6 ms·

Antique BeOS Content by Scot Hacker (2011)

112 points by eadmund 9y ago

xrd 9y ago
I love these quotes from the "BeOS Heads for the Mainstream" article of April, 1999: "Other important languages, such as perl, have also been ported and are fully functional." "Thus, BeOS applications are currently scriptable from both bash and Python." 18 years ago. Perl and Python.
- xrd 9y ago
  If you wanted to learn bash scripting, there is some fun stuff in here: http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/24-scripting_the_bfs/ http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/24-scripting_the_bfs/ $ ThisCity=$(catattr META:city "$This Person" | cut -f3 -d:) The value of $ThisCity is now "Munster Hamlet" whenever the script is passing over the file "Walter Mitty."
- kbp 9y ago
  > 18 years ago. Perl and Python. Perl 18 years ago is pretty standard.
Apocryphon 9y ago
Hope the hobbyist interest in Haiku will grow over time.
- rcarmo 9y ago
  Eventually the beta will ship (probably this quarter) and there will be a few folk trying it out in earnest. Since the browser mostly works, I expect it to be rather popular as such things go...
  - tialaramex 9y ago
    "probably this quarter" could have been written any time in the last five years and been just as likely to come true.
    - rcarmo 9y ago
      Let's BePositive :)
      - snvzz 9y ago
        webpositive :)
    - bebop 9y ago
      The beta is very likely to happen by Q2 this year. All of the release blockers are pretty much done. The big blocker was getting the package manager in shape, and setting up official build bots and repositories. These are done now. I am optimistic that the beta branch will happen in the next month or so.
rcarmo 9y ago
I remember reading most of these and buying the BeOS CD (which I still have). It was fun for a while, but I ended up moving to the Mac full-time. Funny how the 4:3 video windows look dated these days.
- duncan_bayne 9y ago
  Huh. I'm pining for 4:3 screen for a development laptop. My main use case is coding, not watching movies :)
  - wowtip 9y ago
    16:10 screen tilted is really nice for text / coding
    - Y_Y 9y ago
      I find doing that to my laptop makes typing more difficult.
      - wowtip 9y ago
        Just a matter of adjusting your typing habits, and finding a laptop with 16:10 screen :)
    - module0000 9y ago
      FWIW, several of the google-made chromebooks are 3:2 ratio - it's pretty nice.
  - masklinn 9y ago
    Indeed. The "tallest" resolution for laptops these days the rare 3:2 (surface laptops, possibly also the HP Spectre x2), followed by the odd 16:10 (actually is there any laptop manufacturer using 16:10 other than Apple?). 16:10 or 16:9 have the convenience that (at fixed diagonal) they have good support for multiple columns, but this comes at a severe cost to vertical space & total surface area. Though IIRC for some types of FPS widescreen resolutions is also good (as long as the FOV is configurable) as it gives a wider field of view.
lloeki 9y ago
Submission typo: seems like the page title has it spelled "Scot", not "Scott".
- allenbrunson 9y ago
  Nope, not a typo. That's how Scot Hacker spells his name.
  - klez 9y ago
    lloeki was referring to the submission's title here on HN. The submission spelled the name as Scott, and it's been corrected after lloeki's posted.
kalenx 9y ago
Funny how he talks about TiVo well before the advent of GPLv3, but as a victim: > From the stance of a commercial vendor creating a commercial product, the open source world holds other barbs. For example, if components of your system link against libraries that fall under the GPL, you may be forced to release your own system -- or parts of it -- back to the community as open source software. In other words, building a proprietary solution on top of Linux may mean being required to expose the company jewels to the competition. Witness TiVo, who manufacture a time-shifting hardware/software solution for television consumers. Because TiVo is based on Linux, the company's modifications to the kernel are available for anyone to download -- any competitor can emerge at any time, packaging up and selling a variant of Tivo's hard work. One could almost forgive him to say something like that in 99, but the ones who are still repeating the exact same reasoning today should probably think twice...
- erric 9y ago
  To be fair, these articles are from 1999 - 2001.
- Fnoord 9y ago
  That's just an argumentum ad misericordiam (appeal to pity, sob story). These modifications to the Linux kernel weren't even the core of the TiVo product, and the TiVo product was an end user solution consisting of hardware, software, and support (so a full stack, like an Apple TV or an Nvidia Shield). He's also ignoring the patent argument, and the fact that the Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2 or later (EDIT: I stand corrected; licensed under GPLv2. That doesn't change the point though). His argument wasn't rare back in those days though (we're talking about a time where Microsoft was still dominant and actively hampering the FOSS movement), and it was an argument for BSD license as well. The way companies have worked around GPLv2 and GPLv3 is Web 2.0/3.0: HTTP(S) and HTML/JS being proprietary software, though the source is readable, and the entire stack behind it (ie. akin to LAMP) which generates the data having the ability to be part of a closed source or proprietary ecosystem. They furthermore locked it down with things like paywalls, apps (instead of website or PWA which might give the users some power back). In such a world, how can us mere mortal users even verify things like GDPR? The FSF foresaw this, btw, and IIRC (at the very least free software advocates foresaw it) considered having the GPLv3 apply on protocols like HTTP(S). That didn't fly though, and resulted in obvious backfire as well because it went against the business model of many for profits...
t0mek 9y ago
Interesting mention on the BeOS-based IPAD prototype in 1999: > Be has quietly been planning their own version of the perfect low-cost, easy-to-use, dedicated media device. Be's IPAD (Internet Personal Access Device)* > [...] > * According to hints dropped in a recent newsletter, Be may be casting about for a catchier moniker than "IPAD." http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/07-IPAD/ http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/07-IPAD/
wowtip 9y ago
The last article is a bit depressing. But also a good read for millenials and such who have a hard time understanding why some of us older guys really dislike Microsoft. http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/
- allenbrunson 9y ago
