14 ms·

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

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.
    - andrewflnr 7y ago
      I interpreted then as saying it was a liability to Microsoft.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Outside HN and Reddit talks, most people I know don't even care about FOSS OSes existence, they just want something that they buy at the shopping mall and can use right away.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      In fairness, I don't think most people care about the OS at all, FOSS or otherwise; they care that the UI is something they can use, and that their apps work. If you perfected WINE overnight, I'll bet you could sit 80% of the population down at a lightly-skinned FreeBSD box and they'd never know.
      - wutbrodo 7y ago
        I don't even think you'd need that for most of the population: it's been quite some time since the median user cared about desktop software[1]. I switched my parents over to a Linux Mint install a decade ago when I went away to college, and it lowered my over-the-phone tech support burden to zero overnight. I also had (non-CS but very smart) friends who switched to (ie dual-booted) Linux on their own after seeing how much better my system was than a Windows box. A decade later, one of them is getting her PhD in veterinary pathology and still dual boots, firing Windows up only when she feels like gaming. [1] My impression is that committed PC gamers aren't a large portion of the desktop user population, but I may be wrong.
        yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        I know a decent number of people who have That One Program that they've been using for 20 years and can't/won't leave. It probably varies by population group.
- danieldk 7y ago
  Sure, but at the time Windows 95 was released, they already had a couple of Windows NT releases (3.1, 3.5, and 3.51). Windows NT was a different, more modern operating system than the Windows 95/98/ME line. So, they did not have to evolve Windows 95 into a modern operating system. After ME, they 'just' switched their user base to another operating system and made this possible through API/ABI compatibility (which is quite a feat by itself).
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  The company that sold classic Mac OS did, too. But you have to consider what else was going on at the time: Microsoft was actively moving away from the DOS lineage. OS/2 had been in development since the mid-1980s, and, while that project came to an ugly end, they had also released the first version of Windows NT in the early '90s, and, by the late '90s, they were purposefully moving toward building their next-gen consumer OS on top of it. Apple needed to be making similarly strong moves toward a multi-user OS with concerns like security baked in deeply. BeOS had the memory protection and the pre-emptive multitasking, which were definitely steps forward, but I don't think they would have taken Apple far enough to allow them to keep up with Microsoft. Which, in turn, would have allowed Microsoft to rest on its laurels, probably to the detriment of the Windows ecosystem.
_red 7y ago
Also, the the familial relations of MacOS and Linux made it possible to share code fairly seamlessly between both (providing not talking about hardware integration). In a world where we there was 3 separate universes: Windows, BeOS, and Linux it's possible Linux would've become more isolated.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mongol 7y ago
  Hmm possibly. But it could also have been to Linux benefit. It would be alone among these in having then advantage of Unix heritage.
  - eloisant 7y ago
    Yes, I remember so many software developers switching from Linux to OSX in the 2000's because "it's a Unix too, but it's shiny".
- danans 7y ago
  BeOS had a regular Unix like (even posix IIRC) dev environment. I was able to do most of the CS course work projects normally done on my University's Sun workstations on BeOS instead. Most of these of courses were data structures, algorithms, compilers, etc projects in C, and not things that required platform specific APIs. But arguably, BeOS' overall model - a single user desktop OS built on top of but hiding its modern OS underpinnings like memory protection and preemptive multitasking - is far more similar to what eventually became MacOSX than Linux. Which isn't so surprising since it was built by ex apple folks. Remember that consumer OSs before this point had no memory protection or preemptive multitasking. Linux, though it had the same modern OS features, was far more closely aligned in spirit with the timeshared modern multi-user Unix OS's like what ran the aforementioned Sun workstations (it's "Linus' Unix after all).
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    BeOS was as UNIX like, as Amiga was. Surely it had a cli, UNIX like directory navigation and a couple of UNIX command like utilities. But good luck porting UNIX CLI software expecting a full POSIX environment. If I am not mistaken, Haiku has done most of the work regarding POSIX support.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Security from what? Do user accounts really provide much benefit in the personal computing space? Where the median user count is 1? Neither OS had the kind of security that is really useful today for this usecase, which is per-application.
- qubex 7y ago
  “Security” is a bit of a misnomer in this context: I think what you actually meant was “multi-user architecture” which, as remarked elsewhere, undergirds the whole notion of keeping processes from promiscuously sharing any and all resources.
  - crtlaltdel 7y ago
    yeah i think of it more as multi tenet safety
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  I do like that you have to “sudo” a program to allow it to access certain files. Even if I am the only user, it stops malicious programs from modifying certain files without me noticing.
  - deniska 7y ago
    Obligatory related xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1200/ https://xkcd.com/1200/
    - jsjohnst 7y ago
      Posting links to XKCD like this is generally considered to be a low quality post, hence the downvotes. I’m not one of the downvoters, but thought I’d share the reason as nobody else did. Edit: gotta love HN! I try to be helpful to someone else that was downvoted to heck with an explanation of why that was the case (based on past replies I’ve seen) and now my post is the own with a negative score. Cheers y’all!
deepaksurti 7y ago
AYBABTU = All Your Base Are Belongs to Us, which is a mangled or broken translation in English of a Japanese phrase from a Japanese game `Zero Wing` [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us Edit: removed the extra A in the acronym
- geuis 7y ago
  Got an extra A in there
embeddedpro 7y ago
The anti competitive business practices of Apple make it hard to imagine the world could be worse. Instead of competition, Apple survives off marketing medium quality products at high prices. I'm not sure how that's good for anyone unless they own Apple stock.
- SllX 7y ago
