16 ms·

Haiku Project

147 points by jordansmithnz 9y ago

of 9y ago
I remember installing this in a VirtualBox around 2008 - cool to see it's still going! I had a friend in my CS program who was really into BeOS.
- erric 9y ago
  In 1999 at a convention in New Orleans, a friend of mine had BeOS 3 or 4 on an x86 and it absolutely was amazing. It booted way faster then Linux or Windows and was quite pretty. A lot of us reminisce for what could have happened with the MacOS. I love OSX. I use it every day and I'm quite happy with it. Still I wonder what the present would be like with a BeOS based system instead.
- lr 9y ago
  I bought a Performa 6360 (the lowest-end Mac that could run the BeOS at the time) so I could run the BeOS. Even the installer blew me away (you could move the dialog around while it was installing, and it was updating live on the screen). I was like, "You can do that with this hardware?!" This was 1997. I really loved that OS.
phren0logy 9y ago
A fitting link to follow up the Apple / Next merger article that's gotten so much traffic today. At the time I really thought Apple was making the wrong move. Who knows what BeOS would have been today had Apple picked it up, but the wisdom of going with something *nix-based seems to have been a great decision.
- conception 9y ago
  Or if Microsoft didn't actively attempt to destroy it. MS got hit with lawsuits because of Netscape, but their targeted destruction of BeOS was so much worse considering, at the time, BeOS was such a better system that just couldn't fight back.
  - erric 9y ago
    This. Wasn't Dell actively installing BeOS on systems but due to Windows licensing restrictions couldn't make that apparent to end users?
  - nickbauman 9y ago
    There's (perhaps apocryphal) stories that Gates was terrified of what a Unix with a decent UI might do to upend Windows.
    - zitterbewegung 9y ago
      It’s weird that Linux won as a platform on mobile and it was partially due to Apple making it so that phone carriers had less influence on phones so the carriers needed something to claw it back with .
      - Yetanfou 9y ago
        Linux 'winning' on mobile has nothing to do with Apple doing anything at all. It 'won' mostly because it was chosen as the base for Android as well as several other mobile platforms (Intel's Moblin, Nokia's Maemo, the combined offspring called Meego, Samsung's Tizen, etc). Android 'won' for the same reason that Windows 'won', it was available for all to use in more or less any way they saw fit. The carriers had nothing to do with Android 'winning', that is mostly due to the availability of affordable unlocked devices from a multitude of sources, a market which Apple can not and does not want to touch as the profit margins and opportunities for lock-in are too low.
    - eesmith 9y ago
      If so, that would have been NeXTStep. BeOS was (mostly?) POSIX compatible, but was less of a Unix than Linux. John Perry Barlow described it: "I have a NeXT machine -- I expect a boo or two -- that's as close to UNIX as I've been able to get, and that's kind of like UNIX with training wheels by Armani." http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565929920.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565929920.do
- dilap 9y ago
  I remember thinking it was a terrible decision at the time too. It's hard to even imagine how different the world would look today if they'd gone for BeOS; I think Apple would almost certainly have died or been acquired, and we'd all probably still be using a mix of feature phones and whatever craziness Blackberry was up to. (BeOS was really sweet though! So damn snappy. Even on way way way more powerful hardware today, macOS is still not generally snappy. It's a shame.)
  - waddlesplash 9y ago
    Haiku is still "damn snappy", whether on a 15-year-old Athlon XP or the latest Core i7 (neither of which BeOS will even boot on). You should give it a try sometime :-)
  - cmrdporcupine 9y ago
    The whole "Apple needed to buy an OS to be saved" thing was always hogwash -- they bought NeXT under the auspices of "just" porting OpenStep to PowerPC and Mac-ifying it ... but in reality that took them 5 years to accomplish. I'm pretty sure that in 5 years pre-Jobs Apple could have shipped the Copland project, which had reached Developer Release status just prior to Jobs coming on board and its cancellation. I don't think NeXT brought anything tech wise to Apple that Apple couldn't have done already. In reality it was a Steve Jobs/Avi Tevanian coup that led to the mass layoff of a whole lot of people and the garbage binning of a lot of good tech (Newton, OpenDoc, Dylan just to name a few). In any case if not for the iPod/iPhone/iTunes jump, Apple would probably be dead by now. They were in trouble until the revenue and brand cachet from that started to roll in. What I mean to say by this is: Apple needed neither BeOS or NeXTstep. They needed urgently management discipline and to ship the decent tech they already had. Jobs came on board and provided discipline, killed a bunch of expenses, and kept a lifeline going through the iMac sales, but wasted that money on the OS X transition when they probably could have just finished Copland in that time. But hey, I wasn't there, so...
