32 ms·

BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

672 points by fogus 7y ago

adamnemecek 7y ago
BeOS was the way it was thanks to the async API. I think that a Rust port of BeOS would be amazing due to Rusts first class support of async.
- dnautics 7y ago
  BeOS did not use async, it used a "half-hearted, primitive, bug-ridden" implementation of actor model in C++.
  - adamnemecek 7y ago
    ...which is async.
    - rvz 7y ago
      ...which also a Rust port does exist for Haiku at least after a quick search. [0] [0] https://depot.haiku-os.org/#!/pkg/rust_bin/haikuports/1/36/0/-/1/x86_64?bcguid=bc2-WTLR https://depot.haiku-os.org/#!/pkg/rust_bin/haikuports/1/36/0...
      - adamnemecek 7y ago
        I know. I'm not sure I understand.
    - dnautics 7y ago
      It's not async by default. It's concurrent. In order to get async, you have to do a ton of wrapping, e.g. https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/v1.9.4/lib/elixir/lib/task.ex#L418 https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/v1.9.4/lib/elixir...
  - smallstepforman 7y ago
    Unlike Erlang which copies messages, and Pony which uses reference capabilities, BeAPI used a pragmatic approach where BMessages shared a kernel memory pool. Add the ability to filter messages and dynamically retarget messages, and you get a PRACTICAL (vs academic) Actor model. I wouldn't say it was half-hearted and primitive, on the contrary.
    - dnautics 7y ago
      Erlang isn't exactly academic, or impractical. And the BMessages themselves did not share the kernel memory pool, it was the thread system (or BLooper if you will), but only some of the primitives. In fact, BeOS was kind of split brained. You could send a message to a thread either through the kernel send command (which had a limited queue length) or a one which use local shared memory (which effectively did not). That is, of course rather dangerous, since there are no protections on that memory (it being C++). I don't miss the segfaults that I experienced time after time and strange stateful consistency errors from when I was programming in the BeOS, and I don't miss biting my knuckles when having to recast data as (void*) in order to send it to another thread, now that I'm programming in ERTS. I do however strongly appreciate the experience, because it was a hell of a lot of fun, and, importantly, I learned that you can't use a buffered matrix mult to save on memory allocations, because you don't know that your preemptive kernel won't kick you out midway through the matrix mult and start filling the bins with data from the other thread. I would say that half of the reason why I am really adept at identifying race conditions in erlang is that I've seen them all, and worse, in BeOS. And the BeOS runtime does not have half of the resilience and fault isolation properties that Erlang has, which is what I mean by "half hearted and primitive".
killion 7y ago
One of the last lines threw me off... "Would Tim Berners-Lee have used a BeBox to run the world’s first web server instead?" The BeBox didn't ship until 1995. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first version of the web in 1991. So nope, that wouldn't have happened.
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  the author of the article is in her early 20s, and it's all an ancient history to her, so prepare to get OK Boomered
- gfiorav 7y ago
  He used a NeXT computer for that IIRC
rcarmo 7y ago
I ran BeOS back in the day (even have the developer book!) and I've been trying Haiku on and off over the years. It's been interesting. The browser isn't quite all there yet but might be considered serviceable, and you can sort of get a working dev environment going on it (not many modern runtimes, though, nor a way to run Linux binaries that would let me do Clojure). It's certainly worth keeping an eye on, although there were some weird decisions - for instance, I remember a thread on ARM support where whomever was tackling that was completely dissing the Raspberry Pi, and yet today, if I were to install it permanently on any machine to tinker with, it would almost certainly be a Pi...
- waddlesplash 7y ago
  Doesn't Clojure run on the JVM? Haiku has OpenJDK, you know...
  - rcarmo 7y ago
    Last time I tried Java was two years ago. A few months back I installed it on KVM to check out the state of WebPositive, but didn’t actually get to try coding anything since the browser couldn’t load my webmail.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  > if I were to install it permanently on any machine to tinker with, it would almost certainly be a Pi The pi is such a great device for this. If I were working on any niche operating system (or building one from scratch), I'd target qemu first, and the pi second. It may not be the nicest hardware out there, but it is a single platform that loads of people have, that allows trivial disk swapping (upside of no onboard flash -> everything on swappable SD card), and is dirt cheap.
eb0la 7y ago
I installed BeOS a long time ago on a PC. It was something ahead of the times. I still remember how incredible it was the rotating cube demo where you coud drag and drop images and videos on the cube faces... it worked without a glitch on my pentium. Just found out the demo video shows the application with a GL wave surface playing a video over it: https://youtu.be/BsVydyC8ZGQ?t=1074 https://youtu.be/BsVydyC8ZGQ?t=1074
- cptnapalm 7y ago
  By all the stars in heaven, that was an impressive demo.
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    It's about making a virtue of a necessity. When Be wrote that demo the situation is that the other operating systems you might plausibly choose all have working video acceleration. Even Linux has basic capabilities in this area by that point. BeOS doesn't have that and doesn't have a road map to get it soon. So, any of the other platforms can play full resolution video captured from a DVD for example, a use case actual people have, on a fairly cheap machine and BeOS won't be able to do that without a beast of a CPU because it doesn't have even have hardware colour transform acceleration or chromakey. But - 1990s hardware video acceleration can only play one video at a time, because "I want to play three videos" isn't a top ask from actual users. So, Be's demo deliberately shows several different postage stamp videos instead of one higher resolution video, as the acceleration is no help to competitors there. And then since you're doing it all in software, not rendering to a rectangle in hardware, the transform to have this low res video render as one side of a cube or textured onto a surface makes it only very slightly slower, rather than being impossible. Audiences come away remembering they saw BeOS render videos on a 3D surface, and not conscious that it can't do full resolution video on the cheap hardware everybody has. Mission success.
    - anthk 7y ago
      Eh, multithreading decoding could help a lot. And by the population of DVD video in computers (and the PS2), most people had a Pentium3 450MHZ at homes, which was more than enough for DVD video with an ASM optimized video player such as MPlayer and a good 2D video card. 2D acceleration was more than enough. http://rudolfs-place.nl/BeOS/NVdriver/3dnews.html http://rudolfs-place.nl/BeOS/NVdriver/3dnews.html On Linux you didn't need OpenGL, just Xv. Source: I was there, with an Athlon. Playing DVD's.
christkv 7y ago
I remember using one at NTH in Trondheim in 1995-96 and it was awesome compared to the silicon graphics stations or pcs. It just felt insanely smooth and quick compared to the clunkiness of the other machines. I wish it had taken off, it would probably have gotten us faster to multi core machines.
gnu8 7y ago
We didn’t get to have this because Microsoft strangled it in the crib. I am never forgiving them for that.
- dwmcqueen 7y ago
  Actually, you didn't get it because Jean-Louis asked too much when Apple inquired.
  - slipheen 7y ago
    The way I see it, the two are related- Microsoft stopped it from having much of a chance as an independent OS.. This stopped us from getting it outside of a major vendor like Apple acquiring it. Apple saw this, so didn't want to pay as much as they might have if it were selling well on it's own. So Apple ended up going with NeXT "instead of plan Be" as it were.
    - djsumdog 7y ago
      Yep. OEMs were not allowed to sell dual-boot systems if they wanted to keep buying cheap MS licenses. I think they lost that lawsuit, but it was long after BeOS closed up their commercial operations.
      - GeekyBear 7y ago
        Didn't Be publicly offer up a free Be OS license to the first OEM willing to ship a duel boot system? When there were no takers for a free way to have your hardware stand out from the pack, it was hard to imagine a reason for every single OEM in a very crowded field to back away that didn't involve antitrust shenanigans.
        hinkley 7y ago
        Now that you mention it, I recall this as well.
    - 7y ago
jamesfmilne 7y ago
I've been wasting a bit of time lately trying to get BeOS 5.0 Professional running on my PowerMac 8500/180. Had to order a USB CD/DVD burner off of Amazon to write the ISO to a CD as I didn't actually own any hardware with a CD/DVD burner anymore :D
- arpa 7y ago
  Hey, consider yourself lucky you did not need a boot floppy :D
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
djsumdog 7y ago
When I started University in 2000, I had a quad-boot system: Win98, Win2000, BeOS 5 and Slackware Linux (using the BeOS bootload as my primary because it had the prettiest colors). I mostly used Slackware and Win98 (for games), but BeOS was really neat. It had support for the old Booktree video capture cards, could capture video without dropping frames like VirtualDub often did, and it even had support for disabling a CPU on multicpu systems (I only saw videos of this; never ran BeOS on a SMP system). I wish we had more options today. On modern x86 hardware, you pretty much just have Windows, Linux and maybe FreeBSD/OpenBSD if you replace your Wi-Fi card with an older one (or MacOS if you're feeling Hackintoshy .. or just buy Apple hardware). I guess three is kinda the limit you're going to hit when it comes to broad support.
- philwelch 7y ago
  There also used to be other CPU architectures--though even at the time, enough people complained about "Wintel" that maybe it was obvious that the alternatives weren't ever going to catch on.
  - msla 7y ago
    People complained about "Wintel" because the 32-bit x86 chips were so fast and cheap they destroyed the market for RISC designs and killed existing RISC workstation and server architectures, like SPARC and HPPA and MIPS. By the time the Pentium came around, the future looked like a completely monotonous stretch of Windows NT on x86 for ever and ever, amen. No serious hardware competition, other than Intel being smart enough to not kill AMD outright for fear of antitrust litigation, and no software competition on the desktop, with OSS OSes being barely usable then (due to an infinite backlog of shitty hardware like Winmodems and consumer-grade printers) and Apple in a permanent funk. We were perpetually a bit afraid that Microsoft/Intel would pull something like Palladium/Trustworthy Computing [1] and lock down PC hardware but good, finally killing the Rebel Alliance of Linux/BSD, but somehow the hammer never quite fell. It did in the cell phone world, though, albeit in an inconsistent fashion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computing_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi... Microsoft and Intel really seemed permanent back then. I wonder if that's how people felt about IBM back in the 1950s.
aazaa 7y ago
> In 1990, Jean-Louis Gassée, who replaced Jobs in Apple as the head of Macintosh development, was also fired from the company. He then also formed his own computer company with the help of another ex-Apple employee, Steve Sakoman. They called it Be Inc, and their goal was to create a more modern operating system from scratch based on the object-oriented design of C++, using proprietary hardware that could allow for greater media capabilities unseen in personal computers at the time. Even IBM with OS/2 couldn't surmount the juggernaut network effect of Windows. By 1990, this was apparent to many. It's odd that Gassée and company thought they could succeed where IBM had failed.
- msla 7y ago
  IBM also failed to lock down the IBM PC hardware standard. They tried, with the PS/2 and the Micro Channel Architecture, but it turns out clone makers were more interested in standardizing and improving the existing non-standard (retconned into being the Industry Standard Architecture, ISA) into EISA than in signing on to perpetually license MCA from IBM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_architecture
- duxup 7y ago
  IBM also didn't quite know what to do with OS/2 and how to sell it. Maybe Microsoft's ties to the PC industry would have killed it anyway but IBM was kinda lost on what it meant to sell an OS to consumers.