  Indeed! I was working at Be Inc at the point when they were absorbed by Palm and went out of business. Along about 1998, I decided I'd had enough of Microsoft's antics, and started looking for an alternative OS ecosystem I could participate in. I tried a lot of things, and wound up on BeOS. I'd probably still be there, if Microsoft hadn't killed it.
- executesorder66 9y ago
  > have a hard time understanding why some of us older guys really dislike Microsoft There's lots of recent reasons to really hate Microsoft now. - Forcing Windows 10 on users. - Forcing telemetry on people and making it almost impossible to disable. - Saying they <3 Linux, but refusing to port their actual good products (MSO, or Visual Studio) to Linux. So that they can keep their vendor lock-in. - Not adhering to their own standards, to make it difficult for Office documents to inter-operate with other office suites. - Windows 10 switched to a rolling release model, which is nice. But the updates are forced, so that fucks you over as a user, because you can never be sure if your system is stable. edit:formatting
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
    > Windows 10 switched to a rolling release model, which is nice. I disagree. Not only are constant changes destabilizing to the user, they're destabilizing to developers too. I really don't get why so many people (Linux Desktop users especially, so maybe they're all webdevs?) love them so much. Once I have a system set up for my workflow, I don't want it to go and screw it up by changing things unnecessarily.
    - jjrh 9y ago
Crontab 9y ago
In addition to the BeOS Bible, Scot Hacker also created the BeOS Tip Server, which was a great resource at the time. He also wrote a book for O'Reilly on MP3 (MP3: The Definitive Guide) that I found very useful. And he created RipEnc, a BeOS/Bash shell script to rip CDs to MP3 while making use of BeOS metadata. After I left BeOS behind, I haven't heard his name very often, but I still appreciate his advocacy for BeOS.
- qubex 9y ago
  I still have his The BeOS Bible on my bookshelf. I don’t know why, really. (For context, I also have Inside Windows 2000 and Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach, all of which are pretty dated.)
  - rcarmo 9y ago
    Me too. It was a nice enough read, but it sticks out between Singh's book on OS X and Cutler's NT magnum opus...
- grahams 9y ago
  Don't forget he was a major contributor to BeNews (as was I, full disclosure) one of the major Be news sites of the time... It's a shame all of the BeNews content was lost to a database failure, though you can still find bits and pieces in the Wayback Machine..
natecavanaugh 9y ago
I remember reading about BeOS and seeing demos during 2000-2001, but I always wondered a few things. One item of curiosity was how they were able to so efficiently handle media with such a light footprint? What were the trade-offs? For devices like tablets, it seems like it would be a godsend. Also, did any of the innovations make their way into things we use today? Palm bought their tech, but did any of the media tech make it out? Or is it just an artifact from an earlier age with not much applicability to modern day needs?
- allenbrunson 9y ago
  I worked at Be for almost a year, and used BeOS for a couple of years before that. I am not an expert, but I can mention a couple of things. The biggest one was: freedom from backward compatibility. You can't comprehend how much cruft you are drowning in, in your typical OS, until you are free from it. Coming to BeOS from Windows, as I did, it felt like 2,000 pounds was lifted off my shoulders. BeOS was free to fully embrace some modern technologies that had been bolted on to older operating systems as an afterthought. The biggest one was multi-threading. Having spent years on earlier operating systems, I can say that all of them have a stunted idea of multi-threading, compared to BeOS. Typically, you are forced to run your user interface in your main thread, and you have to run background tasks in background threads, and invent ways to communicate between the two. Contrast BeOS: every single window runs in its own thread. Think about that for a minute: If you write a BeOS app that has two or more windows, surprise, your app is multi-threaded. Whether you like it or not! A lot of programmers, coming from older operating systems, very much did not like it. Personally, I came to embrace this as BeOS' greatest strength. Communicating between windows was pretty natural: just drop events into each other's event queues, which were of course thread-safe. Unfortunately, the early architects of the system made their own set of poor decisions that led to a new round of cruft. The worst of these was tying themselves to the ABI of a particular C++ compiler. GCC version 2.9x, I think. In the last year of Be's existence, we were really feeling the pain of this. The compiler we were shackled to was many years out of date. If we switched to a modern compiler, it would have a different ABI, and all older software that couldn't be recompiled would have been instantly broken. Nonetheless, there was a vocal minority of engineers inside Be who argued for doing just that. We weren't focused on external users at that point, just internet appliances, so we could have gotten away with it. But we were all BeOS users ourselves, so we would have lost a lot of useful apps that way.
memsom 9y ago
I was heavily in to BeOS. I read Scott's BeOS Bible cover to cover. I had most of the other books (The BeOS API gude, Advanced topics, Programming the BeOS, Practical Filesystem Design) and also had a BeBox (a 66MHz model) and a PowerMac 9500/180MP (Dual processor) to run the OS on. I had a lot of fun. I advocated PowerPC back when the trend was towards Intel and I still mess about with the OS occasionaly ( https://github.com/memsom/mwobdec https://github.com/memsom/mwobdec .) I had a BeIA device and had a few versions of BeIA running on various other devices. It was pretty much just BeOS without the Tracker desktop and with a slightly different file system. Take a look at Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeIA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeIA - I wrote a lot of the BeIA info back in the day on there, especially the stuff about the CFS and exe compression.) The DT-300 Webpad I had was nothing really like an iPad (it was running a Geode from NationalSemi and booted from a compact flash card.) But you can see where the tech was heading.
memsom 9y ago
Anyone who enjoys this should also take a look at this: the Be Newsletter archive : https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/ https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/ I read these all back in the day. They are an amazing time capsule for the BeOS and what was going on at Be during the mid - late 90's and early Noughtiess.

