Infinite Mac Now Boots BeOS, the 1990s OS Apple Almost Bought, in a Browser Tab, Even the 1996 Build Rigged to Stop Booting in 1997

BeOS was the other road. Apple CEO Gil Amelio started talks to buy Be Inc. in 1996, and they stalled when Be’s Jean-Louis Gassée wanted $300 million against Apple’s $125 million, according to Wikipedia’s BeOS history. Apple’s board bought Steve Jobs’s NeXT instead.

Parparita, who runs Infinite Mac and posts as @mihai, says the new BeOS installs let you “see what the road not taken was like.” His own history with it is personal: he remembers “spotting a BeBox in Akihabara” and dual-booting BeOS on his Power Macintosh 8500.

He expected a quick job. DingusPPC, the PowerPC Mac emulator Infinite Mac already uses, could nearly run BeOS, so the plan was mostly to build disk images. Then the bugs showed up. The boot loader thought every modifier key was held down, so it showed what Parparita calls an “ugly, PC BIOS-like” partition picker on every start. Changing the screen’s color depth scrambled the display, because the emulator had quietly depended on the order Mac OS sends two hardware notifications, and BeOS sends them the other way around. Early BeOS also wrote to video memory in little-endian mode, which the emulator didn’t support.

His summary of the pattern: DingusPPC had been “mostly focused on running Mac OS, and thus accidentally became dependent on its quirks.” Most of the commits he sent back to the emulator over the past month went toward BeOS. He believes it’s now “the only emulator that can run PowerPC versions of BeOS.”

Play the video on YouTube

That’s Be’s own promotional walkthrough, which Parparita points to for what the company thought BeOS did best. The oldest Power Mac version on the site came with a catch. Developer Release 8.2, the first BeOS for Power Macs, “had a time bomb that kept it from booting after April 1, 1997,” he writes, because “it shipped with a licensed font renderer that Be could not distribute indefinitely.”

Be dealt with it at the time. MacTech reported on March 14, 1997 that the DR8.3 update removed the April 1 expiration once Be settled on a font technology and got a full license, and warned that BeBox owners who installed it would get a system that wouldn’t boot. Infinite Mac can’t patch history, so when you choose the DR8.2 disk it hardcodes a date the time bomb accepts.

Parparita also got SheepShaver, a Mac emulator that started life on BeOS, running inside emulated BeOS, which took one more fix. He hopes the same work helps bring up MkLinux and Rhapsody. Rhapsody and Mac OS X developer preview CDs are already in the library, though he calls them “aspirational for now” because DingusPPC can’t run them yet.

Old software with a built-in kill date is going to keep turning up as more of the 1990s gets emulated. Trial builds, beta expirations and license checks that phone a dead server all need someone to fake a clock or a reply before they’ll run. A site like Infinite Mac becomes a record of those workarounds as much as of the software. Rhapsody is the next test, since its CD is already on the shelf and DingusPPC still can’t boot it.