6 ms·

I was really taken with BeOS at the time but NextStep was a much better operating system given that it was built on top of Unix and in addition was just beautif

I was really taken with BeOS at the time but NextStep was a much better operating system given that it was built on top of Unix and in addition was just beautifully engineered. The evidence of the excellence of its architecture is how easily it converted between CPUs and how easily it was changed to become iOS.

acdha 9y ago
That depends on which aspects you compare: it took OS X until ~2010 and pervasive SSDs to become anywhere close to the non-blocking user experience the BeOS I/O scheduler delivered on mid-to-late-90s hardware, and BeFS's indexed metadata is what Spotlight wants to be when it grows up. On the other hand, networking lagged far behind and while you could get into arguments about respective API quality there's no question NextStep was more comprehensive.
- myrandomcomment 9y ago
  So I ran both. I still do not feel that OSX is anywhere as fast and responsive as BeOS. Check out the latest Haiku build. Still so much more responsive.
Eric_WVGG 9y ago
Back in the days when iOS was new, Android was fledgling and WebOS was flailing, I wondered why the owners of BeOS at the time weren't working on a mobile OS based on BeOS. Obviously the touch stuff would have taken some work, but the underpinnings ought to be at least as good as OS X and probably superior to Android out the gate.
- chipotle_coyote 9y ago
  Ironically, that's kinda what happened to BeOS--the assets were bought by Palm, right around the time Palm was splitting into two companies. PalmSource, the OS company, developed "Palm OS Cobalt," which was intended to be the next-generation Palm operating system, built on BeOS. While they completed Cobalt, the now-separate Palm hardware company didn't use it. Also, according to Jean-Louis Gassée, an Apple engineer tried to buy BeOS from Palm for the then-unnamed smartphone project, as a third candidate between Fadell's vision of a souped-up Pixo--the iPod OS--and Forstall's vision of a cut-down OS X. Palm turned the engineer down. (Gassée didn't name the engineer, but it's hard not to suspect it was Dominic Giampaolo, who created BeFS and went on to create Apple's Spotlight and then, unsurprisingly, work on APFS.)
  - Apocryphon 9y ago
    Could they do the same to HaikuOS?
    - chipotle_coyote 9y ago
      While I'm rooting for Haiku in the abstract, they've been working for going on 17 years now without hitting beta. I don't have a lot of confidence that it's ever going to get past the "fascinating curiosity" stage. (I know some people would argue that BeOS itself never got past that point, but I ran it full-time for all of 1999 with very little difficulty--it had a surprisingly robust software scene given its size.) At any rate, I suspect if you were looking for the foundation for a new mobile OS today, there would be better choices.
      - Apocryphon 9y ago
        What better choices would you suggest?
- acdha 9y ago
  They'd tried something similar around 2000 with internet appliances but hardware limitations were pretty bad. The Sony eVilla — awesome naming choice — project I was involved with had an aggressive hardware price point which included a landscape display used in portrait mode but not video hardware which supported rotation, so it had to be done in software. Be seemed to implode with that failure and by the time Palm bought them I doubt they had many good people left. Palm certainly didn't have the vision to invest significantly and I doubt many companies would have bet on a partnership with two failures.
haberman 9y ago
I disagree. BeOS was also "built on top of Unix", to the extent that it ran bash and a standard UNIX-like command-line environment. Most Linux programs compiled fine for it (with the notable exception of mmap() which was not implemented yet). In my opinion BeOS was technically superior in the sense that it was far more pervasively multithreaded, which meant UIs never locked up just because they were waiting on some slow computation or network resource. I still believe it's the case that BeOS on circa-2000 hardware was more responsive than any UI I ever used before or since, including MacOS X on 2017 hardware. Even just resizing a Finder window in 2017 on my MacBook lags the cursor in a way that never happened on BeOS.
- eight_ender 9y ago
  Oh my yes. I still have a Toshiba Portege that boots BeOS R5 because at the time Windows 98 was a slow beast, and linux was terrible on the desktop. BeOS was amazing on that tiny thing. It was like the modern day equivalent of using a MacBook Air or Ultrabook for the first time. This small laptop can do everything I need and quickly.
- fulafel 9y ago
  Pervasinve multithreading and C++ would have meant a very unforgiving app development platform.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Yeah because C makes it so much better.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - fulafel 9y ago
      NeXT used Objective-C + events. The concurrency model is the major unforgiving factor, though apparently the NeXT Objective-C language and tools were ahead of the time in many ways as well.