  If people willingly exchange currency for products from a company and are satisfied with the value that they get out of it to the point that they become repeat customers, then how can you judge that no one except stockholders are benefitting?
  - hugi 7y ago
    Because Apple obviously sucks. I don't understand how hard it is for all their happy customers to understand that they suck. /s
  - anoncake 7y ago
    Network/lock-in effects and negative externalities can easily have that result.
    - eckza 7y ago
      > negative externalities This is very true. macOS and the iPhone, for me, went from being "obviously the very best of the best" to "the lesser of all evils". When my 2015 rMBP finally gives up the ghost and / or when 10.13 loses compatibility with the applications I use, I have no idea what I'm going to do - probably buy another working 2015 rMBP used and pray that the Linux drivers are livable by then. I know it's ridiculous, but it helps me fall asleep at night sometimes.
      - OakNinja 7y ago
        You don’t agree on the 16” being the spiritual successor of the mid 2015 15”?
morio 7y ago
I used to work for Be in Menlo Park in a previous life and I can confirm that the code base quality would have made for a very bad outcome for Apple. Security was the least of the numerous serious issues. That said BeOS somewhat still exists in spirit as a lot of folks from Be went to build/contribute to Android.
- jonhohle 7y ago
  > a lot of folks from Be went to build/contribute to Android. Does that include the quality and security perspective as well? ;-) j/k Having never crossed paths with a former Be employee before, __thank you so much__ for your contribution. BeOS was so instrumental to my perspective on computing and operating systems (and potentially the conception of my disdain for what Microsoft did to the world of operating systems around the turn of the century). From a user perspective, BeOS was nearly perfect. Great UI and utilities, POSIX command line, so fast and responsive. The "install to Windows" option was amazing for trying things out. BeFS was wonderful (it's nice to see Mr. Giampaolo's work continue in macOS).
  - mshockwave 7y ago
    > a lot of folks from Be went to build/contribute to Android. That's correct, the IPC in AOSP, Binder, is basically borrow from BeOS
- lawnchair 7y ago
  Wow! Thanks so much for working on BeOS. This was a super fun OS to use.
- rogihee 7y ago
  Thanks a lot! I ran BeOS fulltime for a few years (R3/4/5) and I'm looking at a BeOS "the Media OS" poster at my wall here. Fond memories!
  - bantunes 7y ago
    Care to share where you got the poster?
_8ljf 7y ago
“That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen Be over NeXT.” Yes. Except that it wasn’t acquiring NeXTSTEP that saved Apple’s skin; it was acquiring Steven P Jobs. True, version 1 had been rough and flakey as hell, and honestly really didn’t work all that well. But Steve 2.0? Damn, that one could sell.
- jimbokun 7y ago
  NeXTSTEP pretty directly evolved into iOS, though, so it was certainly a significant asset in the acquisition, too.
  - mattl 7y ago
    Yeah, Rhapsody > Mac OS X Server 1.0 > Mac OS X > iOS which was literally described as being "OS X" when it first launched.
  - hhas01 7y ago
    True, but a technology is only a means to an end, not an end itself. What sells is product. You may have the finest tech on the planet—and that means precisely squat. What counts is putting bums on seats. Your seats. And keeping them there. Limps of tech are just a vehicle for that; to be used, abused, chewed up, and/or discarded on the road(s) to that end. Apple could have done better; they certainly did plenty worse (Copland, Taligent, the first Mac OS). As it turned out, NeXTSTEP proved it was indeed “good enough” to fit a pressing need at the time; and the rest was just hammering till it looked lickable enough for consumers to bite. All it was needed was a salesman to shift it—and Steve 2.0 proved to be one of the greatest salesman in modern marketing history. That’s what made the difference between selling a tech to a million dyed-in-the-wirewool nerds, and selling tech to a billion everyday consumers. And then up-selling all of those customers to completely new worlds of products and services invented just for the purpose. .. Want to created a whole new device? Hire Steve Wozniak. Want to create a whole new world? Oh, but that is the real trick. And Steve Jobs gave us the masterclass. .. Had Steve started Be and Jean-Louis built NeXT, we would still be in the exact same situation today, and the only difference would be chunks of BeOS as the iPhone’s bones instead. Funny old world, eh? :)
Shivetya 7y ago
bounced between windows and os/2, never really used beos as an os, mostly just as a toy for fun. the one thing I remember is that I could play a video that for the time looked amazing without issue. I want to say I even played Quake on it, in a window!
TheCondor 7y ago
Security, networking, multiuser, i10n, print (don’t even begin to underestimate this and quartz and display postscript) beos was an rtos with a neat UI. it was still fun but there was a gigantic pile of work before it could do what system 7 did, let alone what next did.
- jonhendry18 7y ago
  Additionally, NeXTStep had been in use in production on investment bank trading floors, in scientific institutions, and in military/intelligence agencies. It wasn't widely used, but it was used. So while it might not have been quite ready for the median System 7 user's expectations, it was pretty solid.
  - ngcc_hk 7y ago
    May be so. But I have Mac OS 1.0 running on my MacBook. It is so slow and really not that working. Unlike the Mac OS 9. It is not that smooth. Luckily he found iPod ... even the colour one is very slow.
qwerty456127 7y ago
> 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. I love everything I've read about BeOS but to be honest I must mention I couldn't understand how to use Haiku (I've never used the original BeOS) once I've tried - id didn't feel intuitive at all. And I'm not really stupid, I've been using different flavors of Linux as a primary OS for over a decade. > 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. Some times I miss the days of Windows 95 so much. I wish desktop OSes could be more simple, i.e. without multi-user and file access rights. When it's my own personal computer all I want of it from the security perspective is to prevent others from unlocking it or recovering data from it and to prevent any network communication except that I authorized. Sadly Linux still doesn't even have a decent implementation of the latter (Mac has LittleSnitch). Windows 9x did pretty well for me - I've never caught a virus, never corrupted a system file and it was easy to fix for others who did.
- lproven 7y ago
  > I wish desktop OSes could be more simple, i.e. without multi-user and file access rights. Have a look into Oberon and its successor A2/Bluebottle. http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/ http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/ https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/46523.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/46523.html