- jkestner 7y ago
  I saw BeOS as a spiritual successor to the Amiga OS, where it might be used as a turnkey media creation system. I think Apple was the Microsoft of this market, and had enough user/developer inertia to make inroads impossible. They sold a depressing 1800 BeBoxes.
- hbbio 7y ago
  They thought they would have their chance with hardware+software combo. Indeed, the BeBox should have looked like this to succeed: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Apple-eMac-FL.jpg/600px-Apple-eMac-FL.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Ap... That computer made Apple cool again, and paved the way for their recovery way before the iPhone skyrocket.
pjmlp 7y ago
In this alternative universe, Objective-C would have died, Swift would never happened, and C++ would rule across desktop and mobile OSes (thinking only of Windows, BeOS X, Symbian, Windows CE and what might have been BeOS based iOS). Also POSIX would be even less relevant, and very few would be buying BeOS X for doing Linux coding.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > and C++ would rule across desktop and mobile OSes C++ in a non-standard version as compiled by gcc 2.96 release! Awesome.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    What lack of imagination, as if they wouldn't be upgrading their toolchains. In fact, Haiku does support more modern toolchains and the BeOS R5 is only kept around due to ABI issues with binary only BeOS software.
    - dfox 7y ago
      The ABI issues are exactly the reason why having C++ as OS API level language is a bad idea.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        Not all, Android, IBM i (C++ has been slowly replacing PL/S), mbed, Windows, and OS X (IO Kit, now Driver Kit), are doing pretty alright. There is no such thing as C ABI, it only happens to work on OS that are, surprise surprise, written in C.
        tialaramex 7y ago
        There is a C ABI. The "x86-64 System V ABI" (the ABI for C on everything except Windows on an x86-64, ie a typical PC) was designed by AMD working with early adopters on Linux and other platforms. Here are several extant ABI documents: https://github.com/hjl-tools/x86-psABI/wiki/X86-psABI https://github.com/hjl-tools/x86-psABI/wiki/X86-psABI The ABI for C needs to agree less stuff than a C++ ABI but it's still quite a lot of stuff, if these things don't get agreed then code won't work unless everybody uses the same (version of the) compiler.
localhost 7y ago
Before I first saw BeOS running on a colleague's machine back in the ~mid-late 90s (same guy who introduced me to Python) I used an SGI Onyx Reality Engine machine [1] (roughly $250K computer back in the day) for molecular mechanics simulations and BeOS ran circles around it on perceived responsiveness. I really wish we have OS's that prioritize input/output latency over all else. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx
- JBReefer 7y ago
  Don’t mobile OS’ prioritize perceived latency above all other resources (besides battery)?
  - localhost 7y ago
    I should have said that I really want a general-purpose OS to prioritize perceived latency. Mobile OS (and gaming consoles) of course are tuned quite differently and in my brain I view them as completely different experiences when I use them. My desktop while significantly more powerful just _feels_ slower because of the latency.
  - peatmoss 7y ago
    That’s a great point, however they also lock down the enduser experience to something diminished from a fully general purpose computer.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    Considering how often I hit a button more than once because it took so long to do anything about the first one, that seems unlikely.
    - lostgame 7y ago
      I was drinking water when I read this and ended up snorting it out I laughed so hard when I read this. It’s so, so true. I am a mobile dev and use a plethora of iOS and Android devices all the time, often on many different software versions. It’s not unique to any platform, and seems to be most often affecting the keyboard input, but occasionally seems to affect the rest of the UI as well. Software updates will oscillate between breaking and fixing these things on and off between different devices. I’ve been doing app development since iOS 3 and the first version of the App Store and used an ADP1. There’s no method to the madness I can see. Especially with the keyboard input. Lord help you if you happen to be using a 4S or 5 or iPad 2/3. I often wait for up to 10-15 seconds for text input to catch up to itself, only to catch up to itself all at once - I can type whole sentences knowing by the time I wait for them to finish it’ll be the same 10-15 seconds to wait as if I’ve typed a single character.
rayiner 7y ago
Oh man! I first tried BeOS personal edition when it came on a CD with Maximum PC magazine. (Referring to same demo CD, though the poster is not me: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1067159&start=40 https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1067159&s.... Also, how crazy is it that Ars Technica’s forums have two decade old posts? In 2000, that would be like seeing forum posts from 1980.) I remember being so happy when we got SDSL, and I could get online from BeOS. (Before that, my computer had a winmodem.) BeOS was always a very tasteful design. And well documented! I learned so much about low level programming from the Be Newsletters: https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/index.html https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/index.html. The BONE article is a great introduction to how a network stack works: https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue5-5.html#Engineering5-5 https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue5-5.h.... I still have a copy of Dominic Giampalo’s BeFS book somewhere. BeOS was very much a product of its time. (Microkernel, use of C++, etc.) What would a modern BeOS look like? My thought: use of a memory and thread safe language like Rust for the main app-level APIs. (Thread safety in BeOS applications, where every window ran in its own thread, was not trivial.) Probably more exokernel than microkernel, with direct access to GPUs and NICs and maybe even storage facilitated by hardware multiplexing. What else?
- anon9001 7y ago
  > In 2000, that would be like seeing forum posts from 1980. That's the premise of Jason Scott's project launched in 1998 :) http://textfiles.com/ http://textfiles.com/
  - cbm-vic-20 7y ago
    He also livestreams on Twitch; recently he's been streaming the archival of Apple II floppies. https://www.twitch.tv/textfilesdotcom https://www.twitch.tv/textfilesdotcom
- anthk 7y ago
  Haiku OS still uses C++.
- rvz 7y ago
mumblemumble 7y ago
Ah, memories. Used to use BeOS as my primary OS for a year or two. I think it's the only OS I ever found to be truly intuitive and pleasant to work with. That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen Be over NeXT. The elephant in the room is security: NeXTSTEP, being Unix-based, has some amount of security baked in from the ground up. BeOS didn't; it was more akin to Windows 95 or classic Mac OS on that front. Consequently, I doubt it could have made it far into the 21st century. It would have died unceremoniously in a steaming pile of AYBABTU. Taking Apple with it, presumably.
- andrewflnr 7y ago
  Funny you should mention Windows 95. The company that sold that ended up doing pretty well.
  - hugi 7y ago
    Really? Most people I talk with these days seem to agree that the proprietary OS is a liability.
    - andrewflnr 7y ago
      It didn't kill them, though, which was my only point. I guess HN didn't think it was as funny as I did.
    - colejohnson66 7y ago
      I’ve never heard anyone say Windows is a problem because it’s proprietary. I have heard that having to pay to upgrade is a pain because you (the company) have to budget for it. Even then, you would also need to budget for the downtime and time to verify that it works before deploying the update, and both those have to be done on Linux too (it’s why LTS releases are a thing). Anyways, Windows 10 may have its problems, but Microsoft the company is doing pretty well. Their stock is up about 50% this year (200% over the past 5). And that’s not to mention the fact that they’ve open sourced .NET among many other things.
rvz 7y ago
BeOS was really something of what the future 'could' have almost been. Too bad that it was killed by better competitors. But again I think its fair to compare with the lessons learned from its successor 'Haiku' that can be learned by many other OSes: From what I can see from using Haiku for a bit, it has the bazar community element from the open-source culture with its package management and ports system from Linux and BSD whilst being conservative with its design from its apps, UI, and SDK like macOS. Although I have tired it and its surprisingly "useable", the driver story is still a bit lacking. But from a GUI usability point of view compared with many Linux distros, it feels very consistent unlike the countless confusing interfaces coming from those distros. Perhaps BeOS lives on in the Haiku project, but whats more interesting is that the real contender who learned from its failure is the OS that has its kernel named 'Zircon'.
- 0xDEEPFAC 7y ago
  Well it wasn't as simple as "killed off by better competitors". It was actually both much better than Windows 98 and Mac OS at the time. But ultimately the deathblow came from Apple which, after struggling with low sales and poor quality software, almost chose to buy BeInc's tech but dropped it so they could bring in Steve Jobs. So it was more like vendor lock-in (Windows) and corporate deals (Apple) as well as failing partners (Palm).
  - DennisP 7y ago
    Apple also dropped it because they couldn't come together on price, partly because BeOS was in a fairly unfinished state: > Apple's due diligence placed the value of Be at about $50 million and in early November it responded with a cash bid "well south of $100 million," according to Gassée. Be felt that Apple desperately needed its technology and Gassée's expertise. Apple noted that only $20 million had been invested in Be so far, and its offer represented a windfall, especially in light of the fact that the BeOS still needed three years of additional expensive development before it could ship (it didn't have any printer drivers, didn't support file sharing, wasn't available in languages other than English, and didn't run existing Mac applications). Direct talks between Amelio and Gassée broke down over price just after the Fall Comdex trade show, when Apple offered $125 million. Be's investors were said to be holding out for no less than $200 million, a figure Amelio considered "outrageous." > ...With Be playing hard to get, Apple decided to play hardball and began investigating other options. http://macspeedzone.com/archive/art/con/be.shtml http://macspeedzone.com/archive/art/con/be.shtml
bluedino 7y ago
The founder of Be wrote a bunch of articles about Be's life, and demise https://mondaynote.com/tagged/beos https://mondaynote.com/tagged/beos
- hinkley 7y ago
  This part seemed like the punchline: > Apple’s decision to go with NeXT and Jobs was doubly perilous for us. Not only would we not be the next MacOS, Jobs immediately walked third party Mac hardware makers to their graves. No more Mac clones for BeOS. With tepid BeBox sales and no future on the Mac, Valley VCs weren’t keen for another round of funding — and the 1995 round was running out.
ossworkerrights 7y ago
Ah the memories! Had no idea Haiku was an open source implementation of BeOS. Port Electron to it, and I commit to writing tools for this OS in my spare time!
Quequau 7y ago
I used BeOS for most of the 2nd half of the '90s and I guess in my mind at least the regrettable, messy, and unethical end of BeOS in 2001-2002 is emblematic of the Dot Com collapse. Crushed by Microsoft's anti-competitive business practices and sold for scrap to a failing company who was unable to actually do anything with parts they wound up with but who never the less made damn sure that no one else could either.
- codefreakxff 7y ago
  PSA: nevertheless is written as a single word
rwmj 7y ago
Haiku is really good. Would recommend anyone to try it out in a VM (I had it running on my actual laptop for a short time, but unfortunately my job pretty much requires me to run Linux so it couldn't stay). Haiku has a really responsive UI with a 90s look so you can actually tell what is a button.
- doublerabbit 7y ago
  Also recommend. https://haiku-os.org https://haiku-os.org
- amatecha 7y ago
  Oh man, I really do miss the days of actual coherent UI that is clearly "readable". The trend of flat UI drives me crazy. So much wasted cognitive effort just to make sense of something on-screen.
  - rafaelvasco 7y ago
    Feel the same. Clean UI doesn't have to be flat. That said , "semi-flat" interfaces can look really good.
