7 ms·

I always smile wistfully whenever Haiku/BeOS comes up... its performance and just sheer fun remains unmatched by Windows, OS X, Linux, etc (try it out in a VM).

by miles 10y ago

I always smile wistfully whenever Haiku/BeOS comes up... its performance and just sheer fun remains unmatched by Windows, OS X, Linux, etc (try it out in a VM). dr_dank summed it up best back in 2003 [0]: BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper. He yanked the plug on the box. Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened. Damn. [0] https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66224&cid=6095472 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66224&cid=6095472

honkhonkpants 10y ago
Well let's don't get all romantic about something that was, in the end, half-baked. BeOS debuted at the dawn of the web, and it had a barely-working, userspace network stack and a web browser that essentially didn't work at all. It had some novel APIs, a nifty filesystem, and made for a damn good demo, but there wasn't much more to it.
- cm3 10y ago
  The filesystem metadata queries were real-time back when spinning disks were much slower and neither the processing power or ram was comparable to what we have today. With today's machines we do not have the same experience under Windows, macos, GNOME, KDE. Feature-wise yes, performance no. Is there a technical reason we couldn't have the same filesystem integration? No, there isn't, it's just incompatible priorities and half-baked 2nd system syndrome in effect and repeated all the time.
  - honkhonkpants 10y ago
    We have all that and more in macos today and have for many years. Spotlight is implemented by the same person who wrote BeFS.
    - cm3 10y ago
      The last time I used Spotlight (no mac at the moment), it was so slow that I had to disable it globally. The metadata integration in BeOS was different. For example media and email storage in BeOS.
      - yolesaber 10y ago
        Spotlight is amazing, I use it everyday. It is VERY fast.
        the_other 10y ago
        I feel like I'm missing out. I occasionally use it to search for images in web applications I'm working on, and that's about it. What else is it good for that i could be doing?
        honkhonkpants 10y ago
        It's a perfectly good launcher, for one thing. Having it right under my fingers (cmd+space) means I almost always use Spotlight to launch apps.
  - rogerbinns 10y ago
    BeOS did it by writing their own filesystem. The filesystem author wrote a good book about the design and implementation, including overviews of other filesystems (eg NTFS). He has made the book available for free download at http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf Ars Technica also has a nice 2010 article: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/06/the-beos-filesystem/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/06/the-be... The way it implemented the queries well was because they were integrated into the filesystem. Windows/Mac/Linux do it in userspace. Doing it in the filesystem would be considered a layering violation by most.
    - jwatte 10y ago
      Layer violations are fine if they give you value. ZFS is very layer "violating" as well. However, the layers are concepts put in place by humans to help, not God given laws of nature.
      - cm3 10y ago
        Agreed, and if you run on a microkernel, then pretty much everything is in userspace and any boundaries are those of, say, a capability system for security purposes. I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that we're adding ways to avoid the kernel network stack and other exceptions to the rule, while ignoring microkernels as the sorely needed feature for mainstream computing it is.
    - tambourine_man 10y ago
      Yeah, Dominic Giampaolo. He works at Apple now and is heading its new file system efforts. For years I though he was secretly writing a BeFS like replacement to HFS. APFS seems less ambitious however.
  - Semiapies 10y ago
    Good points, though hard disk sizes are orders of magnitude bigger than they were in the day of BeOS.
- panic 10y ago
  Network stacks and web browsers are easier to improve incrementally than more fundamental parts of the OS.
  - astrobe_ 10y ago
    I'm not so sure. When you implement your own OS your hands are mostly free. With browser on the other hand, you have to comply to large, complex and evolving standards (HTML/CSS/Javascript). I might be biased by the fact that I dabbled a bit with the Linux kernel and dislike graphics programming, though.
    - watwatwatwat 10y ago
      Why is he being downvoted?
