former co-founder Steve Jobs had earlier left Apple to found, for $429 million, with the high price justified by Apple getting Jobs and his NeXT engineers in tow. NeXTSTEP was used as the basis for their new operating system, Mac OS X.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e
- stergios 2y ago“BeOS did not have printing” was the insult thrown around at the time.
- KerrAvon 2y agoI don’t remember the exact number, but BeOS was too incomplete at the time to spend what they were asking, and maybe to purchase at all. There was no way to print documents, which still mattered a lot for a desktop OS in 1996. It needed a lot of work. Now, in retrospect, Apple had time; Mac OS X wasn’t ready for the mainstream until 2003-2004.
- bombcar 2y agoTo be fair, printing in 1995-6 was a huge can of worms and hell on earth.
- KerrAvon 2y agoISTR those of us using HP or Apple printers were generally in pretty good shape at the time. Can’t vouch for other brands.
- p_l 2y agoApple didn't support anything other than PostScript natively at the time, so their printers came with postscript support. HP made special models for use with Macs that shipped with PostScript included.
- tonyedgecombe 2y agoApple sold a ton of printers without PostScript: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apple_printers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apple_printers The earliest ones pre-dated PostScript by years.
- wbl 2y agoSend PostScript, done. Today it's figured out what driver will properly rasterize exotic things like ligatures because we decided that throwing a real CPU in the printer was a mistake.
- bombcar 2y ago96 was still a few years before all the printers natively supported postscript - HPs had their own vector graphics library for example. Many printers in common use were still “one font wonders” and that resulted in lots of fun.
- epcoa 2y agoUnless you were using anything from that tiny obscure Hewlett Packard operation and didn’t want to shell out for a module. HP never promoted Postscript. It was far from universal as an embedded PDL. > that throwing a real CPU in the printer was a mistake. The CPU in any decently modern printer is still many times more powerful than what was in an original LaserWriter (30ppm and up needs power, even if it’s simple transforms and not running wankery). It’s not just about CPU power and modern laser printers still support PDL and vector languages like PCL and PDF (and many have some half assed often buggy PS “compatibility” eg BRScript), the bigger mistake is using general purpose Turing tarpit that is “powerful” rather than a true high level built for purpose PDL. PostScript just isn’t very good and was always a hack. > Send PostScript, done. The other problem of course being that raw PostScript as a target for most applications is not at all elegant and ironically too low level. So even if you wanted postscript, an OS that didn’t provide something more useful to most applications was missing core functionality. The jwz quote about regexes applies just as well.
- wbl 2y agoI have a modern Canon laser printer that does not properly implement ligatures because of obscure driver issues. What I see on the screen is not what is printed.
- epcoa 2y agoText layout is hard and unfortunately drivers and firmware are often buggy (and as printing is lower and lower margin that doesn’t get better). But just throwing a weird language engine in doesn’t actually solve any of those problems.
- WoodenChair 2y agoThe high price was also justified by the success of WebObjects at the time, which was seen as a potential fuel for an IPO for NeXT, even though WebObjects was not what Apple was buying it for. This Computer History Museum article goes into that angle in detail: https://computerhistory.org/blog/next-steve-jobs-dot-com-ipo-that-never-happened/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/next-steve-jobs-dot-com-ipo...