- kungtotte 7y ago
  How painful was it to get it running on a laptop? I've been interested in Haiku for a long time now, but I don't really have a place to play with it except on my laptop.
  - rwmj 7y ago
    You have to have the right laptop. At the time I had a Thinkpad (X1 IIRC?) which fairly much worked out of the box, but I'm fairly sure it won't work on $random laptop. For best results and the lowest barrier to entry try it first in a VM.
    - waddlesplash 7y ago
      Actually these days, Haiku will probably at least boot on $random laptop, and if you have a WiFi chip that FreeBSD also supports (we reuse their network drivers), you can probably even connect wirelessly. I run Haiku on my ThinkPad E550 (2015), I know some of the other devs run on Dell XPS 13, HPs, etc. And the same is true in towers (Ryzen is becoming a popular pick.) GPU acceleration drivers are the one real kind of driver we lack at this point.
perardi 7y ago
In my hazy recollection, there was another, rather pedestrian reason Apple didn't go for BeOS: it had almost no infrastructure for printing. The Mac's niche was prepress and desktop publishing (remember that phrase?), and BeOS could barely print and had no color management. (Though I could be totally wrong on this, and welcome a correction.)
- smallstepforman 7y ago
  I also read a story about how BeOS DPx (developer previews) lacked decent printing support and this was another reason why Apple chose NeXT. The irony is that Apple had to redo the NeXT printing stack anyhow, as did BeOS in R4, and they both ended up using CUPS. Also another reason was lack of x86 support, which forced BeInc to quickly rush out a x86 port in R3.0. Intel were so impressed by the x86 performance, that they ended up investing $4M into BeInc.
- forwhomst 7y ago
  BeOS didn't have a lot of stuff. For example networking. Big gap.
Eric_WVGG 7y ago
I feel like the biggest missed opportunity of the “mobile revolution” ten years ago was BeOS. It seemed clear to me that Android would be a bust for smartphone manufacturers (nobody has really made money off of Android except for Google and Samsung, the latter of whom accomplished this by dominating that market). If Sony, for example, had gotten ahold of BeOS and tried to vertically integrate in a manner similar to Apple, they could have been a contender. Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning Was the Command Line has quite a lot of interesting observations about BeOS during its prime. http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html
- fartcannon 7y ago
  I think Microsoft made quite a lot off Android.
  - seabrookmx 7y ago
    Yup. Mostly around patents. Ironically the only good (IMO, obviously) Outlook client is Android. Really curious how the Surface Duo turns out. Weird form factor aside, Microsoft embracing Android on a branded device is interesting.
- rvz 7y ago
  Well there's your reason why Google has the expertise to build Fuchsia. Most of the BeOS guys were hired there to work on Android and now they are doing it again with Fuchsia. We will all come back to this comment in 10 years to find ourselves running Fuchsia on our phones, tablets and our new Pixelbooks.
  - Eric_WVGG 7y ago
    Huh! I thought it was the Danger Sidekick crew
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
That was actually a fairly awesome OS (for its day). Many folks thought Apple would buy it. When they purchased NeXT, instead, a lot of us were disappointed. However, all these years later, I'm very glad that BeOS wasn't selected.
- deepaksurti 7y ago
  I have never used BeOS, can you explain why you are glad now that it wasn't selected?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
    Mostly because of the UNIX subsystem. Having all that horsepower under the hood has been awesome. Also, NeXTStep became Cocoa, which knocked PowerPlant into a cocked hat. That may not be as compelling an argument. I heard that the BeOS framework was damn nice (never tried it, myself).
    - danieldk 7y ago
      Besides that, it is also very likely that Apple would have remained stagnant (or worse) if Steve Jobs had not been brought into the fold. I am not into persona worshipping, but Jobs brought some well-needed focus to a sea of overpriced beige boxes.
harikb 7y ago
I remember the Palm acquisition. At that time Palm had invested heavily in webOS [1] which wasn't as performant. When they acquired BeOS, I thought it was going to be a turn around. But that didn't happen either. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS
- bsharitt 7y ago
  First of all Be was purchased by Palm several years before webOS ever came out. WebOS didn't even exist in the same company. After Palm split into palmSource(software) and palmOne(hardware), the BeOs stuff(along side the old PalmOS stuff) went with palmSource. Later palmOne bought the rights to the full Palm name from palmSource and became Palm again and that Palm came out with webOS.
  - harikb 7y ago
    Thanks for the correction. Clearly, my recollection was wrong.
vkaku 7y ago
I'm waiting for Haiku stable. I just hope it's worth it :) Could use a change from current ones.
dang 7y ago
Many previous threads for the curious: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22BeOS%22%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=haiku%20-beos%20-yc%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
agumonkey 7y ago
beos demos never fail to make me weep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggCODBIfWKY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggCODBIfWKY
- donatj 7y ago
  Oh man the theme song to this brings me back! I have it in my iTunes to this day. It's Virtual(Void) by Baron Arnold. I spoke to him years ago. If I recall he worked for Be before moving to Sidekick…
jedberg 7y ago
My favorite part of BeOS was that in the control panel you could turn individual processors on and off. And it happily let you shoot yourself in the foot and turn off the last processor with no warning whatsoever. I appreciated that the OS didn't coddle you.
chipotle_coyote 7y ago
I was another former Be "power user." And I think that was probably accurate -- if you weren't in the "BeOS lifestyle" during the admittedly short window that it was possible, it's hard to understand how much promise it looked like it had. When I tell people I ran it full-time for over a year, they wonder how I managed to get anything done, but... - Pe was a great GUI text editor, competitive with BBEdit on the Mac - GoBe Productive was comparable to AppleWorks, but maybe a little better at being compatible with Microsoft Office - SoundPlay was a great MP3 player that could do crazy things that I still don't see anything doing 20 years later (it had speed control for files, including playing backwards, and could mix files that were queued up for playback; it didn't have any library management, but BeOS's file system let you expose arbitrary metadata -- like MP3 song/artist/etc. tags! -- right in file windows) - Mail-It was the second-best email client I ever used, behind the now also sadly-defunct Mailsmith - e-Picture was an object-based bitmapped graphics editor similar in spirit and functionality to Macromedia's Fireworks, and was something I genuinely missed for years after leaving BeOS And there were other programs that were amazing, even though I didn't use them: Adamation's video editor (videoElements? something like that), their audio editor audioElements, Steinberg's Nuendo, objektSynth, and two programs which are incredibly still being sold today: Lost Marble's Moho animation program, now sold by Smith Micro for Mac and PC, and the radio automation package TuneTracker (incredibly now being sold as a turnkey bundle with Haiku). Also, for years, there was a professional-grade theatre light/audio control system, LCS CueStation, that ran on BeOS -- and it actually ran Broadway and Las Vegas productions. I remember seeing it running at the Cirque de Soleil permanent installation at Disney World in Orlando. At the time Apple bought Next rather than Be, I thought they'd made a horrible mistake. Given Apple's trajectory afterward, of course, it's hard to say that looking back. It's very possible that if they'd bought Be, they'd have gone under, although I think that would have less to do with technology than with the management they'd have ended up with (or more accurately, stayed with). But it's still an interesting "what if."
- jonny_eh 7y ago
  You may have hinted at it, but I think Apple's subsequent turnaround after acquiring Next was mainly due to their founder, Steve Jobs, coming back to Apple.
jjrh 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#Products_using_BeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#Products_using_BeOS Pretty cool BeOS still lives on in the audio/video/broadcasting industry.
ttul 7y ago
I remember seeing a BeBox under someone's desk at the video game company I was interning at in 1997. I nearly lost my shit. When Be released an Intel-compatible build while I was at Santa Clara in 1998, I installed it onto one of the lab computers. Sorry about that, IT team.
notadoc 7y ago
Try it yourself today https://www.haiku-os.org https://www.haiku-os.org
gwbas1c 7y ago
When I went to college in 1999, a kid down the hall from me pushed me really hard to install Be. It looked really cool when he showed it to me... ... But no programs that I wanted ran on it! As cool as BeOS was, without programs, it was little more than a demo or a hobby. Within a year I tried Windows NT and Windows 2000, and then forgot all about BeOS. Windows 2000 did everything that BeOS did for me, didn't crash, and ran all the programs I wanted to.
statico 7y ago
One of my favorite anecdotes about BeOS was that it had a CPU usage meter[1], and on the CPU meter there were on/off switches for each core. If you had two cores and turned one off, your computer would run at half speed. If you turned both off, your computer would crash. Someone once told me that this was filed as a bug against the OS and the response was "Works As Intended" and that it was the expected behavior. (These are fuzzy memories from ~25 years ago. It would be nice if someone could confirm this story or tell me if it's just my imagination.) [1]: http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/8way/8way-1.jpg http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/8way/8way-1.jpg
- MisterTea 7y ago
  The CPU monitor program was called Pulse and early versions allowed you to turn all the processors off and crash the machine. I think it was fixed in 3.something or 4.0. The 8-way PIII Xeon was a Compaq someone tested BeOS on before it went into production. I Remember it being posted on some BeOS news site. There should be another screenshot or two with 25 avi files playing and a crap load of CPU hungry programs running at once. Impressive feat circa 2000. Edit: browse the screenshot directory for the other two. Amazing they survived time, internet, bit rot and my memory: http://birdhouse.org/beos/8way/ http://birdhouse.org/beos/8way/ The BeOS scheduler prioritized the GUI and media programs so you could load the machine down to 100% and the GUI never stuttered and windows could be smoothly moved, maximized and minimized at 100% CPU. Rather, your programs would stutter. And everything was given a fair chance at CPU time. Very nice design and the OS was built from the ground up for multimedia and threading for SMP. It was a real nice attempt at building a next generation desktop OS. Had no security even though it had basic POSIX compatibility and a bash shell. Security bits meant nothing.
  - acdha 7y ago
    I remember circa 2000 being able to simultaneously compile Mozilla, transfer DV video from a camcorder into an editor, check email, and surf the web on a dual Pentium Pro system with no hint of UI stutter or dropped frames in the firewire video transfer. It was at least another decade before SSDs and kernel improvements made that possible on Linux, Windows, or OS X.
stiGGG 7y ago
Some trivia: There was an unofficial successor of BeOS called ZETA from a german company yellowTAB (later magnussoft). I remember this because they tried selling it via a homeshopping channel in german TV which was completely hilarious. I found a (very bad) recording of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQW-q2vp6W4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQW-q2vp6W4
- SyneRyder 7y ago
  For some weird reason I still have two (?) copies of yellowTAB Zeta on my bookshelf, next to my boxed copy of Red Hat Linux 7.3. Amazingly Zeta got more use than Linux, because it was much easier to get everything working on my machine. I just checked the discs and it's the same "Deluxe Edition RC2" as in that home shopping video. I think my copies were bought as special advance preview builds for third-party Zeta developers, though. And I don't think I paid as much as 100EUR...
disordinary 7y ago
