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BeOS had multithreading back when that was fairly new for consumer hardware. It was great for media purposes but the OS itself wasn't particularly well-develope
by deadmetheny 9y ago
BeOS had multithreading back when that was fairly new for consumer hardware. It was great for media purposes but the OS itself wasn't particularly well-developed at that point and Be wouldn't drop its overblown asking price, so Apple went with NeXT, and the rest is history.
BeOS is a really neat little OS. I like it a lot, I often wonder how different things would be if they had taken that direction.
- hota_mazi 9y agoFor what it's worth, I think AmigaOS was superior to BeOS in pretty much every way, even as soon as the early 90s. Basically, AmigaOS 1992 was a more advanced operating system than BeOS 1997. Pity Commodore completely squandered their opportunity and Windows 95 killed them dead.
- qubex 9y agoAmigaOS was cooperatively multitasked whereas BeOS was preemptively multitasked, and I don’t think AmigaOS has memory protection (BeOS certainly did). AmigaOS didn’t support multiprocessing either, if I’m not mistaken. The BeFS filesystem was a pretty impressive marvel in terms of metadata and Amiga certainly lacked anything even remotely similar.
- bronson 9y agoBeOS did some tricks with the MMU to catch overruns but didn't have proper memory protection (in 1999 anyway, when I last used it). Any app could scribble on the kernel and hardware devices. This was part of why the graphics felt so flippin fast: appkit just wrote to the GPU & framebuffer itself. No need for any context switches.
- qubex 9y agoThat’s not what I remembered, but upon reflection you’re probably right since lack of multiuser support is difficult to reconcile with a true protected memory model. I’ve still got The BeOS Bible on my bookshelf so I’ll go have a read through the relevant chapters and take a trip down memory lane (ahem) just for nostalgia’s sake.
- bronson 9y agoThinko: I last used BeOS in 1997, not 1999. Curious to hear what you find.
- waddlesplash 9y agoHaiku, BeOS' open-source successor, has proper memory protection and we're still "flippin' fast" when our latency is compared to literally any other OS, so that wasn't the sole reason at any rate.
- hota_mazi 9y ago> AmigaOS was cooperatively multitasked That's incorrect, AmigaOS had been fully preemptively multitasking since Kickstart 1.0, in 1985. It took Windows ten years to get preemptive multitasking and Mac even longer. You are right that AmigaOS never got protected memory, though.
- icedchai 9y agoActually, AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking in 1985. It did lack memory protection, however. I learned C on the Amiga. It made you pretty careful - dereference a bad pointer and you got a "Guru Meditation" error, followed by a reboot.
- qubex 9y agoI never used AmigaOS and despite broadly fitting the demographic I never actually even saw one until a couple of years ago. I should’ve learnt long ago not to make statement about things I don’t know much about. Thanks for the correction.
- icedchai 9y agoIt was a fun platform, especially in the early 90's! Over 20 years later, people are still trying to keep it going... Check out the "Vampire" and "Apollo Core" projects if you have a chance.