6 ms·

I played with BeOS when it was still alive, it was light, nice, and fun, and I miss these cute icons, but frankly, I simply don't see the point of reviving it n

I played with BeOS when it was still alive, it was light, nice, and fun, and I miss these cute icons, but frankly, I simply don't see the point of reviving it now.

adamnemecek 9y ago
There an insane amount of stuff to be learned from failures. From my understanding, one of the main reasons behind their demise was their business plan. Version for PCs with <256RAM were free, you paid for 256+MB. However BeOS ran so efficiently that no one ever needed 256+MB so few people bought it.
- doesnt_know 9y ago
  wow, if that is accurate, talk about being a victim of your own success....
  - agildehaus 9y ago
    I've been part of the BeOS community since 1998 and I have no idea what he's talking about. Other than R5 Personal Edition, x86 BeOS was never free. Be failed because it existed in the times of Microsoft dominance, Apple didn't buy it, and it had some major technical deficiencies (many of which have been addressed in Haiku).
    - adamnemecek 9y ago
      Ok I misremembered some things but this is my source https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwij0Ye2wb_XAhUL9GMKHQLZByYQFggoMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fusers.cs.jmu.edu%2Fabzugcx%2FPublic%2FStudent-Produced-Term-Projects%2FOperating-Systems-2003-FALL%2FBeOS-by-Nicole-Chung-Brian-Hoffman-Robert-Robinson-AJ-Schuster-2003-Fall.doc&usg=AOvVaw371lKRhPE7mRIeJWhS6WsV https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
      - agildehaus 9y ago
        That document mentions that R5 Personal Edition had a disk partition size of 512MB. That's disk, not RAM. R5 PE had that partition size because it installed to a 512MB file within your Windows partition, then booted from that file. Personal Edition was meant to give a way to try BeOS without having to have a second drive or do any partitioning. Once booted into it, you could just launch the Installer app and install to any size partition you pleased. Be was essentially dead decently before R5 was released, so I disagree with the author's conclusion.
        adamnemecek 9y ago
        You are right, its been a while and my memory is hazy. It's not that I cant tell them apart, it's more that I read it a couple years ago and it just doesnt come up and I apparently can't be fucked to look up the docs.
- chipotle_coyote 9y ago
  While it's been ~18 years, this doesn't at all sound correct to me. BeOS was a commercial product from its very beginning. There were free "developer release" versions, but it was sold as boxed software from R3 on. The last official release, BeOS R5, had a free version called "BeOS Personal Edition," which ran as an app inside Windows or Linux, but the full version of R5 was still commercial, at $69.95 (with an upgrade discount). I don't recall any licensing requirements pinned to the amount of RAM you had. A large part of what did in BeOS was a combination of Microsoft's OEM licensing requirements and Be's steadfast belief that the only path to success was pre-installation on a major PC brand. IIRC, if you offered Windows pre-installations at all, you had to pay for every machine that Windows could be installed on whether or not it was actually installed, and you couldn't offer machines capable of dual-booting. Be concentrated their efforts on BeIA, an "internet appliance" version of the OS, which was dead in the water -- according to a lawsuit Be filed against Microsoft, MS pressured their OEMs not to partner with Be on both BeOS and BeIA. (Microsoft settled the suit for around $24M, IIRC.) Personally, I think BeOS might have been able to survive as a niche OS if Be had kept their focus solely on it, kept the price competitive with boxed Linux distributions (those were a thing back then), and not been dedicated to the "go big or go home" mantra, but I don't have any inside info to prove (or disprove) that.
  - allenbrunson 9y ago