I was going through boxes of old CDs and DVDs the other day and throwing out a lot of crap, I found my old BeOS5 disk. Didn't throw out that one. I really enjoyed using that OS back in 2000.
rafaelvasco 7y ago
I feel like modern OS's are in some(several?) ways, worse than these classic OS's... They just assume too much, impose too much, hide too much etc...
denimboy 7y ago
The way BeOS used filesystem attributes like a database was way ahead of the curve and it still might be. This book was a great read back in the day of what goes into a "modern" filesystem design https://archive.org/details/practical-file-system-design "Practical File System Design" was technical but also readable. Straight from the man who designed BFS which makes it more of an accomplishment IMO.
meerita 7y ago
I know Microsoft was really big back then, but why BeOS and OS/2 Warp never get into and GNU/Linux did?
bjornsing 7y ago
I actually bet a little bit of money on that alternative universe. I used to jokingly recount the lesson learned: “Never bet against Steve Jobs.”
bish4p 7y ago
If you are interested there is a way to make linux look like BeOs [0]. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/d8e54k/window_maker_classic_90s_beos_look_powersimplicity/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/d8e54k/window_mak...
int_19h 7y ago
I enjoy the regular reminiscing of BeOS, but for all the talk about how fast it was on hardware common at the time, I wonder why nobody remembers an even more impressive "tech demo" of an OS from that same period - QNX 6 desktop? An ISO of evaluation edition of 6.2 was easily downloadable for a while, and it was pretty neat: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/qnx621 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/qnx621 (I know that QNX was and still is widely used - the "tech demo" bit refers to its use as a primary desktop OS, not the usual embedding scenarios.)
- lproven 7y ago
  Did you know that Blackberry 10 is QNX? I had a Passport for a while. A lovely phone, and the OS had an Android runtime so _some_ Android apps worked... but like other OSes that let you run non-native apps, it resulted in BB10 never attaining a critical mass of apps.
pjeide 7y ago
I remember attending MacWorld Boston in '97, at the age of 12, and seeing a BeOS demo. I was blown away by a demonstration that consisted of a video file playing on the page of a rendered book. If you clicked the page of the book and dragged it around, it simulated the page turning and the video deforming, without skipping a frame. I may've only been 12, but that demo has stuck with me since. Edit: I would love to lay eyes on that demo again if anyone has an idea of where video of it may still exist.
ardenpm 7y ago
Crazy timing, just this week I pulled my BeBox put of storage and fired it up. Still impresses me even now, loads of nice touches. Also got a bit of a shock when I played a MIDI file and perfectly serviceable sound was produced by the little built in speaker.
teinac 7y ago
it's one Microsoft's greatest business achievements to have won against the OS/2 and BeOS competition and it's one of Microsoft's biggest business failures to have not won against Google's Android.
jsjohnst 7y ago
> What’s left for us now is to wonder, how different would the desktop computer ecosystem look today if all those years ago, back in 1997, Apple decided to buy Be Inc. instead of NeXT? Would Tim Berners-Lee have used a BeBox to run the world’s first web server instead? For this hypothetical scenario to ever had been possible, BeOS would’ve had to time travel, as TBL wrote WorldWideWeb on a NeXT machine in 1990[0]. BeOS was initially developed in 1991 per Wikipedia[1] and the initial release of BeOS to the public wasn’t until 1995. [0] https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
prirun 7y ago
"The features it introduced that were brand new at the time are now ubiquitous — things such as preemptive multitasking" Without taking anything away from actual new things introduced in BeOS, preemptive multitasking and dual CPUs were not "brand new". Computer system had been doing these for a long time before 1995, or even 1991 when BeOS was initially developed. Heck, minicomputers were doing this stuff in the 80's!
nickbauman 7y ago
What was truly revolutionary for BeOS was the muti-threaded user interface where you could have multiple mice connected to the same machine and they could interact with the UI at the same time. Hardly anyone paid any attention to this. But the possibilities are amazing.
kresten 7y ago
I was really taken with beos when it was a live product. However, Nextstep really was a much much better basis for taking Apple into the future compared to beos. As has been proven resoundingly first by the seamless switch from PowerPC to intel, and then the ongoing smoothness and general acceptance of OS X by industry. I know it’s not universally loved but OSX/nextstep for me is really everything I could have wanted from an operating system.
VectorLock 7y ago
BeOS was cool and all but I loved the BeBox with the GeekPort. When I worked at a dot-com 1.0 failed startup in 1999 one of our big wigs was a former exec at Be, and he was like the coolest dude I knew at the time. Still up there.
angrygoat 7y ago
We had one of the two-processor BeBoxes at my uni computer club – it was a really cool machine to play around on, and at the time I was using it (1999) one of our few graphical terminals with a web browser, so in quite a bit of demand. We also had a NeXT tower, three SGI machines running IRIX, a Mac upon which someone had installed Mac OS X Server 1.0 (NeXT innards, UI looked like classic MacOS). I kind of miss the diversity of systems we had back then. In many ways we've gone forward – tinkering is much easier now with the preponderance of cheap, fast dev boards and systems like the Raspberry Pi, but it does feel like actual user-facing stuff is now largely locked down, without as much innovation and competition.
schwank 7y ago
I was a paid BeOS customer and still have copies of multiple versions in the original branded shipper envelopes. I have fond memories of using it back during my college CS days. Really loved the interface, that was quite the time when I used NT4, Solaris, Irix, and BeOS all at the same time.
frankzen 7y ago
I almost thought we were talking comeback when I saw the headline!
cable2600 7y ago
The BEOS software needs to be preserved in an archive for the free, PD, open source, software. Mike Crawford RIP: Wrote spellswell: https://github.com/ErisBlastar/spellswell https://github.com/ErisBlastar/spellswell and word services: https://github.com/ErisBlastar/wordservices https://github.com/ErisBlastar/wordservices It was taken from one of his old sites before he lost control of it.
colinstrickland 7y ago
That's a coincidence this surfacing right now. There must be something in the air. I was an enthusiastic BeOS user back when it was a thing (ironically, I switched to it because I thought NEXTSTEP didn't have much of a future left), and I used it for a few years, quite happily. It left me with a legacy of several BeBoxes, and over the holiday period, I was vaguely inspired to dust them off and wonder about what to do with them. I got one of them booting perfectly, here's a link I posted to reddit showing it's first POST https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/eku19u/dusted_off_one_of_my_old_beboxes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/eku19u/du... (first POST should have gone to slashdot really, ah well.)
ngcc_hk 7y ago
It is not the OS, not even the software ... Apple would still be a failure if it is all desktop OS. And the first thing he did is to do sos to Microsoft and ask for office license for 5% Apple share for a reason. That is done. Of course you lost in a battle or even a campaign does not mean you just lost the war. The world is better with Steve, Microsoft with competition ... Now we even have Microsoft having GitHub and linux running on windows. Not if it is BeOS.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
florin0x01 7y ago
How does Haiku compare to Beos?
firecall 7y ago
Now I had read somewhere that Apple would have purchased BeOS but JLG was pushing for too much money. JLG fucked up the deal basically. I dont have a source... was years ago I read it. Had JLG not fucked up the deal, they would have picked up BeOS and not NeXT.
irenedowd 7y ago
Hi. I ran over a generally excellent Hacker Goatse Security. They have assisted with a ton of issues like Phone Hack, Account Hack, Clear Debts, Grade overhaul E.t.c Contact: goatsesecure (at) gmail Text/Whatsapp: +1 646 389 4585
qwerty456127 7y ago
That's sad Haiku won't get traction. An viable alternative on the desktop PC OS market would be a great thing to have (even on a commercial basis, not necessarily for free). Linux for 1% geeks, MacOS X for Apple hardware owners and Windows for everybody else does not seem like a healthy competition. Android, iOS, Chrome, Facebook - everything is monopolized nowadays. Governments should really consider supporting alternative OSes, browsers and social networks for sake of national security as the monopolies enjoy too much power over the whole humanity nowadays.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Unfortunately the way the PC market is makes it basically impossible for a new desktop OS to show up at this point. The hurdle in drivers alone would be insane, and the easy solution to that is to only target a small set of hardware which effectively makes you a hardware company (kinda like Apple), but that probably won't work either since people are a lot less likely to try out your OS if they need to buy a new computer to do so.
  - rvz 7y ago
    > ...the easy solution to that is to only target a small set of hardware which effectively makes you a hardware company (kinda like Apple) Perhaps with this idea the only companies able to do this are Apple, Microsoft and Google. Every other OS aiming to be a new desktop OS has essentially failed. Including the Linux desktop community and everyone else. The desktop OS market only has room for 2 or luckily 3 and always requires at least a billion-dollar (in profit) tech company with such resources to even plan for years to do such a thing. Hence the fierce competition in this space, some may ask themselves why bother. > but that probably won't work either since people are a lot less likely to try out your OS if they need to buy a new computer to do so. The exception to that is Google with ChromeOS (Laptops) and Android (Mobile) which they're probably both replacing with Fuchsia. I'd expect Fuchsia running pixelbooks and phones to arrive in this decade. Which will make the desktop market as Windows, macOS and Fuchsia OS.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
As someone who's interested in platform/OS interface and UX design, is using modern Haiku (in a VM) a decent parallel for what using BeOS was like, or would I need to get ahold of the real thing?
- bartvanH 7y ago
  I've played with both BeOS and Haiku, and I would say Haiku is practically the same UX wise. They have built more tooling etc on Haiku, like a package manager where as far as i remember BeOS was More windows like (download file, install)
lproven 7y ago
There is another big reason that Apple didn't buy Be and was right not to -- and I say that although BeOS is my favourite x86 OS ever. Dev tools. Remember Steve Ballmer's "Developers! Developers! Developers!" dance? https://youtu.be/I14b-C67EXY?t=10 https://youtu.be/I14b-C67EXY?t=10 He was right. Without developers for a new OS, you are dead in the water. Which is my MS has fought so hard to keep compatibility. Apple had to switch OS. That meant it had to persuade all its devs to switch OS. That meant it had to offer the devs something very special, and that something was NeXTstep and Interface Builder. NeXT's dev tools were the best in the software business and _that_ offered trad Mac devs a good enough reason to come across. Be had nothing like that. BeOS was wonderful, but it was not a replacement for NeXTstep as a replacement for MacOS. But there was another company out there. BeOS was a natively multiprocessor OS, when that was very rare. One of the reasons is that in fast x86 computers, the x86 chip is one of the most expensive single components in the machine, and it puts out most of the heat. Especially at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, the era of big fat Slot 2 Pentium IIIs and worse still Pentium 4s. But there was one company making powerful desktops with the cheapest, coolest-running CPUs in the world, where making a dual-processor machine _in 1998_ was barely more expensive than making a uniprocessor one. That company's CPUs are the best-selling CPUs ever designed and outsell all x86 chips put together (Intel + AMD + Via etc.) by well over 10 to 1. And it needed a lightweight, SMP-capable OS very badly, right at the time Be was porting BeOS from PowerPC to x86... https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/55562.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/55562.html