acdha 9y ago

That depends on which aspects you compare: it took OS X until ~2010 and pervasive SSDs to become anywhere close to the non-blocking user experience the BeOS I/O scheduler delivered on mid-to-late-90s hardware, and BeFS's indexed metadata is what Spotlight wants to be when it grows up. On the other hand, networking lagged far behind and while you could get into arguments about respective API quality there's no question NextStep was more comprehensive.

myrandomcomment 9y ago
So I ran both. I still do not feel that OSX is anywhere as fast and responsive as BeOS. Check out the latest Haiku build. Still so much more responsive.

Eric_WVGG 9y ago

Back in the days when iOS was new, Android was fledgling and WebOS was flailing, I wondered why the owners of BeOS at the time weren't working on a mobile OS based on BeOS. Obviously the touch stuff would have taken some work, but the underpinnings ought to be at least as good as OS X and probably superior to Android out the gate.

chipotle_coyote 9y ago
Ironically, that's kinda what happened to BeOS--the assets were bought by Palm, right around the time Palm was splitting into two companies. PalmSource, the OS company, developed "Palm OS Cobalt," which was intended to be the next-generation Palm operating system, built on BeOS. While they completed Cobalt, the now-separate Palm hardware company didn't use it. Also, according to Jean-Louis Gassée, an Apple engineer tried to buy BeOS from Palm for the then-unnamed smartphone project, as a third candidate between Fadell's vision of a souped-up Pixo--the iPod OS--and Forstall's vision of a cut-down OS X. Palm turned the engineer down. (Gassée didn't name the engineer, but it's hard not to suspect it was Dominic Giampaolo, who created BeFS and went on to create Apple's Spotlight and then, unsurprisingly, work on APFS.)
- Apocryphon 9y ago
  Could they do the same to HaikuOS?
  - chipotle_coyote 9y ago
    While I'm rooting for Haiku in the abstract, they've been working for going on 17 years now without hitting beta. I don't have a lot of confidence that it's ever going to get past the "fascinating curiosity" stage. (I know some people would argue that BeOS itself never got past that point, but I ran it full-time for all of 1999 with very little difficulty--it had a surprisingly robust software scene given its size.) At any rate, I suspect if you were looking for the foundation for a new mobile OS today, there would be better choices.
    - Apocryphon 9y ago
      What better choices would you suggest?
acdha 9y ago
They'd tried something similar around 2000 with internet appliances but hardware limitations were pretty bad. The Sony eVilla — awesome naming choice — project I was involved with had an aggressive hardware price point which included a landscape display used in portrait mode but not video hardware which supported rotation, so it had to be done in software. Be seemed to implode with that failure and by the time Palm bought them I doubt they had many good people left. Palm certainly didn't have the vision to invest significantly and I doubt many companies would have bet on a partnership with two failures.

haberman 9y ago

I disagree. BeOS was also "built on top of Unix", to the extent that it ran bash and a standard UNIX-like command-line environment. Most Linux programs compiled fine for it (with the notable exception of mmap() which was not implemented yet). In my opinion BeOS was technically superior in the sense that it was far more pervasively multithreaded, which meant UIs never locked up just because they were waiting on some slow computation or network resource. I still believe it's the case that BeOS on circa-2000 hardware was more responsive than any UI I ever used before or since, including MacOS X on 2017 hardware. Even just resizing a Finder window in 2017 on my MacBook lags the cursor in a way that never happened on BeOS.

eight_ender 9y ago
Oh my yes. I still have a Toshiba Portege that boots BeOS R5 because at the time Windows 98 was a slow beast, and linux was terrible on the desktop. BeOS was amazing on that tiny thing. It was like the modern day equivalent of using a MacBook Air or Ultrabook for the first time. This small laptop can do everything I need and quickly.
fulafel 9y ago
Pervasinve multithreading and C++ would have meant a very unforgiving app development platform.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Yeah because C makes it so much better.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - fulafel 9y ago
    NeXT used Objective-C + events. The concurrency model is the major unforgiving factor, though apparently the NeXT Objective-C language and tools were ahead of the time in many ways as well.