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.
  - andrewflnr 7y ago
    I interpreted then as saying it was a liability to Microsoft.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Outside HN and Reddit talks, most people I know don't even care about FOSS OSes existence, they just want something that they buy at the shopping mall and can use right away.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    In fairness, I don't think most people care about the OS at all, FOSS or otherwise; they care that the UI is something they can use, and that their apps work. If you perfected WINE overnight, I'll bet you could sit 80% of the population down at a lightly-skinned FreeBSD box and they'd never know.
    - wutbrodo 7y ago
      I don't even think you'd need that for most of the population: it's been quite some time since the median user cared about desktop software[1]. I switched my parents over to a Linux Mint install a decade ago when I went away to college, and it lowered my over-the-phone tech support burden to zero overnight. I also had (non-CS but very smart) friends who switched to (ie dual-booted) Linux on their own after seeing how much better my system was than a Windows box. A decade later, one of them is getting her PhD in veterinary pathology and still dual boots, firing Windows up only when she feels like gaming. [1] My impression is that committed PC gamers aren't a large portion of the desktop user population, but I may be wrong.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        I know a decent number of people who have That One Program that they've been using for 20 years and can't/won't leave. It probably varies by population group.
danieldk 7y ago
Sure, but at the time Windows 95 was released, they already had a couple of Windows NT releases (3.1, 3.5, and 3.51). Windows NT was a different, more modern operating system than the Windows 95/98/ME line. So, they did not have to evolve Windows 95 into a modern operating system. After ME, they 'just' switched their user base to another operating system and made this possible through API/ABI compatibility (which is quite a feat by itself).
mumblemumble 7y ago
The company that sold classic Mac OS did, too. But you have to consider what else was going on at the time: Microsoft was actively moving away from the DOS lineage. OS/2 had been in development since the mid-1980s, and, while that project came to an ugly end, they had also released the first version of Windows NT in the early '90s, and, by the late '90s, they were purposefully moving toward building their next-gen consumer OS on top of it. Apple needed to be making similarly strong moves toward a multi-user OS with concerns like security baked in deeply. BeOS had the memory protection and the pre-emptive multitasking, which were definitely steps forward, but I don't think they would have taken Apple far enough to allow them to keep up with Microsoft. Which, in turn, would have allowed Microsoft to rest on its laurels, probably to the detriment of the Windows ecosystem.