672 points by fogus 7y ago

BeOS was the way it was thanks to the async API. I think that a Rust port of BeOS would be amazing due to Rusts first class support of async.

dnautics 7y ago
BeOS did not use async, it used a "half-hearted, primitive, bug-ridden" implementation of actor model in C++.
- adamnemecek 7y ago
  ...which is async.
  - rvz 7y ago
    ...which also a Rust port does exist for Haiku at least after a quick search. [0] [0] https://depot.haiku-os.org/#!/pkg/rust_bin/haikuports/1/36/0/-/1/x86_64?bcguid=bc2-WTLR https://depot.haiku-os.org/#!/pkg/rust_bin/haikuports/1/36/0...
    - adamnemecek 7y ago
      I know. I'm not sure I understand.
  - dnautics 7y ago
    It's not async by default. It's concurrent. In order to get async, you have to do a ton of wrapping, e.g. https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/v1.9.4/lib/elixir/lib/task.ex#L418 https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/v1.9.4/lib/elixir...
- smallstepforman 7y ago
  Unlike Erlang which copies messages, and Pony which uses reference capabilities, BeAPI used a pragmatic approach where BMessages shared a kernel memory pool. Add the ability to filter messages and dynamically retarget messages, and you get a PRACTICAL (vs academic) Actor model. I wouldn't say it was half-hearted and primitive, on the contrary.
  - dnautics 7y ago
    Erlang isn't exactly academic, or impractical. And the BMessages themselves did not share the kernel memory pool, it was the thread system (or BLooper if you will), but only some of the primitives. In fact, BeOS was kind of split brained. You could send a message to a thread either through the kernel send command (which had a limited queue length) or a one which use local shared memory (which effectively did not). That is, of course rather dangerous, since there are no protections on that memory (it being C++). I don't miss the segfaults that I experienced time after time and strange stateful consistency errors from when I was programming in the BeOS, and I don't miss biting my knuckles when having to recast data as (void*) in order to send it to another thread, now that I'm programming in ERTS. I do however strongly appreciate the experience, because it was a hell of a lot of fun, and, importantly, I learned that you can't use a buffered matrix mult to save on memory allocations, because you don't know that your preemptive kernel won't kick you out midway through the matrix mult and start filling the bins with data from the other thread. I would say that half of the reason why I am really adept at identifying race conditions in erlang is that I've seen them all, and worse, in BeOS. And the BeOS runtime does not have half of the resilience and fault isolation properties that Erlang has, which is what I mean by "half hearted and primitive".

killion 7y ago

One of the last lines threw me off... "Would Tim Berners-Lee have used a BeBox to run the world’s first web server instead?" The BeBox didn't ship until 1995. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first version of the web in 1991. So nope, that wouldn't have happened.

Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
the author of the article is in her early 20s, and it's all an ancient history to her, so prepare to get OK Boomered
gfiorav 7y ago
He used a NeXT computer for that IIRC

rcarmo 7y ago

I ran BeOS back in the day (even have the developer book!) and I've been trying Haiku on and off over the years. It's been interesting. The browser isn't quite all there yet but might be considered serviceable, and you can sort of get a working dev environment going on it (not many modern runtimes, though, nor a way to run Linux binaries that would let me do Clojure). It's certainly worth keeping an eye on, although there were some weird decisions - for instance, I remember a thread on ARM support where whomever was tackling that was completely dissing the Raspberry Pi, and yet today, if I were to install it permanently on any machine to tinker with, it would almost certainly be a Pi...

waddlesplash 7y ago
Doesn't Clojure run on the JVM? Haiku has OpenJDK, you know...
- rcarmo 7y ago
  Last time I tried Java was two years ago. A few months back I installed it on KVM to check out the state of WebPositive, but didn’t actually get to try coding anything since the browser couldn’t load my webmail.
yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
> if I were to install it permanently on any machine to tinker with, it would almost certainly be a Pi The pi is such a great device for this. If I were working on any niche operating system (or building one from scratch), I'd target qemu first, and the pi second. It may not be the nicest hardware out there, but it is a single platform that loads of people have, that allows trivial disk swapping (upside of no onboard flash -> everything on swappable SD card), and is dirt cheap.

eb0la 7y ago

I installed BeOS a long time ago on a PC. It was something ahead of the times. I still remember how incredible it was the rotating cube demo where you coud drag and drop images and videos on the cube faces... it worked without a glitch on my pentium. Just found out the demo video shows the application with a GL wave surface playing a video over it: https://youtu.be/BsVydyC8ZGQ?t=1074 https://youtu.be/BsVydyC8ZGQ?t=1074

cptnapalm 7y ago
By all the stars in heaven, that was an impressive demo.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  It's about making a virtue of a necessity. When Be wrote that demo the situation is that the other operating systems you might plausibly choose all have working video acceleration. Even Linux has basic capabilities in this area by that point. BeOS doesn't have that and doesn't have a road map to get it soon. So, any of the other platforms can play full resolution video captured from a DVD for example, a use case actual people have, on a fairly cheap machine and BeOS won't be able to do that without a beast of a CPU because it doesn't have even have hardware colour transform acceleration or chromakey. But - 1990s hardware video acceleration can only play one video at a time, because "I want to play three videos" isn't a top ask from actual users. So, Be's demo deliberately shows several different postage stamp videos instead of one higher resolution video, as the acceleration is no help to competitors there. And then since you're doing it all in software, not rendering to a rectangle in hardware, the transform to have this low res video render as one side of a cube or textured onto a surface makes it only very slightly slower, rather than being impossible. Audiences come away remembering they saw BeOS render videos on a 3D surface, and not conscious that it can't do full resolution video on the cheap hardware everybody has. Mission success.
  - anthk 7y ago
    Eh, multithreading decoding could help a lot. And by the population of DVD video in computers (and the PS2), most people had a Pentium3 450MHZ at homes, which was more than enough for DVD video with an ASM optimized video player such as MPlayer and a good 2D video card. 2D acceleration was more than enough. http://rudolfs-place.nl/BeOS/NVdriver/3dnews.html http://rudolfs-place.nl/BeOS/NVdriver/3dnews.html On Linux you didn't need OpenGL, just Xv. Source: I was there, with an Athlon. Playing DVD's.

christkv 7y ago

I remember using one at NTH in Trondheim in 1995-96 and it was awesome compared to the silicon graphics stations or pcs. It just felt insanely smooth and quick compared to the clunkiness of the other machines. I wish it had taken off, it would probably have gotten us faster to multi core machines.

gnu8 7y ago

We didn’t get to have this because Microsoft strangled it in the crib. I am never forgiving them for that.

dwmcqueen 7y ago
Actually, you didn't get it because Jean-Louis asked too much when Apple inquired.
- slipheen 7y ago
  The way I see it, the two are related- Microsoft stopped it from having much of a chance as an independent OS.. This stopped us from getting it outside of a major vendor like Apple acquiring it. Apple saw this, so didn't want to pay as much as they might have if it were selling well on it's own. So Apple ended up going with NeXT "instead of plan Be" as it were.
  - djsumdog 7y ago
    Yep. OEMs were not allowed to sell dual-boot systems if they wanted to keep buying cheap MS licenses. I think they lost that lawsuit, but it was long after BeOS closed up their commercial operations.
    - GeekyBear 7y ago
      Didn't Be publicly offer up a free Be OS license to the first OEM willing to ship a duel boot system? When there were no takers for a free way to have your hardware stand out from the pack, it was hard to imagine a reason for every single OEM in a very crowded field to back away that didn't involve antitrust shenanigans.
      - hinkley 7y ago
        Now that you mention it, I recall this as well.
  - 7y ago

jamesfmilne 7y ago

I've been wasting a bit of time lately trying to get BeOS 5.0 Professional running on my PowerMac 8500/180. Had to order a USB CD/DVD burner off of Amazon to write the ISO to a CD as I didn't actually own any hardware with a CD/DVD burner anymore :D

arpa 7y ago
Hey, consider yourself lucky you did not need a boot floppy :D

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

djsumdog 7y ago

When I started University in 2000, I had a quad-boot system: Win98, Win2000, BeOS 5 and Slackware Linux (using the BeOS bootload as my primary because it had the prettiest colors). I mostly used Slackware and Win98 (for games), but BeOS was really neat. It had support for the old Booktree video capture cards, could capture video without dropping frames like VirtualDub often did, and it even had support for disabling a CPU on multicpu systems (I only saw videos of this; never ran BeOS on a SMP system). I wish we had more options today. On modern x86 hardware, you pretty much just have Windows, Linux and maybe FreeBSD/OpenBSD if you replace your Wi-Fi card with an older one (or MacOS if you're feeling Hackintoshy .. or just buy Apple hardware). I guess three is kinda the limit you're going to hit when it comes to broad support.

philwelch 7y ago
There also used to be other CPU architectures--though even at the time, enough people complained about "Wintel" that maybe it was obvious that the alternatives weren't ever going to catch on.
- msla 7y ago
  People complained about "Wintel" because the 32-bit x86 chips were so fast and cheap they destroyed the market for RISC designs and killed existing RISC workstation and server architectures, like SPARC and HPPA and MIPS. By the time the Pentium came around, the future looked like a completely monotonous stretch of Windows NT on x86 for ever and ever, amen. No serious hardware competition, other than Intel being smart enough to not kill AMD outright for fear of antitrust litigation, and no software competition on the desktop, with OSS OSes being barely usable then (due to an infinite backlog of shitty hardware like Winmodems and consumer-grade printers) and Apple in a permanent funk. We were perpetually a bit afraid that Microsoft/Intel would pull something like Palladium/Trustworthy Computing [1] and lock down PC hardware but good, finally killing the Rebel Alliance of Linux/BSD, but somehow the hammer never quite fell. It did in the cell phone world, though, albeit in an inconsistent fashion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computing_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi... Microsoft and Intel really seemed permanent back then. I wonder if that's how people felt about IBM back in the 1950s.

aazaa 7y ago

> In 1990, Jean-Louis Gassée, who replaced Jobs in Apple as the head of Macintosh development, was also fired from the company. He then also formed his own computer company with the help of another ex-Apple employee, Steve Sakoman. They called it Be Inc, and their goal was to create a more modern operating system from scratch based on the object-oriented design of C++, using proprietary hardware that could allow for greater media capabilities unseen in personal computers at the time. Even IBM with OS/2 couldn't surmount the juggernaut network effect of Windows. By 1990, this was apparent to many. It's odd that Gassée and company thought they could succeed where IBM had failed.