112 points by eadmund 9y ago

xrd 9y ago

I love these quotes from the "BeOS Heads for the Mainstream" article of April, 1999: "Other important languages, such as perl, have also been ported and are fully functional." "Thus, BeOS applications are currently scriptable from both bash and Python." 18 years ago. Perl and Python.

xrd 9y ago
If you wanted to learn bash scripting, there is some fun stuff in here: http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/24-scripting_the_bfs/ http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/24-scripting_the_bfs/ $ ThisCity=$(catattr META:city "$This Person" | cut -f3 -d:) The value of $ThisCity is now "Munster Hamlet" whenever the script is passing over the file "Walter Mitty."
kbp 9y ago
> 18 years ago. Perl and Python. Perl 18 years ago is pretty standard.

Apocryphon 9y ago

Hope the hobbyist interest in Haiku will grow over time.

rcarmo 9y ago
Eventually the beta will ship (probably this quarter) and there will be a few folk trying it out in earnest. Since the browser mostly works, I expect it to be rather popular as such things go...
- tialaramex 9y ago
  "probably this quarter" could have been written any time in the last five years and been just as likely to come true.
  - rcarmo 9y ago
    Let's BePositive :)
    - snvzz 9y ago
      webpositive :)
  - bebop 9y ago
    The beta is very likely to happen by Q2 this year. All of the release blockers are pretty much done. The big blocker was getting the package manager in shape, and setting up official build bots and repositories. These are done now. I am optimistic that the beta branch will happen in the next month or so.

rcarmo 9y ago

I remember reading most of these and buying the BeOS CD (which I still have). It was fun for a while, but I ended up moving to the Mac full-time. Funny how the 4:3 video windows look dated these days.

duncan_bayne 9y ago
Huh. I'm pining for 4:3 screen for a development laptop. My main use case is coding, not watching movies :)
- wowtip 9y ago
  16:10 screen tilted is really nice for text / coding
  - Y_Y 9y ago
    I find doing that to my laptop makes typing more difficult.
    - wowtip 9y ago
      Just a matter of adjusting your typing habits, and finding a laptop with 16:10 screen :)
  - module0000 9y ago
    FWIW, several of the google-made chromebooks are 3:2 ratio - it's pretty nice.
- masklinn 9y ago
  Indeed. The "tallest" resolution for laptops these days the rare 3:2 (surface laptops, possibly also the HP Spectre x2), followed by the odd 16:10 (actually is there any laptop manufacturer using 16:10 other than Apple?). 16:10 or 16:9 have the convenience that (at fixed diagonal) they have good support for multiple columns, but this comes at a severe cost to vertical space & total surface area. Though IIRC for some types of FPS widescreen resolutions is also good (as long as the FOV is configurable) as it gives a wider field of view.

