Famous for 15 minutes

The interfaces that almost made it…

Amiga OS (1985)

> Commodore’s 1980s Amiga has a special place in the hearts of gamers and musicians. It was fast, did proper multitasking and boasted arcadequality games, but sadly Commodore couldn’t maintain the momentum.

BeOS (1990)

> BeOS hoped to be a rival to Apple and Windows, and it courted Mac clone makers to ship it on their computers. Apple considered buying it but passed; Steve Jobs would find a better parent for Mac OS X.

NeXTSTEP (1989)

> While exiled from Apple, Steve Jobs set up NeXT, with hardware running NeXTSTEP OS. It wasn’t a big hit – although Tim Berners-Lee created the web browser on it. Apple bought it in 1996 and made it part of Mac OS X.

Newton OS (1993)

> The Newton offered a mobile Apple experience that proved too expensive for the portable device buyers of the early 1990s. But you can see how it paved the way for the iPhone and ultimately iOS.