_red 7y ago

Also, the the familial relations of MacOS and Linux made it possible to share code fairly seamlessly between both (providing not talking about hardware integration). In a world where we there was 3 separate universes: Windows, BeOS, and Linux it's possible Linux would've become more isolated.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mongol 7y ago
Hmm possibly. But it could also have been to Linux benefit. It would be alone among these in having then advantage of Unix heritage.
- eloisant 7y ago
  Yes, I remember so many software developers switching from Linux to OSX in the 2000's because "it's a Unix too, but it's shiny".
danans 7y ago
BeOS had a regular Unix like (even posix IIRC) dev environment. I was able to do most of the CS course work projects normally done on my University's Sun workstations on BeOS instead. Most of these of courses were data structures, algorithms, compilers, etc projects in C, and not things that required platform specific APIs. But arguably, BeOS' overall model - a single user desktop OS built on top of but hiding its modern OS underpinnings like memory protection and preemptive multitasking - is far more similar to what eventually became MacOSX than Linux. Which isn't so surprising since it was built by ex apple folks. Remember that consumer OSs before this point had no memory protection or preemptive multitasking. Linux, though it had the same modern OS features, was far more closely aligned in spirit with the timeshared modern multi-user Unix OS's like what ran the aforementioned Sun workstations (it's "Linus' Unix after all).
- pjmlp 7y ago
  BeOS was as UNIX like, as Amiga was. Surely it had a cli, UNIX like directory navigation and a couple of UNIX command like utilities. But good luck porting UNIX CLI software expecting a full POSIX environment. If I am not mistaken, Haiku has done most of the work regarding POSIX support.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