    - dilap 9y ago
      Yeah, definitely, the focus that Jobs' provided was far more important than the tech. I doubt Copland was going anywhere, though, no matter how much time they gave it. The underlying tech of NextStep was just so much better than the classic macOS assembly/pascal, cooperative-multi-tasking, single-memory-sapce, GetNextEvent() universe. Just too hard a problem to try to modernize while still so closely tied to MacOS in your mind...they needed to make a clean break.
Apocryphon 9y ago
Imagine if BeOS had been ported to mobile devices. What would it look like? How would it have run? Not so insane, since this was attempted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeIA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeIA And also this: https://mondaynote.com/the-operating-system-fountain-of-youth-ios-39bc1a3ce004 https://mondaynote.com/the-operating-system-fountain-of-yout...
- protomyth 9y ago
  Well, there was a bit of hope. Palm bought BeOS, spun it off with PalmSource which all eventually got bought by ACCESS. It was hoped Palm would use BeOS as the basis for new operating systems but it never quite happened with the failed Palm OS Cobalt. Palm, going its own way, eventually created WebOS which is now owned by LG.
nickbauman 9y ago
What I loved about BeOS was the multithreaded user interface. Imagine and office with a single computer with dozens of gigs of RAM and 128 cores could do where everyone could collaborate on the same screen (50 feet wide) at once. Kinda like SunRay on steroids.
- bringtheaction 9y ago
  Yes! I've been thinking about this occasionally. I have decided that when I get time I will build on FreeBSD (my favorite operating system) and make a shared screen multi user graphical desktop that supports multiple keyboards and mouses at the same time, and there will be a permission system so that people are only allowed to interact or obscure the windows of others if they get their permission.
  - nickbauman 9y ago
    But there's only one GUI thread. It wouldn't work.
    - bringtheaction 9y ago
      I'll write my own GUI layer from scratch.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  That sounds like a godawful nightmare.
  - nickbauman 9y ago
    Until you personally need 64 cores for a particular calculation while everyone else is just checking their emails...
- kirykl 9y ago
  sounds like a mainframe
k__ 9y ago
Wasn't Zeta a BeOS? Here in Germany we had much fuzz about it, because it was sold via TV commercials. Somehow noone was really sure if they had an acutal BeOS licence and really access to the source, eventually it died.
- eesmith 9y ago
  "Zeta was a commercially available operating system based on the BeOS R5.1 codebase." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
- frik 9y ago
  Zeta was illegal! magnussoft/yellowTAB never had a license but distributed a rebranded BeOS 5. After a years long drama they eventually ceased operation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnussoft_ZETA#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnussoft_ZETA#Criticism Excerpt from Wikipedia article: "Zeta had no legal rights to distribute the BeOS software, much less open source any of it, as the rumours had it. [...] The main reason that there hasn't been a public statement previously is that dealing with this matter legally, in Germany, is an expensive undertaking and--given the apparently small amount of funding behind Zeta in its various incarnations--we'd only be in a position to spend significant money and legal time to make a point. [...] We have sent "cease and desist" letters to YellowTab on a number of occasions, which have been uniformly ignored. If Herr Korz [Bernd Korz, Former CEO of yellowTAB] feels that he holds a legitimate license to the BeOS code he's been using, we're completely unaware of it, and I'd be fascinated to see him produce any substantiation for that claim.” — David Schlesinger, Director, Open Source Technologies. ACCESS Co., Ltd., Access 'Completely Unaware' of Legitimate Zeta License
kgraves 9y ago
It seems that this project is a free and open-source inspiration of the BeOS rather than aiming to be a complete reimplementation of it. Just like what Linux was to UN*X and ReactOS was to Windows. But, judging from its recent progress: package management repos, 64 bit support and the recent software ports at ‘HaikuPorts[0]’, it seems to be already more advanced than BeOS was and already has a lot more software since its last official alpha release (5 years ago.) But yeah a pretty interesting OS, but I’d wait for it’s so called ’beta’ when ever it arrives. I’d like to try this on a Raspberry Pi or another ARM board soon. If only it attracted more developers though. PS. (Its actually 'Haiku' not 'Haiku OS' ;) ) [0] https://github.com/haikuports https://github.com/haikuports
