5 ms·

The BeOS was all smoke and mirrors. It worked really well to the end user, yes. But it was extremely lean under the hood. I think getting it to do what the base

by memsom 9y ago

The BeOS was all smoke and mirrors. It worked really well to the end user, yes. But it was extremely lean under the hood. I think getting it to do what the baseline of Mac OS 9 did would have taken significant engineering. The issue was stuff we take for granted these days, like networking (netserver, shudder!), printing (severely lacking drivers), USB (barely worked in R5.03, slightly better if you installed the leaked BETA USB stacks)... stuff like that. It all "sort of" worked. But it still wasn't completely ready when Be Inc closed their doors. And this was even after they completely re-wrote the network stack (aka BONE.)

badsectoracula 9y ago
Isn't all that stuff about drivers? If Apple got BeOS they would only need to implement drivers for their own hardware and ignore anything else. EDIT: See? This is why comment voting is a bad idea, it was bad on Reddit, is bad on every Reddit clone being made and of course is bad on Hacker News. What is the point? You get people downvoting comments without reason, leaving the original commenter wonder why someone would... disagree? Consider it non-constructive? Agree but dislike the tone? What? Text explains much better than a number the intent of someone and me, right now looking at a -1 number near my post, have no idea what exactly is the issue. Not to mention the fadeout that happens in downvoted comments in HN, which is extra bad (gives the impression that this comment is not important before even someone bothers to read it - thus creating a bias against it regardless of the contents). No really, why was this comment downvoted? There are so many reasons it could have been, from misunderstandings to actual issues, that i cannot pinpoint without someone saying it. I mean, imagine being in the same room, having a discussion about OSes, someone saying the above about BeOS and me asking the question above... if you disagreed with something i said, wouldn't you try to explain what you disagreed with? Why aren't you doing the same here? Note that whenever i say something like that (mainly on Reddit, but a couple of times also here) people upvote the comment after the fact, i suppose to "right the wrong". But i am not interested in the comment votes as much as knowing the reasoning. After all i asked a question, my impression from what memsom said was that this was a driver issue that Apple could mostly avoid - downvoting/upvoting isn't a response, doesn't answer the question nor affect the thinking that went on making it.
- troydavis 9y ago
  I suspect it was downvoted because "Isn't all that stuff about drivers?" is phrased aggressively. After the detail memsom posted, posting what amounts to a 1-sentence argument is dismissive, even if that wasn't your intent. If your comment actually said your summary of it ("my impression was that this was a driver issue that Apple could mostly avoid") then asked "As an ex-user, what do you think?" I doubt it would have been downvoted. OTOH, if you were actually arguing that the problems were all driver issues (rather than proposing the possibility and asking), then your theory needed a lot more substantiation.
  - badsectoracula 9y ago
    It was indeed mainly a question, followed by my assumption (which i meant to be used as a "pivot point"/anchor for a followup, not as a declaration for what happened). I didn't meant it to sound aggressive, it was more of an informal tone - basically what i'd say to someone in front of me.
- memsom 9y ago
  Not really. The underpinnings of the OS were fairly basic. I was a heavy BeOS user. I owned a BeBox. I developed for the OS. There was a *lot" of stuff under the hood that made the OS very immature. I just didn't sit here listing them. Highlights: Messaging was flaky prior to R5.1. The BMessage got copied a lot, and the Ports used for messaging could get clogged and then messages got dropped. Quite fatal. The API was multi threaded - it was a concept that at the time a lot of developers struggled with. It could be extremely complicated to port apps. A lot of the code was rough and some of it badly documented. So, the guy who worked on it knew it worked, but I doubt many other people did outside of their team. They cut a lot of corners. For example, OpenGL was a disaster. I was told the original dev left and no one was able to support what he left. It never really got back up to the level he had it up to prior o the focus shift. Media Kit ended up getting a rewrite. There was quite a bit of 3rd party code in the OS. Some was licensed. Some was GPL. Some of the GPL was a little questionably used, given the license. This is quite probably one of the reasons the OS was never open sourced.

by memsom 9y ago

badsectoracula 9y ago

Isn't all that stuff about drivers? If Apple got BeOS they would only need to implement drivers for their own hardware and ignore anything else. EDIT: See? This is why comment voting is a bad idea, it was bad on Reddit, is bad on every Reddit clone being made and of course is bad on Hacker News. What is the point? You get people downvoting comments without reason, leaving the original commenter wonder why someone would... disagree? Consider it non-constructive? Agree but dislike the tone? What? Text explains much better than a number the intent of someone and me, right now looking at a -1 number near my post, have no idea what exactly is the issue. Not to mention the fadeout that happens in downvoted comments in HN, which is extra bad (gives the impression that this comment is not important before even someone bothers to read it - thus creating a bias against it regardless of the contents). No really, why was this comment downvoted? There are so many reasons it could have been, from misunderstandings to actual issues, that i cannot pinpoint without someone saying it. I mean, imagine being in the same room, having a discussion about OSes, someone saying the above about BeOS and me asking the question above... if you disagreed with something i said, wouldn't you try to explain what you disagreed with? Why aren't you doing the same here? Note that whenever i say something like that (mainly on Reddit, but a couple of times also here) people upvote the comment after the fact, i suppose to "right the wrong". But i am not interested in the comment votes as much as knowing the reasoning. After all i asked a question, my impression from what memsom said was that this was a driver issue that Apple could mostly avoid - downvoting/upvoting isn't a response, doesn't answer the question nor affect the thinking that went on making it.

troydavis 9y ago
I suspect it was downvoted because "Isn't all that stuff about drivers?" is phrased aggressively. After the detail memsom posted, posting what amounts to a 1-sentence argument is dismissive, even if that wasn't your intent. If your comment actually said your summary of it ("my impression was that this was a driver issue that Apple could mostly avoid") then asked "As an ex-user, what do you think?" I doubt it would have been downvoted. OTOH, if you were actually arguing that the problems were all driver issues (rather than proposing the possibility and asking), then your theory needed a lot more substantiation.
- badsectoracula 9y ago
  It was indeed mainly a question, followed by my assumption (which i meant to be used as a "pivot point"/anchor for a followup, not as a declaration for what happened). I didn't meant it to sound aggressive, it was more of an informal tone - basically what i'd say to someone in front of me.
memsom 9y ago
Not really. The underpinnings of the OS were fairly basic. I was a heavy BeOS user. I owned a BeBox. I developed for the OS. There was a *lot" of stuff under the hood that made the OS very immature. I just didn't sit here listing them. Highlights: Messaging was flaky prior to R5.1. The BMessage got copied a lot, and the Ports used for messaging could get clogged and then messages got dropped. Quite fatal. The API was multi threaded - it was a concept that at the time a lot of developers struggled with. It could be extremely complicated to port apps. A lot of the code was rough and some of it badly documented. So, the guy who worked on it knew it worked, but I doubt many other people did outside of their team. They cut a lot of corners. For example, OpenGL was a disaster. I was told the original dev left and no one was able to support what he left. It never really got back up to the level he had it up to prior o the focus shift. Media Kit ended up getting a rewrite. There was quite a bit of 3rd party code in the OS. Some was licensed. Some was GPL. Some of the GPL was a little questionably used, given the license. This is quite probably one of the reasons the OS was never open sourced.