Security from what? Do user accounts really provide much benefit in the personal computing space? Where the median user count is 1? Neither OS had the kind of security that is really useful today for this usecase, which is per-application.

qubex 7y ago
“Security” is a bit of a misnomer in this context: I think what you actually meant was “multi-user architecture” which, as remarked elsewhere, undergirds the whole notion of keeping processes from promiscuously sharing any and all resources.
- crtlaltdel 7y ago
  yeah i think of it more as multi tenet safety
colejohnson66 7y ago
I do like that you have to “sudo” a program to allow it to access certain files. Even if I am the only user, it stops malicious programs from modifying certain files without me noticing.
- deniska 7y ago
  Obligatory related xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1200/ https://xkcd.com/1200/
  - jsjohnst 7y ago
    Posting links to XKCD like this is generally considered to be a low quality post, hence the downvotes. I’m not one of the downvoters, but thought I’d share the reason as nobody else did. Edit: gotta love HN! I try to be helpful to someone else that was downvoted to heck with an explanation of why that was the case (based on past replies I’ve seen) and now my post is the own with a negative score. Cheers y’all!

deepaksurti 7y ago

AYBABTU = All Your Base Are Belongs to Us, which is a mangled or broken translation in English of a Japanese phrase from a Japanese game `Zero Wing` [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us Edit: removed the extra A in the acronym

geuis 7y ago
Got an extra A in there

embeddedpro 7y ago

The anti competitive business practices of Apple make it hard to imagine the world could be worse. Instead of competition, Apple survives off marketing medium quality products at high prices. I'm not sure how that's good for anyone unless they own Apple stock.

SllX 7y ago
If people willingly exchange currency for products from a company and are satisfied with the value that they get out of it to the point that they become repeat customers, then how can you judge that no one except stockholders are benefitting?
- hugi 7y ago
  Because Apple obviously sucks. I don't understand how hard it is for all their happy customers to understand that they suck. /s
- anoncake 7y ago
  Network/lock-in effects and negative externalities can easily have that result.
  - eckza 7y ago
    > negative externalities This is very true. macOS and the iPhone, for me, went from being "obviously the very best of the best" to "the lesser of all evils". When my 2015 rMBP finally gives up the ghost and / or when 10.13 loses compatibility with the applications I use, I have no idea what I'm going to do - probably buy another working 2015 rMBP used and pray that the Linux drivers are livable by then. I know it's ridiculous, but it helps me fall asleep at night sometimes.
    - OakNinja 7y ago
      You don’t agree on the 16” being the spiritual successor of the mid 2015 15”?

morio 7y ago

I used to work for Be in Menlo Park in a previous life and I can confirm that the code base quality would have made for a very bad outcome for Apple. Security was the least of the numerous serious issues. That said BeOS somewhat still exists in spirit as a lot of folks from Be went to build/contribute to Android.

jonhohle 7y ago
> a lot of folks from Be went to build/contribute to Android. Does that include the quality and security perspective as well? ;-) j/k Having never crossed paths with a former Be employee before, __thank you so much__ for your contribution. BeOS was so instrumental to my perspective on computing and operating systems (and potentially the conception of my disdain for what Microsoft did to the world of operating systems around the turn of the century). From a user perspective, BeOS was nearly perfect. Great UI and utilities, POSIX command line, so fast and responsive. The "install to Windows" option was amazing for trying things out. BeFS was wonderful (it's nice to see Mr. Giampaolo's work continue in macOS).
- mshockwave 7y ago
  > a lot of folks from Be went to build/contribute to Android. That's correct, the IPC in AOSP, Binder, is basically borrow from BeOS
lawnchair 7y ago
Wow! Thanks so much for working on BeOS. This was a super fun OS to use.
rogihee 7y ago
Thanks a lot! I ran BeOS fulltime for a few years (R3/4/5) and I'm looking at a BeOS "the Media OS" poster at my wall here. Fond memories!
- bantunes 7y ago
  Care to share where you got the poster?

