What resulted was a firestorm of protest from Observers around the world who said that Apple is entirely to blame for the G3 BeOS situation. The following is a sample of that feedback including a letter from a former Be employee.
"Dear Mac Observer folks,
Unlike Scott Prive, who seems to have only his own speculations as to what happened in the Be/Apple breakup, as a former Be employee I have the advantage of actually knowing some of the people involved. The truth is that it's _entirely_ Apple's fault that the Be OS isn't available on G3 Macs.
First, you need to know the history of the Be system:
Originally, it was designed to run on custom hardware (this was when I joined). Said hardware consisted of a logic board with two AT&T "Hobbit" processors and three AT&T 3210 DSPs. There were six expansion slots, three of which had "extensions" to enable cards to access the DSP chips directly. It was really rather cool.
Then AT&T, without warning, killed the Hobbit processor.
We retrenched and hired Joe Palmer to design a new logic board based around the then-new PowerPC 603 processor. The performance of this new board was much better than the board with the AT&T chips. The new dual-603 boards were produced in 66MHz and 120MHz versions, with a couple of 200MHz prototypes. While the design was brilliant, the production costs were fairly high, and we decided that it made more since to simply port the OS to Apple hardware, which was PowerPC based anyway. I left around this time but I think about 1,000 of the original Be systems were produced.
Apple was very helpful in getting Be the technical information needed to port the OS to Mac hardware. Then, as now, Macs used a lot of custom ASICs and many parts of the hardware and boot process aren't documented to the level needed for someone producing a new OS. You have to set up the memory management correctly, initialize a lot of Apple-specific hardware (ADB, for example), and so forth.
The things got interesting: Apple's bold new OS for the Mac project (Copland) imploded (like Pink/Taligent). Apple goes looking outside the company for a new OS, and the field quickly narrows to two contenders: Next and Be. Be's a small startup; Next has been around for 10 years, and despite critical acclaim has never made a profit nor garnered any significant market share...in other words they're a proven commercial failure. In what will turn out to be an eerie parallel to Be, they've dropped their own proprietary computer platform and ported their OS to...Intel boxes.
Be is staffed largely by ex-Apple people. Next is staffed by Unix folks.
And here's the most important part, which many seem to have forgotten: Be has a modern, stable OS running on Mac hardware _right now_. Next doesn't.
The choice seems obvious, but Gil makes the mistake (well, _he_ thinks it was a mistake) of having one-on-one talks with Jobs. The reality distortion field takes hold, and the combination of Jobs' intense personal charisma and a sense of business ethics that might best be described as "reptilian" win the day.
Things played out as anyone who knows him would expect: Apple's management and board were cleared out within a year, replaced with Jobs' designated people. And were there any ill feelings between the new Jobs-dominated Apple and former rival Be? Of course not. But the people I know at Be say the information flow stopped dead, virtually overnight, once Jobs was in control. And we do all recall when Apple subsequently tried to have Be kicked out of MacWorld Expo, right?
So now Be has no hardware business and can't adapt their system to the forthcoming G3 Macs. What to do? Well, they can either close their doors or port to Intel iron. And guess what: Intel's willing to invest.
I don't know what, if any, conditions Intel has placed on Be with regards to marketing and compatibility. As for Intel logos being "*everywhere*" on Be's web site, well, I only see them on the pages discussing Intel hardware. There are certainly none on the home page, the newsletter page, the user's group pages, the BeWare pages, etc.
So here's the current situation:
* Apple actively supports the Linux folks, which is why you have Linux on the G3 Macs. This means that Apple gives the Linux folks information and technical help they don't give Be. For those wondering why Be doesn't simply copy or reverse engineer from Linux, check the explanation in Be's FAQ.
* Apple actively doesn't support Be, which is why you don't have the Be OS on G3 Macs.
* Intel actively supports Be, which is why you have the Be OS on Intel systems.
I realize this explanation isn't as fun and mysterious as presumed conspiracies between Be and Intel, but the truth is often boring. That's why we have fiction.
-- David Ramsey"