- waddlesplash 9y ago
  (I'm one of the developers of Haiku -- I manage the website and am one of the leads at HaikuPorts in addition to committing to the main source tree.) The ARM port is stalled due to a lack of developer time, and has been for over a year now... The kernel is mostly ported and initializes the framebuffer but then stalls when it gets to HID and storage initialization because the USB stack isn't ported yet (iirc). Patches wanted... but we won't have much time to spend on it ourselves anytime soon. Yes, the beta release should be coming "real soon now". We're down to 2 blockers, both of which should not be that complicated to fix. And yes, it is indeed "Haiku" not "Haiku OS". :)
  - monocasa 9y ago
    Is there any documentation on what the current status of the ARM port is?
    - waddlesplash 9y ago
      I know there is https://github.com/haiku/haiku/tree/master/docs/develop/ports/arm https://github.com/haiku/haiku/tree/master/docs/develop/port... but I think it's out of date at this point. Check the commit logs for the "arm" directories in the kernel, and then ask the developers responsible for that on IRC (Freenode#haiku). I don't know much about the ARM port in specific, but I'm very familiar with our build system and development model in general, so if you have questions about that I can help there.
killjoywashere 9y ago
Is this still considered alpha? Last I tried this on a dell laptop it would crash everytime I tried something really banal, I can't remember what. Like visit Google with the browser.
- waddlesplash 9y ago
  We're very near "beta", at least in the nightly builds The browser is much more polished (it plays YouTube out of the box, etc.) And kernel crashes are at least somewhat rare.
  - killjoywashere 9y ago
    thanks!
andy_ppp 9y ago
I couldn’t have helped but want to rename the NS prefix from all over the OS APIs (NSString, NSUrl, NSWhatever, etc.) but it feels good to me that it’s still there. Almost as if no software is ever perfect...
phlakaton 9y ago
A certain Be executive once quipped that "we don't engage in necrophilia." And yet, here we are... ;-) It still gives me a grin to see this project plugging forward, funky 1990s-flavored C++ programming kits and all. :-)
- waddlesplash 9y ago
  Haiku isn't Be, we're free to be necrophiliacs. :P
danans 9y ago
If this ever gets past Beta someone has to recreate the original BeBox to go with it, perhaps with a dual core CPU with each core's activity (?) mapped to the LED cpu activity indicators on the front of the box. I still miss mine ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox
- waddlesplash 9y ago
  There was some project which was going to do that, using the MinnowBoard Max (x86-based): https://twitter.com/20thABBx https://twitter.com/20thABBx -- but we haven't heard from them in over a year now :(
- peatmoss 9y ago
  Man, I’m not sure BeOS was ever on the same technical footing as NeXT, but those BeBox machines were magical. I remember getting to play with one a little—an Internet acquaintance I met through IRC had one, was home on college break, and my fragile little mind was totally blown. I remember watching the fractal generator render the Mandelbrot set and top out both CPU LED bars. In my naïveté I figured that software everywhere would soon be making use of multiple processors, increasing performance linearly, and with no effort. I guess we all have lots of cores now, but writing software to use them all is still a PIA. Those felt like magical times, with one juggernaut (Windows) and a sense that any of the new computing platforms could upend everything. Nowadays, I feel less of that excitement in spite of being able to credibly choose between Linux, Mac, Windows. Maybe that’s more a function of my age than anything else. Or maybe the hegemony of mediocre web apps has just delivered us into another period of bland sameness.
solarkraft 9y ago
I was going to reference the "is computer on fire" and "is computer turned on" API calls, but couldn't find them in the documentation anymore :s All that's left seems to be this page: https://www.haiku-os.org/is_computer_on_fire/ https://www.haiku-os.org/is_computer_on_fire/
- waddlesplash 9y ago
  Oh don't worry, they're still around: https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/headers/os/kernel/OS.h#L589 https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/headers/os/kernel... :) Our own API documentation is still a massive work in progress. The old Be Book should still have them documented, though.
jason_slack 9y ago
Some of us spent $2,000usd on a BeBox :-) I learned so much about c++, SMP, threading, etc.
cgb223 9y ago
How does this compare to Linux performance wise? What’s the advantage to Haiku?