_8ljf 7y ago

“That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen Be over NeXT.” Yes. Except that it wasn’t acquiring NeXTSTEP that saved Apple’s skin; it was acquiring Steven P Jobs. True, version 1 had been rough and flakey as hell, and honestly really didn’t work all that well. But Steve 2.0? Damn, that one could sell.

jimbokun 7y ago
NeXTSTEP pretty directly evolved into iOS, though, so it was certainly a significant asset in the acquisition, too.
- mattl 7y ago
  Yeah, Rhapsody > Mac OS X Server 1.0 > Mac OS X > iOS which was literally described as being "OS X" when it first launched.
- hhas01 7y ago
  True, but a technology is only a means to an end, not an end itself. What sells is product. You may have the finest tech on the planet—and that means precisely squat. What counts is putting bums on seats. Your seats. And keeping them there. Limps of tech are just a vehicle for that; to be used, abused, chewed up, and/or discarded on the road(s) to that end. Apple could have done better; they certainly did plenty worse (Copland, Taligent, the first Mac OS). As it turned out, NeXTSTEP proved it was indeed “good enough” to fit a pressing need at the time; and the rest was just hammering till it looked lickable enough for consumers to bite. All it was needed was a salesman to shift it—and Steve 2.0 proved to be one of the greatest salesman in modern marketing history. That’s what made the difference between selling a tech to a million dyed-in-the-wirewool nerds, and selling tech to a billion everyday consumers. And then up-selling all of those customers to completely new worlds of products and services invented just for the purpose. .. Want to created a whole new device? Hire Steve Wozniak. Want to create a whole new world? Oh, but that is the real trick. And Steve Jobs gave us the masterclass. .. Had Steve started Be and Jean-Louis built NeXT, we would still be in the exact same situation today, and the only difference would be chunks of BeOS as the iPhone’s bones instead. Funny old world, eh? :)

Shivetya 7y ago

bounced between windows and os/2, never really used beos as an os, mostly just as a toy for fun. the one thing I remember is that I could play a video that for the time looked amazing without issue. I want to say I even played Quake on it, in a window!

TheCondor 7y ago

Security, networking, multiuser, i10n, print (don’t even begin to underestimate this and quartz and display postscript) beos was an rtos with a neat UI. it was still fun but there was a gigantic pile of work before it could do what system 7 did, let alone what next did.

jonhendry18 7y ago
Additionally, NeXTStep had been in use in production on investment bank trading floors, in scientific institutions, and in military/intelligence agencies. It wasn't widely used, but it was used. So while it might not have been quite ready for the median System 7 user's expectations, it was pretty solid.
- ngcc_hk 7y ago
  May be so. But I have Mac OS 1.0 running on my MacBook. It is so slow and really not that working. Unlike the Mac OS 9. It is not that smooth. Luckily he found iPod ... even the colour one is very slow.

qwerty456127 7y ago

> 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. I love everything I've read about BeOS but to be honest I must mention I couldn't understand how to use Haiku (I've never used the original BeOS) once I've tried - id didn't feel intuitive at all. And I'm not really stupid, I've been using different flavors of Linux as a primary OS for over a decade. > 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. Some times I miss the days of Windows 95 so much. I wish desktop OSes could be more simple, i.e. without multi-user and file access rights. When it's my own personal computer all I want of it from the security perspective is to prevent others from unlocking it or recovering data from it and to prevent any network communication except that I authorized. Sadly Linux still doesn't even have a decent implementation of the latter (Mac has LittleSnitch). Windows 9x did pretty well for me - I've never caught a virus, never corrupted a system file and it was easy to fix for others who did.

lproven 7y ago
> I wish desktop OSes could be more simple, i.e. without multi-user and file access rights. Have a look into Oberon and its successor A2/Bluebottle. http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/ http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/ https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/46523.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/46523.html