lloeki 9y ago

Submission typo: seems like the page title has it spelled "Scot", not "Scott".

allenbrunson 9y ago
Nope, not a typo. That's how Scot Hacker spells his name.
- klez 9y ago
  lloeki was referring to the submission's title here on HN. The submission spelled the name as Scott, and it's been corrected after lloeki's posted.

kalenx 9y ago

Funny how he talks about TiVo well before the advent of GPLv3, but as a victim: > From the stance of a commercial vendor creating a commercial product, the open source world holds other barbs. For example, if components of your system link against libraries that fall under the GPL, you may be forced to release your own system -- or parts of it -- back to the community as open source software. In other words, building a proprietary solution on top of Linux may mean being required to expose the company jewels to the competition. Witness TiVo, who manufacture a time-shifting hardware/software solution for television consumers. Because TiVo is based on Linux, the company's modifications to the kernel are available for anyone to download -- any competitor can emerge at any time, packaging up and selling a variant of Tivo's hard work. One could almost forgive him to say something like that in 99, but the ones who are still repeating the exact same reasoning today should probably think twice...

erric 9y ago
To be fair, these articles are from 1999 - 2001.
Fnoord 9y ago
That's just an argumentum ad misericordiam (appeal to pity, sob story). These modifications to the Linux kernel weren't even the core of the TiVo product, and the TiVo product was an end user solution consisting of hardware, software, and support (so a full stack, like an Apple TV or an Nvidia Shield). He's also ignoring the patent argument, and the fact that the Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2 or later (EDIT: I stand corrected; licensed under GPLv2. That doesn't change the point though). His argument wasn't rare back in those days though (we're talking about a time where Microsoft was still dominant and actively hampering the FOSS movement), and it was an argument for BSD license as well. The way companies have worked around GPLv2 and GPLv3 is Web 2.0/3.0: HTTP(S) and HTML/JS being proprietary software, though the source is readable, and the entire stack behind it (ie. akin to LAMP) which generates the data having the ability to be part of a closed source or proprietary ecosystem. They furthermore locked it down with things like paywalls, apps (instead of website or PWA which might give the users some power back). In such a world, how can us mere mortal users even verify things like GDPR? The FSF foresaw this, btw, and IIRC (at the very least free software advocates foresaw it) considered having the GPLv3 apply on protocols like HTTP(S). That didn't fly though, and resulted in obvious backfire as well because it went against the business model of many for profits...

t0mek 9y ago

Interesting mention on the BeOS-based IPAD prototype in 1999: > Be has quietly been planning their own version of the perfect low-cost, easy-to-use, dedicated media device. Be's IPAD (Internet Personal Access Device)* > [...] > * According to hints dropped in a recent newsletter, Be may be casting about for a catchier moniker than "IPAD." http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/07-IPAD/ http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/07-IPAD/

wowtip 9y ago

The last article is a bit depressing. But also a good read for millenials and such who have a hard time understanding why some of us older guys really dislike Microsoft. http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

allenbrunson 9y ago
Indeed! I was working at Be Inc at the point when they were absorbed by Palm and went out of business. Along about 1998, I decided I'd had enough of Microsoft's antics, and started looking for an alternative OS ecosystem I could participate in. I tried a lot of things, and wound up on BeOS. I'd probably still be there, if Microsoft hadn't killed it.
executesorder66 9y ago
> have a hard time understanding why some of us older guys really dislike Microsoft There's lots of recent reasons to really hate Microsoft now. - Forcing Windows 10 on users. - Forcing telemetry on people and making it almost impossible to disable. - Saying they <3 Linux, but refusing to port their actual good products (MSO, or Visual Studio) to Linux. So that they can keep their vendor lock-in. - Not adhering to their own standards, to make it difficult for Office documents to inter-operate with other office suites. - Windows 10 switched to a rolling release model, which is nice. But the updates are forced, so that fucks you over as a user, because you can never be sure if your system is stable. edit:formatting
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
  > Windows 10 switched to a rolling release model, which is nice. I disagree. Not only are constant changes destabilizing to the user, they're destabilizing to developers too. I really don't get why so many people (Linux Desktop users especially, so maybe they're all webdevs?) love them so much. Once I have a system set up for my workflow, I don't want it to go and screw it up by changing things unnecessarily.
  - jjrh 9y ago