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      That's true. Take the Redox project that's been moving along nicely. Or Haiku, Syllable, MenuetOS, etc. All of them had small teams with external vontributors that got plenty done in terms of a usable OS. Whereas, a fast, standardized browser like Firefox takes a huge company to support it. The complexity is just huge. Plus, the standards and web experience are always moving along. Can't wait for more people to scratch an itch if you want to stay competitive.
    - panic 10y ago
      Browser engines like WebKit are (with some work) portable to any platform with a C++ compiler: that's how the current Haiku browser is built.
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago
        So, now you just need to build a highly-optimizing, C++ compiler instead of a browser? That's another project that few got right over a period of a decade or so. Of course, one could use a C++ to C compiler or extend existing C++ compiler with OS-specific backend. Might still be plenty work but easier than clean-slate browser.
- zem 10y ago
  the network stack is the reason i never got into it; it didn't work on my machine at the time and i wasn't about to buy a new network card just to experiment with beos.
  - fu9ar 10y ago
    That is what kept me out of Linux when I was a teenager, but it was MODEM drivers at that time. Lack of driver support for an operating system is not a technical problem, it is a social problem.
    - honkhonkpants 10y ago
      Software modems, you mean. Real modems are attached to serial ports and don't require drivers :-)
      - fu9ar 10y ago
        Essentially, it doesn't matter what mechanism generates the signals except when it came down to me wanting to play with Linux twenty years ago and a company decided to release a product that was only compatible with a single operating system. My desire to play with Linux did not happen to be worth as much as it would have cost to do so at the time, so I waited.
        nickpsecurity 10y ago
        It does. The soft modens were partly a lockin technique to decrease odds you'd be able to use something like Linux without buying new hardware. The strategy apparently worked. It's why I push for standards-compliant hardware that requires no funny business to use in new ways.
        kalleboo 10y ago
        WinModems were a way to save money, plain and simple. Even Apple had their GeoPort software modem, and they sure didn't need any more lock-in.
- fu9ar 10y ago
  The web-first approach of the entire global software industry is half-baked.
- jwatte 10y ago
  The network stack was totally rewritten and optimized, in kernel mode, about halfway through the BeOS lifetime. The kernel did a better job at heavy threading and SMP than Linux or NT or NextStep at the time. The interrupt model and thus latencies led to much better soft real time performance than the other OSes at the time. I think it was more than half baked, but Linux took over the enthusiast market (with zero dollar cost) and Microsoft asserted their OEM monopoly (as determined in court, way too late to matter) and it wasn't to be.
  - tambourine_man 10y ago
    and it wasn't to _Be_
baldfat 10y ago
BeOS was awesome Cubase and Nuendo (Digital Work Station) but never did. I had everything all set for my studio to run BeOS and then sadly it got cancelled. Then I was excited when Palm(Pilot) bought them and was going to bring them back. So sad it just didn't become the OS X that it was headed for.. I actually might have joined the evil Apple empire for that. (Well probably not but at least a hackintosh). As an old timer BeOS was so far ahead of the competition it was like AmegaOS ahead of Windows and MacOS when it was released.
- dnautics 10y ago
  A lot of beos wound up in android design. The way intents work is reminiscent of how one does bmessage passing between applications in beos. Romain Guy and Dianne Hack born are both early hires on the Android team.
lbenes 10y ago
Haiku is a clone not based on the original BeOS codebase. So while it may run the same apps and look similar, does it have the internal design and optimizations that made the original so capable for its time? Could Haiku running on equivalent hardware run that demo as well as BeOS?
- soapdog 10y ago
  It is even better. It has ABI compatibility with BeOS, it can run x86 BeOS apps (not PPC apps though)
- PeCaN 10y ago
  Haiku is pretty damn fast. Its kernel (NewOS) was written by one of the BeOS developers and the whole system's architecture is generally pretty similar to BeOS.
agumonkey 10y ago
I looked at it with young eyes of wonder when it was released. I looked at the same demo 2 years ago and alongside wonder and awe there was a pinch of sadness.