147 points by jordansmithnz 9y ago

of 9y ago

I remember installing this in a VirtualBox around 2008 - cool to see it's still going! I had a friend in my CS program who was really into BeOS.

erric 9y ago
In 1999 at a convention in New Orleans, a friend of mine had BeOS 3 or 4 on an x86 and it absolutely was amazing. It booted way faster then Linux or Windows and was quite pretty. A lot of us reminisce for what could have happened with the MacOS. I love OSX. I use it every day and I'm quite happy with it. Still I wonder what the present would be like with a BeOS based system instead.
lr 9y ago
I bought a Performa 6360 (the lowest-end Mac that could run the BeOS at the time) so I could run the BeOS. Even the installer blew me away (you could move the dialog around while it was installing, and it was updating live on the screen). I was like, "You can do that with this hardware?!" This was 1997. I really loved that OS.

phren0logy 9y ago

A fitting link to follow up the Apple / Next merger article that's gotten so much traffic today. At the time I really thought Apple was making the wrong move. Who knows what BeOS would have been today had Apple picked it up, but the wisdom of going with something *nix-based seems to have been a great decision.

conception 9y ago
Or if Microsoft didn't actively attempt to destroy it. MS got hit with lawsuits because of Netscape, but their targeted destruction of BeOS was so much worse considering, at the time, BeOS was such a better system that just couldn't fight back.
- erric 9y ago
  This. Wasn't Dell actively installing BeOS on systems but due to Windows licensing restrictions couldn't make that apparent to end users?
- nickbauman 9y ago
  There's (perhaps apocryphal) stories that Gates was terrified of what a Unix with a decent UI might do to upend Windows.
  - zitterbewegung 9y ago
    It’s weird that Linux won as a platform on mobile and it was partially due to Apple making it so that phone carriers had less influence on phones so the carriers needed something to claw it back with .
    - Yetanfou 9y ago
      Linux 'winning' on mobile has nothing to do with Apple doing anything at all. It 'won' mostly because it was chosen as the base for Android as well as several other mobile platforms (Intel's Moblin, Nokia's Maemo, the combined offspring called Meego, Samsung's Tizen, etc). Android 'won' for the same reason that Windows 'won', it was available for all to use in more or less any way they saw fit. The carriers had nothing to do with Android 'winning', that is mostly due to the availability of affordable unlocked devices from a multitude of sources, a market which Apple can not and does not want to touch as the profit margins and opportunities for lock-in are too low.
  - eesmith 9y ago
    If so, that would have been NeXTStep. BeOS was (mostly?) POSIX compatible, but was less of a Unix than Linux. John Perry Barlow described it: "I have a NeXT machine -- I expect a boo or two -- that's as close to UNIX as I've been able to get, and that's kind of like UNIX with training wheels by Armani." http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565929920.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565929920.do
dilap 9y ago
I remember thinking it was a terrible decision at the time too. It's hard to even imagine how different the world would look today if they'd gone for BeOS; I think Apple would almost certainly have died or been acquired, and we'd all probably still be using a mix of feature phones and whatever craziness Blackberry was up to. (BeOS was really sweet though! So damn snappy. Even on way way way more powerful hardware today, macOS is still not generally snappy. It's a shame.)
- waddlesplash 9y ago
  Haiku is still "damn snappy", whether on a 15-year-old Athlon XP or the latest Core i7 (neither of which BeOS will even boot on). You should give it a try sometime :-)
- cmrdporcupine 9y ago
  The whole "Apple needed to buy an OS to be saved" thing was always hogwash -- they bought NeXT under the auspices of "just" porting OpenStep to PowerPC and Mac-ifying it ... but in reality that took them 5 years to accomplish. I'm pretty sure that in 5 years pre-Jobs Apple could have shipped the Copland project, which had reached Developer Release status just prior to Jobs coming on board and its cancellation. I don't think NeXT brought anything tech wise to Apple that Apple couldn't have done already. In reality it was a Steve Jobs/Avi Tevanian coup that led to the mass layoff of a whole lot of people and the garbage binning of a lot of good tech (Newton, OpenDoc, Dylan just to name a few). In any case if not for the iPod/iPhone/iTunes jump, Apple would probably be dead by now. They were in trouble until the revenue and brand cachet from that started to roll in. What I mean to say by this is: Apple needed neither BeOS or NeXTstep. They needed urgently management discipline and to ship the decent tech they already had. Jobs came on board and provided discipline, killed a bunch of expenses, and kept a lifeline going through the iMac sales, but wasted that money on the OS X transition when they probably could have just finished Copland in that time. But hey, I wasn't there, so...
  - dilap 9y ago
    Yeah, definitely, the focus that Jobs' provided was far more important than the tech. I doubt Copland was going anywhere, though, no matter how much time they gave it. The underlying tech of NextStep was just so much better than the classic macOS assembly/pascal, cooperative-multi-tasking, single-memory-sapce, GetNextEvent() universe. Just too hard a problem to try to modernize while still so closely tied to MacOS in your mind...they needed to make a clean break.