Crontab 9y ago

In addition to the BeOS Bible, Scot Hacker also created the BeOS Tip Server, which was a great resource at the time. He also wrote a book for O'Reilly on MP3 (MP3: The Definitive Guide) that I found very useful. And he created RipEnc, a BeOS/Bash shell script to rip CDs to MP3 while making use of BeOS metadata. After I left BeOS behind, I haven't heard his name very often, but I still appreciate his advocacy for BeOS.

qubex 9y ago
I still have his The BeOS Bible on my bookshelf. I don’t know why, really. (For context, I also have Inside Windows 2000 and Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach, all of which are pretty dated.)
- rcarmo 9y ago
  Me too. It was a nice enough read, but it sticks out between Singh's book on OS X and Cutler's NT magnum opus...
grahams 9y ago
Don't forget he was a major contributor to BeNews (as was I, full disclosure) one of the major Be news sites of the time... It's a shame all of the BeNews content was lost to a database failure, though you can still find bits and pieces in the Wayback Machine..

natecavanaugh 9y ago

I remember reading about BeOS and seeing demos during 2000-2001, but I always wondered a few things. One item of curiosity was how they were able to so efficiently handle media with such a light footprint? What were the trade-offs? For devices like tablets, it seems like it would be a godsend. Also, did any of the innovations make their way into things we use today? Palm bought their tech, but did any of the media tech make it out? Or is it just an artifact from an earlier age with not much applicability to modern day needs?

allenbrunson 9y ago
I worked at Be for almost a year, and used BeOS for a couple of years before that. I am not an expert, but I can mention a couple of things. The biggest one was: freedom from backward compatibility. You can't comprehend how much cruft you are drowning in, in your typical OS, until you are free from it. Coming to BeOS from Windows, as I did, it felt like 2,000 pounds was lifted off my shoulders. BeOS was free to fully embrace some modern technologies that had been bolted on to older operating systems as an afterthought. The biggest one was multi-threading. Having spent years on earlier operating systems, I can say that all of them have a stunted idea of multi-threading, compared to BeOS. Typically, you are forced to run your user interface in your main thread, and you have to run background tasks in background threads, and invent ways to communicate between the two. Contrast BeOS: every single window runs in its own thread. Think about that for a minute: If you write a BeOS app that has two or more windows, surprise, your app is multi-threaded. Whether you like it or not! A lot of programmers, coming from older operating systems, very much did not like it. Personally, I came to embrace this as BeOS' greatest strength. Communicating between windows was pretty natural: just drop events into each other's event queues, which were of course thread-safe. Unfortunately, the early architects of the system made their own set of poor decisions that led to a new round of cruft. The worst of these was tying themselves to the ABI of a particular C++ compiler. GCC version 2.9x, I think. In the last year of Be's existence, we were really feeling the pain of this. The compiler we were shackled to was many years out of date. If we switched to a modern compiler, it would have a different ABI, and all older software that couldn't be recompiled would have been instantly broken. Nonetheless, there was a vocal minority of engineers inside Be who argued for doing just that. We weren't focused on external users at that point, just internet appliances, so we could have gotten away with it. But we were all BeOS users ourselves, so we would have lost a lot of useful apps that way.

memsom 9y ago

I was heavily in to BeOS. I read Scott's BeOS Bible cover to cover. I had most of the other books (The BeOS API gude, Advanced topics, Programming the BeOS, Practical Filesystem Design) and also had a BeBox (a 66MHz model) and a PowerMac 9500/180MP (Dual processor) to run the OS on. I had a lot of fun. I advocated PowerPC back when the trend was towards Intel and I still mess about with the OS occasionaly ( https://github.com/memsom/mwobdec https://github.com/memsom/mwobdec .) I had a BeIA device and had a few versions of BeIA running on various other devices. It was pretty much just BeOS without the Tracker desktop and with a slightly different file system. Take a look at Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeIA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeIA - I wrote a lot of the BeIA info back in the day on there, especially the stuff about the CFS and exe compression.) The DT-300 Webpad I had was nothing really like an iPad (it was running a Geode from NationalSemi and booted from a compact flash card.) But you can see where the tech was heading.

memsom 9y ago

Anyone who enjoys this should also take a look at this: the Be Newsletter archive : https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/ https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/ I read these all back in the day. They are an amazing time capsule for the BeOS and what was going on at Be during the mid - late 90's and early Noughtiess.