![]() ![]() After selling only around 1,800 units of BeBox over two years (and with no acquisition forthcoming), Be decided to develop versions of BeOS that would run on Macs and commodity Windows PC hardware. Without the sale to Apple, Be was left to go it alone. RELATED: 20 Years Later: How the Mac OS X Public Beta Saved the Mac Thus, Apple’s Mac OS X was born, but its impetus could just as easily have been BeOS had Be accepted Apple’s initial offer. When Steve Jobs got wind of the potential BeOS deal, he offered up NeXT and its operating system, which ultimately won. ![]() Be’s executives balked at the price offered (reportedly, around $120 million), and negotiations soon stalled. Most famously, in 1996, Apple made an offer to purchase Be and its intellectual property with the intention of making BeOS the core of a new Macintosh OS. ![]() With its highly-praised tech and close run-ins with success, BeOS is almost a textbook case of painful tech what-if scenarios. It also supported virtual desktops for productivity, a feature that still isn’t implemented at BeOS-levels in most modern operating systems. BeOS also shipped with a web browser and had UNIX-like elements, including support for a Bash command-line interface, despite the fact that it wasn’t Unix-based.
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