Apocryphon 9y ago

Imagine if BeOS had been ported to mobile devices. What would it look like? How would it have run? Not so insane, since this was attempted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeIA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeIA And also this: https://mondaynote.com/the-operating-system-fountain-of-youth-ios-39bc1a3ce004 https://mondaynote.com/the-operating-system-fountain-of-yout...

protomyth 9y ago
Well, there was a bit of hope. Palm bought BeOS, spun it off with PalmSource which all eventually got bought by ACCESS. It was hoped Palm would use BeOS as the basis for new operating systems but it never quite happened with the failed Palm OS Cobalt. Palm, going its own way, eventually created WebOS which is now owned by LG.

nickbauman 9y ago

What I loved about BeOS was the multithreaded user interface. Imagine and office with a single computer with dozens of gigs of RAM and 128 cores could do where everyone could collaborate on the same screen (50 feet wide) at once. Kinda like SunRay on steroids.

bringtheaction 9y ago
Yes! I've been thinking about this occasionally. I have decided that when I get time I will build on FreeBSD (my favorite operating system) and make a shared screen multi user graphical desktop that supports multiple keyboards and mouses at the same time, and there will be a permission system so that people are only allowed to interact or obscure the windows of others if they get their permission.
- nickbauman 9y ago
  But there's only one GUI thread. It wouldn't work.
  - bringtheaction 9y ago
    I'll write my own GUI layer from scratch.
nerdponx 9y ago
That sounds like a godawful nightmare.
- nickbauman 9y ago
  Until you personally need 64 cores for a particular calculation while everyone else is just checking their emails...
kirykl 9y ago
sounds like a mainframe

k__ 9y ago

Wasn't Zeta a BeOS? Here in Germany we had much fuzz about it, because it was sold via TV commercials. Somehow noone was really sure if they had an acutal BeOS licence and really access to the source, eventually it died.

eesmith 9y ago
"Zeta was a commercially available operating system based on the BeOS R5.1 codebase." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
frik 9y ago
Zeta was illegal! magnussoft/yellowTAB never had a license but distributed a rebranded BeOS 5. After a years long drama they eventually ceased operation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnussoft_ZETA#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnussoft_ZETA#Criticism Excerpt from Wikipedia article: "Zeta had no legal rights to distribute the BeOS software, much less open source any of it, as the rumours had it. [...] The main reason that there hasn't been a public statement previously is that dealing with this matter legally, in Germany, is an expensive undertaking and--given the apparently small amount of funding behind Zeta in its various incarnations--we'd only be in a position to spend significant money and legal time to make a point. [...] We have sent "cease and desist" letters to YellowTab on a number of occasions, which have been uniformly ignored. If Herr Korz [Bernd Korz, Former CEO of yellowTAB] feels that he holds a legitimate license to the BeOS code he's been using, we're completely unaware of it, and I'd be fascinated to see him produce any substantiation for that claim.” — David Schlesinger, Director, Open Source Technologies. ACCESS Co., Ltd., Access 'Completely Unaware' of Legitimate Zeta License

kgraves 9y ago

It seems that this project is a free and open-source inspiration of the BeOS rather than aiming to be a complete reimplementation of it. Just like what Linux was to UN*X and ReactOS was to Windows. But, judging from its recent progress: package management repos, 64 bit support and the recent software ports at ‘HaikuPorts[0]’, it seems to be already more advanced than BeOS was and already has a lot more software since its last official alpha release (5 years ago.) But yeah a pretty interesting OS, but I’d wait for it’s so called ’beta’ when ever it arrives. I’d like to try this on a Raspberry Pi or another ARM board soon. If only it attracted more developers though. PS. (Its actually 'Haiku' not 'Haiku OS' ;) ) [0] https://github.com/haikuports https://github.com/haikuports