    I was one of the people who worked at Be, right up to the very end, when the company went out of business, got absorbed into Palm, and I was laid off. I remember all this the same way you do. ... Except that I don't think there is anything they could have done that would have made them successful, at that point in time, other than possibly not playing hardball when Apple came calling. Microsoft's stranglehold on the industry was just too great.
    - qubex 9y ago
      I just wanted to let you know that to this very day I mourn the loss of Be Inc and BeOS. Whatever work you did there I’d like you to know (that for me at least) it was worth it because it left an enduring impression on those of us that had the privilege to use the system.
- outworlder 9y ago
  Their demise was due to the fact that Apple picked NextStep to base their OS on, not BeOS
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Actually it was more Apple picking up Steve, which ended up leading to an inverted buy from inside.
    - frik 9y ago
      Yes, they picked Steve Jobs, and NeXTSTEP was quite advanced with ObjectOriented-UI and its UI-builder - most of the stuff is still there with a new Theme and called MacOS X. Companies like Pixar used NeXTSTEP. BeOS was quite interesting too. Though it lacked multi-user support, and had a small user community. Its BeFS filesytem had an indexing feature that dwarfs all desktop search features even today - and Windows "Cairo" (1996) / WinFS (2006) that tried to accomplish it too, turned out as vamporeware. Both NeXTSTEP and BeOS were ahead with multimedia support like real time video player and WYSIWYG editor.
      - kjhwfc 9y ago
        >vamporeware vampireware, FTFY. As in "this vampireware is invisible, and people think it don't real".
        frik 9y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware "... "Vaporware" was coined by a Microsoft engineer in 1982 to describe the company's Xenix operating system, and first appeared in print in a newsletter by entrepreneur Esther Dyson in 1983. It became popular among writers in the industry as a way to describe products they felt took too long to be released. InfoWorld magazine editor Stewart Alsop helped popularize it by lampooning Bill Gates with a Golden Vaporware award for the late release of his company's first version of Windows in 1985. Vaporware first implied intentional fraud when it was applied to the Ovation office suite in 1983; the suite's demonstration was well received by the press, but the product was never released. ..."
agildehaus 9y ago
I don't see the point making such a comment either, yet you made it. What's so wrong with having multiple options that, in every Haiku thread, someone makes a comment like this?
- vadimberman 9y ago
  Perhaps because there is an actual point in it? How many users will this system have at its peak, in your opinion?
  - agildehaus 9y ago
    You could say literally the same thing about any OS when it was at this stage of development. So what, we should never produce a new operating system ever again?
    - vadimberman 9y ago
      This stage of development is: based on an OS that died quietly over a decade ago. Not exactly "new operating system", isn't it?
      - agildehaus 9y ago
        What a tremendously poor argument. NeXTSTEP never caught on and was a commercial failure. macOS is based on it. Netscape Communicator was open-sourced after it fell to Microsoft and later became Firefox. Not everything that dies deserved to. Successors are not their predecessors. BeOS provided a good base for developers to work towards, so the project wouldn't get bogged down in trying to be "something new".
mmjaa 9y ago
The same has been said countless times over the decades for things like "Unix", or "Linux" or heck .. even Windows in some quarters. I don't think there's anything 'wrong' per se with having alternative operating systems - they may not get mainstream approval, but a lot of what is now mainstream started out as fringe/horizon technology. And in that regard, we ought to encourage the fringe to share their discoveries - it does eventually trickle down. (Disclaimer: you can have my BeBox when you pry it from my cold dead hands..)

