They probably would fail to recover and be another historical company by now.
If not, desktop computing would be taken over by C++ as main systems programming language, and UNIX like computing relegated to servers.
They probably would fail to recover and be another historical company by now.
If not, desktop computing would be taken over by C++ as main systems programming language, and UNIX like computing relegated to servers.
Outside of the GUI, Be is a very thin veneer over Unix. There is, no joke, a class named "BStatable" which, if you know some Unix, is just stat, because of course what their OS kernel implements is just stat.
In the places where there's something entirely different going on, such as networking in earlier BeOS, it's trash and you'd obviously want to throw it away and do what Unix did - Be were doing so. So a hypothetical turn of the century fruit-flavour BeOS is probably much closer to "Unix with a different UI" than you're thinking. NeXT changed nothing there.
It certainly wasn't on the BeOS R5 CD that was available back in the day, or the whole Kits available for BeOs programming in C++.
The amount of work done by Haiku to provide a proper POSIX userspace support proves the point.
A strong BeOS selling point was that it was POSIX compliant. I guess that is what you mean by a thin veneer. But we had to write all that code; it wasn’t like we were running Linux or some SCO or other flavor of Unix. It was a written and rewritten and rewritten multiple times.
I am greatly enjoying the juxtaposition of a comment asserting that obviously BeOS was so far from POSIX that Haiku had to do loads of work to get there and your comment that BeOS was POSIX compliant.