Steve Jobs returned to Apple after a 12-year absence when it acquired his company NeXt in 1997.
Under his leadership, Apple went on to reinvent itself as a leading consumer electronics company and the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.
But it almost didn't happen. Apple came this close to acquiring another company instead, a startup also founded by an Apple alumnus that for a brief moment had what was considered the world's hottest operating system: Be Inc.
Be was founded in 1990 by former Apple COO Jean-Louis Gassée and Apple director of hardware engineering Steve Sakoman, who helped bring Apple's first mobile computer, the Newton, into being. Initially, the company sold its own hardware called the BeBox. But what Apple wanted was the BeOS operating system.
BeOS was an insanely fast and efficient operating system for its time. It could boot in less than 10 seconds, supported dual processors, and, as you can see in the video above, one of the company's favorites stunts was using it to run multiple videos at once. That might not sound like much today, but it was enough to wow `90s computer users who were used to waiting minutes for Windows to boot and were lucky if they could play even a single video at a time.
BeOS attracted a cult following akin to that of the Amiga. Science fiction author Neal Stephenson even called it the Batmobile of operating systems in his book In the Beginning Was the Command Line. But in 1997 BeOS was still rough around the edges, and Gassée and his backers reportedly wanted far more for Be Inc. than Apple thought the company was worth. So Apple acquired NeXt, used its operating system NeXTstep as the basis for OS X, and left Be to fend for itself.
Be never did find a foothold in the market, even after it started selling BeOS as a stand-alone product. The company blamed interference from Microsoft and sued the company for antitrust in 2002. The case was [settled](http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240052523/BeOS-will-live-on-as-Microsoft-settles-legal-action) for $23.3 million in 2003, but it was too late for Be, which had already been sold to Palm.
BeOS became the foundation of PalmOS 6, but it was never used on any Palm device. Its intellectual property is now owned by Access, which acquired Palm Source in 2005.
But like most pieces of retro-tech, BeOS still didn't quite die. A German company called yellowTAB continued to sell the operating system for a few years. But more importantly, open source clones sprang up, most significantly Haiku, which aims to be fully compatible with BeOS.
Meanwhile, its engineering team continues to shape the operating system landscape to this day. Many of Be's engineers moved on to a company called Danger, the company behind the Sidekick. When Danger founder Andy Rubin left the company in 2003 to found Android, which was of course later acquired by Google, many of those developers went with them. A few of them still work on Android today. Then there's Dominic Giampaolo, the creator of Be File System, one of the most critically acclaimed parts of the operating system. In 2002 Giampaolo was hired by Apple, where he has worked on file systems and the Spotlight feature.
These days Gassée says he's glad Apple bought NeXt instead of Be. But it's hard not to wonder what the past couple decades of tech history would have looked like if Apple had gone the other way.