I played with BeOS when it was still alive, it was light, nice, and fun, and I miss these cute icons, but frankly, I simply don't see the point of reviving it now.

adamnemecek 9y ago

There an insane amount of stuff to be learned from failures. From my understanding, one of the main reasons behind their demise was their business plan. Version for PCs with <256RAM were free, you paid for 256+MB. However BeOS ran so efficiently that no one ever needed 256+MB so few people bought it.

doesnt_know 9y ago
wow, if that is accurate, talk about being a victim of your own success....
- agildehaus 9y ago
  I've been part of the BeOS community since 1998 and I have no idea what he's talking about. Other than R5 Personal Edition, x86 BeOS was never free. Be failed because it existed in the times of Microsoft dominance, Apple didn't buy it, and it had some major technical deficiencies (many of which have been addressed in Haiku).
  - adamnemecek 9y ago
    Ok I misremembered some things but this is my source https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwij0Ye2wb_XAhUL9GMKHQLZByYQFggoMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fusers.cs.jmu.edu%2Fabzugcx%2FPublic%2FStudent-Produced-Term-Projects%2FOperating-Systems-2003-FALL%2FBeOS-by-Nicole-Chung-Brian-Hoffman-Robert-Robinson-AJ-Schuster-2003-Fall.doc&usg=AOvVaw371lKRhPE7mRIeJWhS6WsV https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
    - agildehaus 9y ago
      That document mentions that R5 Personal Edition had a disk partition size of 512MB. That's disk, not RAM. R5 PE had that partition size because it installed to a 512MB file within your Windows partition, then booted from that file. Personal Edition was meant to give a way to try BeOS without having to have a second drive or do any partitioning. Once booted into it, you could just launch the Installer app and install to any size partition you pleased. Be was essentially dead decently before R5 was released, so I disagree with the author's conclusion.
      - adamnemecek 9y ago
        You are right, its been a while and my memory is hazy. It's not that I cant tell them apart, it's more that I read it a couple years ago and it just doesnt come up and I apparently can't be fucked to look up the docs.
chipotle_coyote 9y ago
While it's been ~18 years, this doesn't at all sound correct to me. BeOS was a commercial product from its very beginning. There were free "developer release" versions, but it was sold as boxed software from R3 on. The last official release, BeOS R5, had a free version called "BeOS Personal Edition," which ran as an app inside Windows or Linux, but the full version of R5 was still commercial, at $69.95 (with an upgrade discount). I don't recall any licensing requirements pinned to the amount of RAM you had. A large part of what did in BeOS was a combination of Microsoft's OEM licensing requirements and Be's steadfast belief that the only path to success was pre-installation on a major PC brand. IIRC, if you offered Windows pre-installations at all, you had to pay for every machine that Windows could be installed on whether or not it was actually installed, and you couldn't offer machines capable of dual-booting. Be concentrated their efforts on BeIA, an "internet appliance" version of the OS, which was dead in the water -- according to a lawsuit Be filed against Microsoft, MS pressured their OEMs not to partner with Be on both BeOS and BeIA. (Microsoft settled the suit for around $24M, IIRC.) Personally, I think BeOS might have been able to survive as a niche OS if Be had kept their focus solely on it, kept the price competitive with boxed Linux distributions (those were a thing back then), and not been dedicated to the "go big or go home" mantra, but I don't have any inside info to prove (or disprove) that.
- allenbrunson 9y ago
  I was one of the people who worked at Be, right up to the very end, when the company went out of business, got absorbed into Palm, and I was laid off. I remember all this the same way you do. ... Except that I don't think there is anything they could have done that would have made them successful, at that point in time, other than possibly not playing hardball when Apple came calling. Microsoft's stranglehold on the industry was just too great.
  - qubex 9y ago
    I just wanted to let you know that to this very day I mourn the loss of Be Inc and BeOS. Whatever work you did there I’d like you to know (that for me at least) it was worth it because it left an enduring impression on those of us that had the privilege to use the system.
outworlder 9y ago
Their demise was due to the fact that Apple picked NextStep to base their OS on, not BeOS
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Actually it was more Apple picking up Steve, which ended up leading to an inverted buy from inside.
  - frik 9y ago
    Yes, they picked Steve Jobs, and NeXTSTEP was quite advanced with ObjectOriented-UI and its UI-builder - most of the stuff is still there with a new Theme and called MacOS X. Companies like Pixar used NeXTSTEP. BeOS was quite interesting too. Though it lacked multi-user support, and had a small user community. Its BeFS filesytem had an indexing feature that dwarfs all desktop search features even today - and Windows "Cairo" (1996) / WinFS (2006) that tried to accomplish it too, turned out as vamporeware. Both NeXTSTEP and BeOS were ahead with multimedia support like real time video player and WYSIWYG editor.
    - kjhwfc 9y ago
      >vamporeware vampireware, FTFY. As in "this vampireware is invisible, and people think it don't real".
      - frik 9y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware "... "Vaporware" was coined by a Microsoft engineer in 1982 to describe the company's Xenix operating system, and first appeared in print in a newsletter by entrepreneur Esther Dyson in 1983. It became popular among writers in the industry as a way to describe products they felt took too long to be released. InfoWorld magazine editor Stewart Alsop helped popularize it by lampooning Bill Gates with a Golden Vaporware award for the late release of his company's first version of Windows in 1985. Vaporware first implied intentional fraud when it was applied to the Ovation office suite in 1983; the suite's demonstration was well received by the press, but the product was never released. ..."

agildehaus 9y ago

I don't see the point making such a comment either, yet you made it. What's so wrong with having multiple options that, in every Haiku thread, someone makes a comment like this?

vadimberman 9y ago
Perhaps because there is an actual point in it? How many users will this system have at its peak, in your opinion?
- agildehaus 9y ago
  You could say literally the same thing about any OS when it was at this stage of development. So what, we should never produce a new operating system ever again?
  - vadimberman 9y ago
    This stage of development is: based on an OS that died quietly over a decade ago. Not exactly "new operating system", isn't it?
    - agildehaus 9y ago
      What a tremendously poor argument. NeXTSTEP never caught on and was a commercial failure. macOS is based on it. Netscape Communicator was open-sourced after it fell to Microsoft and later became Firefox. Not everything that dies deserved to. Successors are not their predecessors. BeOS provided a good base for developers to work towards, so the project wouldn't get bogged down in trying to be "something new".

mmjaa 9y ago

The same has been said countless times over the decades for things like "Unix", or "Linux" or heck .. even Windows in some quarters. I don't think there's anything 'wrong' per se with having alternative operating systems - they may not get mainstream approval, but a lot of what is now mainstream started out as fringe/horizon technology. And in that regard, we ought to encourage the fringe to share their discoveries - it does eventually trickle down. (Disclaimer: you can have my BeBox when you pry it from my cold dead hands..)