by miles 10y ago

honkhonkpants 10y ago

Well let's don't get all romantic about something that was, in the end, half-baked. BeOS debuted at the dawn of the web, and it had a barely-working, userspace network stack and a web browser that essentially didn't work at all. It had some novel APIs, a nifty filesystem, and made for a damn good demo, but there wasn't much more to it.

cm3 10y ago
The filesystem metadata queries were real-time back when spinning disks were much slower and neither the processing power or ram was comparable to what we have today. With today's machines we do not have the same experience under Windows, macos, GNOME, KDE. Feature-wise yes, performance no. Is there a technical reason we couldn't have the same filesystem integration? No, there isn't, it's just incompatible priorities and half-baked 2nd system syndrome in effect and repeated all the time.
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  We have all that and more in macos today and have for many years. Spotlight is implemented by the same person who wrote BeFS.
  - cm3 10y ago
    The last time I used Spotlight (no mac at the moment), it was so slow that I had to disable it globally. The metadata integration in BeOS was different. For example media and email storage in BeOS.
    - yolesaber 10y ago
      Spotlight is amazing, I use it everyday. It is VERY fast.
      - the_other 10y ago
        I feel like I'm missing out. I occasionally use it to search for images in web applications I'm working on, and that's about it. What else is it good for that i could be doing?
        honkhonkpants 10y ago
        It's a perfectly good launcher, for one thing. Having it right under my fingers (cmd+space) means I almost always use Spotlight to launch apps.
- rogerbinns 10y ago
  BeOS did it by writing their own filesystem. The filesystem author wrote a good book about the design and implementation, including overviews of other filesystems (eg NTFS). He has made the book available for free download at http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf Ars Technica also has a nice 2010 article: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/06/the-beos-filesystem/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/06/the-be... The way it implemented the queries well was because they were integrated into the filesystem. Windows/Mac/Linux do it in userspace. Doing it in the filesystem would be considered a layering violation by most.
  - jwatte 10y ago
    Layer violations are fine if they give you value. ZFS is very layer "violating" as well. However, the layers are concepts put in place by humans to help, not God given laws of nature.
    - cm3 10y ago
      Agreed, and if you run on a microkernel, then pretty much everything is in userspace and any boundaries are those of, say, a capability system for security purposes. I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that we're adding ways to avoid the kernel network stack and other exceptions to the rule, while ignoring microkernels as the sorely needed feature for mainstream computing it is.
  - tambourine_man 10y ago
    Yeah, Dominic Giampaolo. He works at Apple now and is heading its new file system efforts. For years I though he was secretly writing a BeFS like replacement to HFS. APFS seems less ambitious however.
- Semiapies 10y ago
  Good points, though hard disk sizes are orders of magnitude bigger than they were in the day of BeOS.
panic 10y ago
Network stacks and web browsers are easier to improve incrementally than more fundamental parts of the OS.
- astrobe_ 10y ago
  I'm not so sure. When you implement your own OS your hands are mostly free. With browser on the other hand, you have to comply to large, complex and evolving standards (HTML/CSS/Javascript). I might be biased by the fact that I dabbled a bit with the Linux kernel and dislike graphics programming, though.
  - watwatwatwat 10y ago
    Why is he being downvoted?
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    That's true. Take the Redox project that's been moving along nicely. Or Haiku, Syllable, MenuetOS, etc. All of them had small teams with external vontributors that got plenty done in terms of a usable OS. Whereas, a fast, standardized browser like Firefox takes a huge company to support it. The complexity is just huge. Plus, the standards and web experience are always moving along. Can't wait for more people to scratch an itch if you want to stay competitive.
  - panic 10y ago
    Browser engines like WebKit are (with some work) portable to any platform with a C++ compiler: that's how the current Haiku browser is built.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      So, now you just need to build a highly-optimizing, C++ compiler instead of a browser? That's another project that few got right over a period of a decade or so. Of course, one could use a C++ to C compiler or extend existing C++ compiler with OS-specific backend. Might still be plenty work but easier than clean-slate browser.
zem 10y ago
the network stack is the reason i never got into it; it didn't work on my machine at the time and i wasn't about to buy a new network card just to experiment with beos.
- fu9ar 10y ago
  That is what kept me out of Linux when I was a teenager, but it was MODEM drivers at that time. Lack of driver support for an operating system is not a technical problem, it is a social problem.
  - honkhonkpants 10y ago
    Software modems, you mean. Real modems are attached to serial ports and don't require drivers :-)
    - fu9ar 10y ago
      Essentially, it doesn't matter what mechanism generates the signals except when it came down to me wanting to play with Linux twenty years ago and a company decided to release a product that was only compatible with a single operating system. My desire to play with Linux did not happen to be worth as much as it would have cost to do so at the time, so I waited.
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago
        It does. The soft modens were partly a lockin technique to decrease odds you'd be able to use something like Linux without buying new hardware. The strategy apparently worked. It's why I push for standards-compliant hardware that requires no funny business to use in new ways.
        kalleboo 10y ago
        WinModems were a way to save money, plain and simple. Even Apple had their GeoPort software modem, and they sure didn't need any more lock-in.
fu9ar 10y ago
The web-first approach of the entire global software industry is half-baked.
jwatte 10y ago
The network stack was totally rewritten and optimized, in kernel mode, about halfway through the BeOS lifetime. The kernel did a better job at heavy threading and SMP than Linux or NT or NextStep at the time. The interrupt model and thus latencies led to much better soft real time performance than the other OSes at the time. I think it was more than half baked, but Linux took over the enthusiast market (with zero dollar cost) and Microsoft asserted their OEM monopoly (as determined in court, way too late to matter) and it wasn't to be.
- tambourine_man 10y ago
  and it wasn't to _Be_

baldfat 10y ago

BeOS was awesome Cubase and Nuendo (Digital Work Station) but never did. I had everything all set for my studio to run BeOS and then sadly it got cancelled. Then I was excited when Palm(Pilot) bought them and was going to bring them back. So sad it just didn't become the OS X that it was headed for.. I actually might have joined the evil Apple empire for that. (Well probably not but at least a hackintosh). As an old timer BeOS was so far ahead of the competition it was like AmegaOS ahead of Windows and MacOS when it was released.

dnautics 10y ago
A lot of beos wound up in android design. The way intents work is reminiscent of how one does bmessage passing between applications in beos. Romain Guy and Dianne Hack born are both early hires on the Android team.

lbenes 10y ago

Haiku is a clone not based on the original BeOS codebase. So while it may run the same apps and look similar, does it have the internal design and optimizations that made the original so capable for its time? Could Haiku running on equivalent hardware run that demo as well as BeOS?

soapdog 10y ago
It is even better. It has ABI compatibility with BeOS, it can run x86 BeOS apps (not PPC apps though)
PeCaN 10y ago
Haiku is pretty damn fast. Its kernel (NewOS) was written by one of the BeOS developers and the whole system's architecture is generally pretty similar to BeOS.

agumonkey 10y ago

I looked at it with young eyes of wonder when it was released. I looked at the same demo 2 years ago and alongside wonder and awe there was a pinch of sadness.