msla 7y ago
IBM also failed to lock down the IBM PC hardware standard. They tried, with the PS/2 and the Micro Channel Architecture, but it turns out clone makers were more interested in standardizing and improving the existing non-standard (retconned into being the Industry Standard Architecture, ISA) into EISA than in signing on to perpetually license MCA from IBM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Channel_architecture
duxup 7y ago
IBM also didn't quite know what to do with OS/2 and how to sell it. Maybe Microsoft's ties to the PC industry would have killed it anyway but IBM was kinda lost on what it meant to sell an OS to consumers.
jkestner 7y ago
I saw BeOS as a spiritual successor to the Amiga OS, where it might be used as a turnkey media creation system. I think Apple was the Microsoft of this market, and had enough user/developer inertia to make inroads impossible. They sold a depressing 1800 BeBoxes.
hbbio 7y ago
They thought they would have their chance with hardware+software combo. Indeed, the BeBox should have looked like this to succeed: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Apple-eMac-FL.jpg/600px-Apple-eMac-FL.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Ap... That computer made Apple cool again, and paved the way for their recovery way before the iPhone skyrocket.

pjmlp 7y ago

In this alternative universe, Objective-C would have died, Swift would never happened, and C++ would rule across desktop and mobile OSes (thinking only of Windows, BeOS X, Symbian, Windows CE and what might have been BeOS based iOS). Also POSIX would be even less relevant, and very few would be buying BeOS X for doing Linux coding.

zozbot234 7y ago
> and C++ would rule across desktop and mobile OSes C++ in a non-standard version as compiled by gcc 2.96 release! Awesome.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  What lack of imagination, as if they wouldn't be upgrading their toolchains. In fact, Haiku does support more modern toolchains and the BeOS R5 is only kept around due to ABI issues with binary only BeOS software.
  - dfox 7y ago
    The ABI issues are exactly the reason why having C++ as OS API level language is a bad idea.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Not all, Android, IBM i (C++ has been slowly replacing PL/S), mbed, Windows, and OS X (IO Kit, now Driver Kit), are doing pretty alright. There is no such thing as C ABI, it only happens to work on OS that are, surprise surprise, written in C.
      - tialaramex 7y ago
        There is a C ABI. The "x86-64 System V ABI" (the ABI for C on everything except Windows on an x86-64, ie a typical PC) was designed by AMD working with early adopters on Linux and other platforms. Here are several extant ABI documents: https://github.com/hjl-tools/x86-psABI/wiki/X86-psABI https://github.com/hjl-tools/x86-psABI/wiki/X86-psABI The ABI for C needs to agree less stuff than a C++ ABI but it's still quite a lot of stuff, if these things don't get agreed then code won't work unless everybody uses the same (version of the) compiler.

localhost 7y ago

Before I first saw BeOS running on a colleague's machine back in the ~mid-late 90s (same guy who introduced me to Python) I used an SGI Onyx Reality Engine machine [1] (roughly $250K computer back in the day) for molecular mechanics simulations and BeOS ran circles around it on perceived responsiveness. I really wish we have OS's that prioritize input/output latency over all else. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx

JBReefer 7y ago
Don’t mobile OS’ prioritize perceived latency above all other resources (besides battery)?
- localhost 7y ago
  I should have said that I really want a general-purpose OS to prioritize perceived latency. Mobile OS (and gaming consoles) of course are tuned quite differently and in my brain I view them as completely different experiences when I use them. My desktop while significantly more powerful just _feels_ slower because of the latency.
- peatmoss 7y ago
  That’s a great point, however they also lock down the enduser experience to something diminished from a fully general purpose computer.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Considering how often I hit a button more than once because it took so long to do anything about the first one, that seems unlikely.
  - lostgame 7y ago
    I was drinking water when I read this and ended up snorting it out I laughed so hard when I read this. It’s so, so true. I am a mobile dev and use a plethora of iOS and Android devices all the time, often on many different software versions. It’s not unique to any platform, and seems to be most often affecting the keyboard input, but occasionally seems to affect the rest of the UI as well. Software updates will oscillate between breaking and fixing these things on and off between different devices. I’ve been doing app development since iOS 3 and the first version of the App Store and used an ADP1. There’s no method to the madness I can see. Especially with the keyboard input. Lord help you if you happen to be using a 4S or 5 or iPad 2/3. I often wait for up to 10-15 seconds for text input to catch up to itself, only to catch up to itself all at once - I can type whole sentences knowing by the time I wait for them to finish it’ll be the same 10-15 seconds to wait as if I’ve typed a single character.

rayiner 7y ago

Oh man! I first tried BeOS personal edition when it came on a CD with Maximum PC magazine. (Referring to same demo CD, though the poster is not me: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1067159&start=40 https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1067159&s.... Also, how crazy is it that Ars Technica’s forums have two decade old posts? In 2000, that would be like seeing forum posts from 1980.) I remember being so happy when we got SDSL, and I could get online from BeOS. (Before that, my computer had a winmodem.) BeOS was always a very tasteful design. And well documented! I learned so much about low level programming from the Be Newsletters: https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/index.html https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/index.html. The BONE article is a great introduction to how a network stack works: https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue5-5.html#Engineering5-5 https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue5-5.h.... I still have a copy of Dominic Giampalo’s BeFS book somewhere. BeOS was very much a product of its time. (Microkernel, use of C++, etc.) What would a modern BeOS look like? My thought: use of a memory and thread safe language like Rust for the main app-level APIs. (Thread safety in BeOS applications, where every window ran in its own thread, was not trivial.) Probably more exokernel than microkernel, with direct access to GPUs and NICs and maybe even storage facilitated by hardware multiplexing. What else?

anon9001 7y ago
> In 2000, that would be like seeing forum posts from 1980. That's the premise of Jason Scott's project launched in 1998 :) http://textfiles.com/ http://textfiles.com/
- cbm-vic-20 7y ago
  He also livestreams on Twitch; recently he's been streaming the archival of Apple II floppies. https://www.twitch.tv/textfilesdotcom https://www.twitch.tv/textfilesdotcom
anthk 7y ago
Haiku OS still uses C++.
rvz 7y ago

mumblemumble 7y ago

Ah, memories. Used to use BeOS as my primary OS for a year or two. I think it's the only OS I ever found to be truly intuitive and pleasant to work with. That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen Be over NeXT. The elephant in the room is security: NeXTSTEP, being Unix-based, has some amount of security baked in from the ground up. BeOS didn't; it was more akin to Windows 95 or classic Mac OS on that front. Consequently, I doubt it could have made it far into the 21st century. It would have died unceremoniously in a steaming pile of AYBABTU. Taking Apple with it, presumably.

andrewflnr 7y ago
Funny you should mention Windows 95. The company that sold that ended up doing pretty well.
- hugi 7y ago
  Really? Most people I talk with these days seem to agree that the proprietary OS is a liability.
  - andrewflnr 7y ago
    It didn't kill them, though, which was my only point. I guess HN didn't think it was as funny as I did.
  - colejohnson66 7y ago
    I’ve never heard anyone say Windows is a problem because it’s proprietary. I have heard that having to pay to upgrade is a pain because you (the company) have to budget for it. Even then, you would also need to budget for the downtime and time to verify that it works before deploying the update, and both those have to be done on Linux too (it’s why LTS releases are a thing). Anyways, Windows 10 may have its problems, but Microsoft the company is doing pretty well. Their stock is up about 50% this year (200% over the past 5). And that’s not to mention the fact that they’ve open sourced .NET among many other things.

rvz 7y ago

BeOS was really something of what the future 'could' have almost been. Too bad that it was killed by better competitors. But again I think its fair to compare with the lessons learned from its successor 'Haiku' that can be learned by many other OSes: From what I can see from using Haiku for a bit, it has the bazar community element from the open-source culture with its package management and ports system from Linux and BSD whilst being conservative with its design from its apps, UI, and SDK like macOS. Although I have tired it and its surprisingly "useable", the driver story is still a bit lacking. But from a GUI usability point of view compared with many Linux distros, it feels very consistent unlike the countless confusing interfaces coming from those distros. Perhaps BeOS lives on in the Haiku project, but whats more interesting is that the real contender who learned from its failure is the OS that has its kernel named 'Zircon'.

0xDEEPFAC 7y ago
Well it wasn't as simple as "killed off by better competitors". It was actually both much better than Windows 98 and Mac OS at the time. But ultimately the deathblow came from Apple which, after struggling with low sales and poor quality software, almost chose to buy BeInc's tech but dropped it so they could bring in Steve Jobs. So it was more like vendor lock-in (Windows) and corporate deals (Apple) as well as failing partners (Palm).
- DennisP 7y ago
  Apple also dropped it because they couldn't come together on price, partly because BeOS was in a fairly unfinished state: > Apple's due diligence placed the value of Be at about $50 million and in early November it responded with a cash bid "well south of $100 million," according to Gassée. Be felt that Apple desperately needed its technology and Gassée's expertise. Apple noted that only $20 million had been invested in Be so far, and its offer represented a windfall, especially in light of the fact that the BeOS still needed three years of additional expensive development before it could ship (it didn't have any printer drivers, didn't support file sharing, wasn't available in languages other than English, and didn't run existing Mac applications). Direct talks between Amelio and Gassée broke down over price just after the Fall Comdex trade show, when Apple offered $125 million. Be's investors were said to be holding out for no less than $200 million, a figure Amelio considered "outrageous." > ...With Be playing hard to get, Apple decided to play hardball and began investigating other options. http://macspeedzone.com/archive/art/con/be.shtml http://macspeedzone.com/archive/art/con/be.shtml

bluedino 7y ago

The founder of Be wrote a bunch of articles about Be's life, and demise https://mondaynote.com/tagged/beos https://mondaynote.com/tagged/beos

hinkley 7y ago
This part seemed like the punchline: > Apple’s decision to go with NeXT and Jobs was doubly perilous for us. Not only would we not be the next MacOS, Jobs immediately walked third party Mac hardware makers to their graves. No more Mac clones for BeOS. With tepid BeBox sales and no future on the Mac, Valley VCs weren’t keen for another round of funding — and the 1995 round was running out.

ossworkerrights 7y ago

Ah the memories! Had no idea Haiku was an open source implementation of BeOS. Port Electron to it, and I commit to writing tools for this OS in my spare time!