waddlesplash 9y ago
(I'm one of the developers of Haiku -- I manage the website and am one of the leads at HaikuPorts in addition to committing to the main source tree.) The ARM port is stalled due to a lack of developer time, and has been for over a year now... The kernel is mostly ported and initializes the framebuffer but then stalls when it gets to HID and storage initialization because the USB stack isn't ported yet (iirc). Patches wanted... but we won't have much time to spend on it ourselves anytime soon. Yes, the beta release should be coming "real soon now". We're down to 2 blockers, both of which should not be that complicated to fix. And yes, it is indeed "Haiku" not "Haiku OS". :)
- monocasa 9y ago
  Is there any documentation on what the current status of the ARM port is?
  - waddlesplash 9y ago
    I know there is https://github.com/haiku/haiku/tree/master/docs/develop/ports/arm https://github.com/haiku/haiku/tree/master/docs/develop/port... but I think it's out of date at this point. Check the commit logs for the "arm" directories in the kernel, and then ask the developers responsible for that on IRC (Freenode#haiku). I don't know much about the ARM port in specific, but I'm very familiar with our build system and development model in general, so if you have questions about that I can help there.

killjoywashere 9y ago

Is this still considered alpha? Last I tried this on a dell laptop it would crash everytime I tried something really banal, I can't remember what. Like visit Google with the browser.

waddlesplash 9y ago
We're very near "beta", at least in the nightly builds The browser is much more polished (it plays YouTube out of the box, etc.) And kernel crashes are at least somewhat rare.
- killjoywashere 9y ago
  thanks!

andy_ppp 9y ago

I couldn’t have helped but want to rename the NS prefix from all over the OS APIs (NSString, NSUrl, NSWhatever, etc.) but it feels good to me that it’s still there. Almost as if no software is ever perfect...

phlakaton 9y ago

A certain Be executive once quipped that "we don't engage in necrophilia." And yet, here we are... ;-) It still gives me a grin to see this project plugging forward, funky 1990s-flavored C++ programming kits and all. :-)

waddlesplash 9y ago
Haiku isn't Be, we're free to be necrophiliacs. :P

danans 9y ago

If this ever gets past Beta someone has to recreate the original BeBox to go with it, perhaps with a dual core CPU with each core's activity (?) mapped to the LED cpu activity indicators on the front of the box. I still miss mine ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox

waddlesplash 9y ago
There was some project which was going to do that, using the MinnowBoard Max (x86-based): https://twitter.com/20thABBx https://twitter.com/20thABBx -- but we haven't heard from them in over a year now :(
peatmoss 9y ago
Man, I’m not sure BeOS was ever on the same technical footing as NeXT, but those BeBox machines were magical. I remember getting to play with one a little—an Internet acquaintance I met through IRC had one, was home on college break, and my fragile little mind was totally blown. I remember watching the fractal generator render the Mandelbrot set and top out both CPU LED bars. In my naïveté I figured that software everywhere would soon be making use of multiple processors, increasing performance linearly, and with no effort. I guess we all have lots of cores now, but writing software to use them all is still a PIA. Those felt like magical times, with one juggernaut (Windows) and a sense that any of the new computing platforms could upend everything. Nowadays, I feel less of that excitement in spite of being able to credibly choose between Linux, Mac, Windows. Maybe that’s more a function of my age than anything else. Or maybe the hegemony of mediocre web apps has just delivered us into another period of bland sameness.

solarkraft 9y ago

I was going to reference the "is computer on fire" and "is computer turned on" API calls, but couldn't find them in the documentation anymore :s All that's left seems to be this page: https://www.haiku-os.org/is_computer_on_fire/ https://www.haiku-os.org/is_computer_on_fire/

waddlesplash 9y ago
Oh don't worry, they're still around: https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/headers/os/kernel/OS.h#L589 https://github.com/haiku/haiku/blob/master/headers/os/kernel... :) Our own API documentation is still a massive work in progress. The old Be Book should still have them documented, though.

jason_slack 9y ago

Some of us spent $2,000usd on a BeBox :-) I learned so much about c++, SMP, threading, etc.

cgb223 9y ago

How does this compare to Linux performance wise? What’s the advantage to Haiku?