Quequau 7y ago

I used BeOS for most of the 2nd half of the '90s and I guess in my mind at least the regrettable, messy, and unethical end of BeOS in 2001-2002 is emblematic of the Dot Com collapse. Crushed by Microsoft's anti-competitive business practices and sold for scrap to a failing company who was unable to actually do anything with parts they wound up with but who never the less made damn sure that no one else could either.

codefreakxff 7y ago
PSA: nevertheless is written as a single word

rwmj 7y ago

Haiku is really good. Would recommend anyone to try it out in a VM (I had it running on my actual laptop for a short time, but unfortunately my job pretty much requires me to run Linux so it couldn't stay). Haiku has a really responsive UI with a 90s look so you can actually tell what is a button.

doublerabbit 7y ago
Also recommend. https://haiku-os.org https://haiku-os.org
amatecha 7y ago
Oh man, I really do miss the days of actual coherent UI that is clearly "readable". The trend of flat UI drives me crazy. So much wasted cognitive effort just to make sense of something on-screen.
- rafaelvasco 7y ago
  Feel the same. Clean UI doesn't have to be flat. That said , "semi-flat" interfaces can look really good.
kungtotte 7y ago
How painful was it to get it running on a laptop? I've been interested in Haiku for a long time now, but I don't really have a place to play with it except on my laptop.
- rwmj 7y ago
  You have to have the right laptop. At the time I had a Thinkpad (X1 IIRC?) which fairly much worked out of the box, but I'm fairly sure it won't work on $random laptop. For best results and the lowest barrier to entry try it first in a VM.
  - waddlesplash 7y ago
    Actually these days, Haiku will probably at least boot on $random laptop, and if you have a WiFi chip that FreeBSD also supports (we reuse their network drivers), you can probably even connect wirelessly. I run Haiku on my ThinkPad E550 (2015), I know some of the other devs run on Dell XPS 13, HPs, etc. And the same is true in towers (Ryzen is becoming a popular pick.) GPU acceleration drivers are the one real kind of driver we lack at this point.

perardi 7y ago

In my hazy recollection, there was another, rather pedestrian reason Apple didn't go for BeOS: it had almost no infrastructure for printing. The Mac's niche was prepress and desktop publishing (remember that phrase?), and BeOS could barely print and had no color management. (Though I could be totally wrong on this, and welcome a correction.)

smallstepforman 7y ago
I also read a story about how BeOS DPx (developer previews) lacked decent printing support and this was another reason why Apple chose NeXT. The irony is that Apple had to redo the NeXT printing stack anyhow, as did BeOS in R4, and they both ended up using CUPS. Also another reason was lack of x86 support, which forced BeInc to quickly rush out a x86 port in R3.0. Intel were so impressed by the x86 performance, that they ended up investing $4M into BeInc.
forwhomst 7y ago
BeOS didn't have a lot of stuff. For example networking. Big gap.

Eric_WVGG 7y ago

I feel like the biggest missed opportunity of the “mobile revolution” ten years ago was BeOS. It seemed clear to me that Android would be a bust for smartphone manufacturers (nobody has really made money off of Android except for Google and Samsung, the latter of whom accomplished this by dominating that market). If Sony, for example, had gotten ahold of BeOS and tried to vertically integrate in a manner similar to Apple, they could have been a contender. Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning Was the Command Line has quite a lot of interesting observations about BeOS during its prime. http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html

fartcannon 7y ago
I think Microsoft made quite a lot off Android.
- seabrookmx 7y ago
  Yup. Mostly around patents. Ironically the only good (IMO, obviously) Outlook client is Android. Really curious how the Surface Duo turns out. Weird form factor aside, Microsoft embracing Android on a branded device is interesting.
rvz 7y ago
Well there's your reason why Google has the expertise to build Fuchsia. Most of the BeOS guys were hired there to work on Android and now they are doing it again with Fuchsia. We will all come back to this comment in 10 years to find ourselves running Fuchsia on our phones, tablets and our new Pixelbooks.
- Eric_WVGG 7y ago
  Huh! I thought it was the Danger Sidekick crew

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

That was actually a fairly awesome OS (for its day). Many folks thought Apple would buy it. When they purchased NeXT, instead, a lot of us were disappointed. However, all these years later, I'm very glad that BeOS wasn't selected.

deepaksurti 7y ago
I have never used BeOS, can you explain why you are glad now that it wasn't selected?
- ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
  Mostly because of the UNIX subsystem. Having all that horsepower under the hood has been awesome. Also, NeXTStep became Cocoa, which knocked PowerPlant into a cocked hat. That may not be as compelling an argument. I heard that the BeOS framework was damn nice (never tried it, myself).
  - danieldk 7y ago
    Besides that, it is also very likely that Apple would have remained stagnant (or worse) if Steve Jobs had not been brought into the fold. I am not into persona worshipping, but Jobs brought some well-needed focus to a sea of overpriced beige boxes.

harikb 7y ago

I remember the Palm acquisition. At that time Palm had invested heavily in webOS [1] which wasn't as performant. When they acquired BeOS, I thought it was going to be a turn around. But that didn't happen either. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS

bsharitt 7y ago
First of all Be was purchased by Palm several years before webOS ever came out. WebOS didn't even exist in the same company. After Palm split into palmSource(software) and palmOne(hardware), the BeOs stuff(along side the old PalmOS stuff) went with palmSource. Later palmOne bought the rights to the full Palm name from palmSource and became Palm again and that Palm came out with webOS.
- harikb 7y ago
  Thanks for the correction. Clearly, my recollection was wrong.

vkaku 7y ago

I'm waiting for Haiku stable. I just hope it's worth it :) Could use a change from current ones.

dang 7y ago

Many previous threads for the curious: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22BeOS%22%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=haiku%20-beos%20-yc%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

agumonkey 7y ago

beos demos never fail to make me weep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggCODBIfWKY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggCODBIfWKY

donatj 7y ago
Oh man the theme song to this brings me back! I have it in my iTunes to this day. It's Virtual(Void) by Baron Arnold. I spoke to him years ago. If I recall he worked for Be before moving to Sidekick…

jedberg 7y ago

My favorite part of BeOS was that in the control panel you could turn individual processors on and off. And it happily let you shoot yourself in the foot and turn off the last processor with no warning whatsoever. I appreciated that the OS didn't coddle you.

chipotle_coyote 7y ago

I was another former Be "power user." And I think that was probably accurate -- if you weren't in the "BeOS lifestyle" during the admittedly short window that it was possible, it's hard to understand how much promise it looked like it had. When I tell people I ran it full-time for over a year, they wonder how I managed to get anything done, but... - Pe was a great GUI text editor, competitive with BBEdit on the Mac - GoBe Productive was comparable to AppleWorks, but maybe a little better at being compatible with Microsoft Office - SoundPlay was a great MP3 player that could do crazy things that I still don't see anything doing 20 years later (it had speed control for files, including playing backwards, and could mix files that were queued up for playback; it didn't have any library management, but BeOS's file system let you expose arbitrary metadata -- like MP3 song/artist/etc. tags! -- right in file windows) - Mail-It was the second-best email client I ever used, behind the now also sadly-defunct Mailsmith - e-Picture was an object-based bitmapped graphics editor similar in spirit and functionality to Macromedia's Fireworks, and was something I genuinely missed for years after leaving BeOS And there were other programs that were amazing, even though I didn't use them: Adamation's video editor (videoElements? something like that), their audio editor audioElements, Steinberg's Nuendo, objektSynth, and two programs which are incredibly still being sold today: Lost Marble's Moho animation program, now sold by Smith Micro for Mac and PC, and the radio automation package TuneTracker (incredibly now being sold as a turnkey bundle with Haiku). Also, for years, there was a professional-grade theatre light/audio control system, LCS CueStation, that ran on BeOS -- and it actually ran Broadway and Las Vegas productions. I remember seeing it running at the Cirque de Soleil permanent installation at Disney World in Orlando. At the time Apple bought Next rather than Be, I thought they'd made a horrible mistake. Given Apple's trajectory afterward, of course, it's hard to say that looking back. It's very possible that if they'd bought Be, they'd have gone under, although I think that would have less to do with technology than with the management they'd have ended up with (or more accurately, stayed with). But it's still an interesting "what if."

jonny_eh 7y ago
You may have hinted at it, but I think Apple's subsequent turnaround after acquiring Next was mainly due to their founder, Steve Jobs, coming back to Apple.

jjrh 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#Products_using_BeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#Products_using_BeOS Pretty cool BeOS still lives on in the audio/video/broadcasting industry.

ttul 7y ago

I remember seeing a BeBox under someone's desk at the video game company I was interning at in 1997. I nearly lost my shit. When Be released an Intel-compatible build while I was at Santa Clara in 1998, I installed it onto one of the lab computers. Sorry about that, IT team.

notadoc 7y ago

Try it yourself today https://www.haiku-os.org https://www.haiku-os.org

gwbas1c 7y ago

When I went to college in 1999, a kid down the hall from me pushed me really hard to install Be. It looked really cool when he showed it to me... ... But no programs that I wanted ran on it! As cool as BeOS was, without programs, it was little more than a demo or a hobby. Within a year I tried Windows NT and Windows 2000, and then forgot all about BeOS. Windows 2000 did everything that BeOS did for me, didn't crash, and ran all the programs I wanted to.

statico 7y ago

One of my favorite anecdotes about BeOS was that it had a CPU usage meter[1], and on the CPU meter there were on/off switches for each core. If you had two cores and turned one off, your computer would run at half speed. If you turned both off, your computer would crash. Someone once told me that this was filed as a bug against the OS and the response was "Works As Intended" and that it was the expected behavior. (These are fuzzy memories from ~25 years ago. It would be nice if someone could confirm this story or tell me if it's just my imagination.) [1]: http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/8way/8way-1.jpg http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/8way/8way-1.jpg

MisterTea 7y ago
The CPU monitor program was called Pulse and early versions allowed you to turn all the processors off and crash the machine. I think it was fixed in 3.something or 4.0. The 8-way PIII Xeon was a Compaq someone tested BeOS on before it went into production. I Remember it being posted on some BeOS news site. There should be another screenshot or two with 25 avi files playing and a crap load of CPU hungry programs running at once. Impressive feat circa 2000. Edit: browse the screenshot directory for the other two. Amazing they survived time, internet, bit rot and my memory: http://birdhouse.org/beos/8way/ http://birdhouse.org/beos/8way/ The BeOS scheduler prioritized the GUI and media programs so you could load the machine down to 100% and the GUI never stuttered and windows could be smoothly moved, maximized and minimized at 100% CPU. Rather, your programs would stutter. And everything was given a fair chance at CPU time. Very nice design and the OS was built from the ground up for multimedia and threading for SMP. It was a real nice attempt at building a next generation desktop OS. Had no security even though it had basic POSIX compatibility and a bash shell. Security bits meant nothing.
- acdha 7y ago
  I remember circa 2000 being able to simultaneously compile Mozilla, transfer DV video from a camcorder into an editor, check email, and surf the web on a dual Pentium Pro system with no hint of UI stutter or dropped frames in the firewire video transfer. It was at least another decade before SSDs and kernel improvements made that possible on Linux, Windows, or OS X.

stiGGG 7y ago

Some trivia: There was an unofficial successor of BeOS called ZETA from a german company yellowTAB (later magnussoft). I remember this because they tried selling it via a homeshopping channel in german TV which was completely hilarious. I found a (very bad) recording of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQW-q2vp6W4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQW-q2vp6W4

SyneRyder 7y ago
For some weird reason I still have two (?) copies of yellowTAB Zeta on my bookshelf, next to my boxed copy of Red Hat Linux 7.3. Amazingly Zeta got more use than Linux, because it was much easier to get everything working on my machine. I just checked the discs and it's the same "Deluxe Edition RC2" as in that home shopping video. I think my copies were bought as special advance preview builds for third-party Zeta developers, though. And I don't think I paid as much as 100EUR...

disordinary 7y ago

I was going through boxes of old CDs and DVDs the other day and throwing out a lot of crap, I found my old BeOS5 disk. Didn't throw out that one. I really enjoyed using that OS back in 2000.

rafaelvasco 7y ago

I feel like modern OS's are in some(several?) ways, worse than these classic OS's... They just assume too much, impose too much, hide too much etc...

denimboy 7y ago

The way BeOS used filesystem attributes like a database was way ahead of the curve and it still might be. This book was a great read back in the day of what goes into a "modern" filesystem design https://archive.org/details/practical-file-system-design "Practical File System Design" was technical but also readable. Straight from the man who designed BFS which makes it more of an accomplishment IMO.

meerita 7y ago

I know Microsoft was really big back then, but why BeOS and OS/2 Warp never get into and GNU/Linux did?

bjornsing 7y ago

I actually bet a little bit of money on that alternative universe. I used to jokingly recount the lesson learned: “Never bet against Steve Jobs.”

bish4p 7y ago

If you are interested there is a way to make linux look like BeOs [0]. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/d8e54k/window_maker_classic_90s_beos_look_powersimplicity/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/d8e54k/window_mak...

int_19h 7y ago

I enjoy the regular reminiscing of BeOS, but for all the talk about how fast it was on hardware common at the time, I wonder why nobody remembers an even more impressive "tech demo" of an OS from that same period - QNX 6 desktop? An ISO of evaluation edition of 6.2 was easily downloadable for a while, and it was pretty neat: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/qnx621 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/qnx621 (I know that QNX was and still is widely used - the "tech demo" bit refers to its use as a primary desktop OS, not the usual embedding scenarios.)

lproven 7y ago
Did you know that Blackberry 10 is QNX? I had a Passport for a while. A lovely phone, and the OS had an Android runtime so _some_ Android apps worked... but like other OSes that let you run non-native apps, it resulted in BB10 never attaining a critical mass of apps.

pjeide 7y ago

I remember attending MacWorld Boston in '97, at the age of 12, and seeing a BeOS demo. I was blown away by a demonstration that consisted of a video file playing on the page of a rendered book. If you clicked the page of the book and dragged it around, it simulated the page turning and the video deforming, without skipping a frame. I may've only been 12, but that demo has stuck with me since. Edit: I would love to lay eyes on that demo again if anyone has an idea of where video of it may still exist.

ardenpm 7y ago

Crazy timing, just this week I pulled my BeBox put of storage and fired it up. Still impresses me even now, loads of nice touches. Also got a bit of a shock when I played a MIDI file and perfectly serviceable sound was produced by the little built in speaker.

teinac 7y ago

it's one Microsoft's greatest business achievements to have won against the OS/2 and BeOS competition and it's one of Microsoft's biggest business failures to have not won against Google's Android.

jsjohnst 7y ago

> What’s left for us now is to wonder, how different would the desktop computer ecosystem look today if all those years ago, back in 1997, Apple decided to buy Be Inc. instead of NeXT? Would Tim Berners-Lee have used a BeBox to run the world’s first web server instead? For this hypothetical scenario to ever had been possible, BeOS would’ve had to time travel, as TBL wrote WorldWideWeb on a NeXT machine in 1990[0]. BeOS was initially developed in 1991 per Wikipedia[1] and the initial release of BeOS to the public wasn’t until 1995. [0] https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS

prirun 7y ago

"The features it introduced that were brand new at the time are now ubiquitous — things such as preemptive multitasking" Without taking anything away from actual new things introduced in BeOS, preemptive multitasking and dual CPUs were not "brand new". Computer system had been doing these for a long time before 1995, or even 1991 when BeOS was initially developed. Heck, minicomputers were doing this stuff in the 80's!

nickbauman 7y ago

What was truly revolutionary for BeOS was the muti-threaded user interface where you could have multiple mice connected to the same machine and they could interact with the UI at the same time. Hardly anyone paid any attention to this. But the possibilities are amazing.

kresten 7y ago

I was really taken with beos when it was a live product. However, Nextstep really was a much much better basis for taking Apple into the future compared to beos. As has been proven resoundingly first by the seamless switch from PowerPC to intel, and then the ongoing smoothness and general acceptance of OS X by industry. I know it’s not universally loved but OSX/nextstep for me is really everything I could have wanted from an operating system.

VectorLock 7y ago

BeOS was cool and all but I loved the BeBox with the GeekPort. When I worked at a dot-com 1.0 failed startup in 1999 one of our big wigs was a former exec at Be, and he was like the coolest dude I knew at the time. Still up there.

angrygoat 7y ago

We had one of the two-processor BeBoxes at my uni computer club – it was a really cool machine to play around on, and at the time I was using it (1999) one of our few graphical terminals with a web browser, so in quite a bit of demand. We also had a NeXT tower, three SGI machines running IRIX, a Mac upon which someone had installed Mac OS X Server 1.0 (NeXT innards, UI looked like classic MacOS). I kind of miss the diversity of systems we had back then. In many ways we've gone forward – tinkering is much easier now with the preponderance of cheap, fast dev boards and systems like the Raspberry Pi, but it does feel like actual user-facing stuff is now largely locked down, without as much innovation and competition.

schwank 7y ago

I was a paid BeOS customer and still have copies of multiple versions in the original branded shipper envelopes. I have fond memories of using it back during my college CS days. Really loved the interface, that was quite the time when I used NT4, Solaris, Irix, and BeOS all at the same time.

frankzen 7y ago

I almost thought we were talking comeback when I saw the headline!

cable2600 7y ago

The BEOS software needs to be preserved in an archive for the free, PD, open source, software. Mike Crawford RIP: Wrote spellswell: https://github.com/ErisBlastar/spellswell https://github.com/ErisBlastar/spellswell and word services: https://github.com/ErisBlastar/wordservices https://github.com/ErisBlastar/wordservices It was taken from one of his old sites before he lost control of it.

colinstrickland 7y ago

That's a coincidence this surfacing right now. There must be something in the air. I was an enthusiastic BeOS user back when it was a thing (ironically, I switched to it because I thought NEXTSTEP didn't have much of a future left), and I used it for a few years, quite happily. It left me with a legacy of several BeBoxes, and over the holiday period, I was vaguely inspired to dust them off and wonder about what to do with them. I got one of them booting perfectly, here's a link I posted to reddit showing it's first POST https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/eku19u/dusted_off_one_of_my_old_beboxes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/eku19u/du... (first POST should have gone to slashdot really, ah well.)

ngcc_hk 7y ago

It is not the OS, not even the software ... Apple would still be a failure if it is all desktop OS. And the first thing he did is to do sos to Microsoft and ask for office license for 5% Apple share for a reason. That is done. Of course you lost in a battle or even a campaign does not mean you just lost the war. The world is better with Steve, Microsoft with competition ... Now we even have Microsoft having GitHub and linux running on windows. Not if it is BeOS.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

florin0x01 7y ago

How does Haiku compare to Beos?

firecall 7y ago

Now I had read somewhere that Apple would have purchased BeOS but JLG was pushing for too much money. JLG fucked up the deal basically. I dont have a source... was years ago I read it. Had JLG not fucked up the deal, they would have picked up BeOS and not NeXT.

irenedowd 7y ago

Hi. I ran over a generally excellent Hacker Goatse Security. They have assisted with a ton of issues like Phone Hack, Account Hack, Clear Debts, Grade overhaul E.t.c Contact: goatsesecure (at) gmail Text/Whatsapp: +1 646 389 4585

qwerty456127 7y ago

That's sad Haiku won't get traction. An viable alternative on the desktop PC OS market would be a great thing to have (even on a commercial basis, not necessarily for free). Linux for 1% geeks, MacOS X for Apple hardware owners and Windows for everybody else does not seem like a healthy competition. Android, iOS, Chrome, Facebook - everything is monopolized nowadays. Governments should really consider supporting alternative OSes, browsers and social networks for sake of national security as the monopolies enjoy too much power over the whole humanity nowadays.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Unfortunately the way the PC market is makes it basically impossible for a new desktop OS to show up at this point. The hurdle in drivers alone would be insane, and the easy solution to that is to only target a small set of hardware which effectively makes you a hardware company (kinda like Apple), but that probably won't work either since people are a lot less likely to try out your OS if they need to buy a new computer to do so.
- rvz 7y ago
  > ...the easy solution to that is to only target a small set of hardware which effectively makes you a hardware company (kinda like Apple) Perhaps with this idea the only companies able to do this are Apple, Microsoft and Google. Every other OS aiming to be a new desktop OS has essentially failed. Including the Linux desktop community and everyone else. The desktop OS market only has room for 2 or luckily 3 and always requires at least a billion-dollar (in profit) tech company with such resources to even plan for years to do such a thing. Hence the fierce competition in this space, some may ask themselves why bother. > but that probably won't work either since people are a lot less likely to try out your OS if they need to buy a new computer to do so. The exception to that is Google with ChromeOS (Laptops) and Android (Mobile) which they're probably both replacing with Fuchsia. I'd expect Fuchsia running pixelbooks and phones to arrive in this decade. Which will make the desktop market as Windows, macOS and Fuchsia OS.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

As someone who's interested in platform/OS interface and UX design, is using modern Haiku (in a VM) a decent parallel for what using BeOS was like, or would I need to get ahold of the real thing?

bartvanH 7y ago
I've played with both BeOS and Haiku, and I would say Haiku is practically the same UX wise. They have built more tooling etc on Haiku, like a package manager where as far as i remember BeOS was More windows like (download file, install)

lproven 7y ago

There is another big reason that Apple didn't buy Be and was right not to -- and I say that although BeOS is my favourite x86 OS ever. Dev tools. Remember Steve Ballmer's "Developers! Developers! Developers!" dance? https://youtu.be/I14b-C67EXY?t=10 https://youtu.be/I14b-C67EXY?t=10 He was right. Without developers for a new OS, you are dead in the water. Which is my MS has fought so hard to keep compatibility. Apple had to switch OS. That meant it had to persuade all its devs to switch OS. That meant it had to offer the devs something very special, and that something was NeXTstep and Interface Builder. NeXT's dev tools were the best in the software business and _that_ offered trad Mac devs a good enough reason to come across. Be had nothing like that. BeOS was wonderful, but it was not a replacement for NeXTstep as a replacement for MacOS. But there was another company out there. BeOS was a natively multiprocessor OS, when that was very rare. One of the reasons is that in fast x86 computers, the x86 chip is one of the most expensive single components in the machine, and it puts out most of the heat. Especially at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, the era of big fat Slot 2 Pentium IIIs and worse still Pentium 4s. But there was one company making powerful desktops with the cheapest, coolest-running CPUs in the world, where making a dual-processor machine _in 1998_ was barely more expensive than making a uniprocessor one. That company's CPUs are the best-selling CPUs ever designed and outsell all x86 chips put together (Intel + AMD + Via etc.) by well over 10 to 1. And it needed a lightweight, SMP-capable OS very badly, right at the time Be was porting BeOS from PowerPC to x86... https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/55562.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/55562.html