4 ms·
I think most of the perceived performance was a result of pervasive multi threading, which was novel at the time. For example, I remember being able to simulta
by kitotik 6y ago
I think most of the perceived performance was a result of pervasive multi threading, which was novel at the time.
For example, I remember being able to simultaneously play 5-6 mp3 files, load a web page, play an mpeg video, and browse the local file system while having complete UI responsiveness and no audible/visual glitches. This was pretty much unheard of at the time, especially on modest consumer hardware (pentium 2 ~350mhz IIRC)
- slantyyz 6y agoYeah that pretty much sums it up. The OS ran circles around pretty much any other OS you had running on the same hardware. I remember the OS installing in a crazy short amount of time.
- einr 6y agoIt booted in ~10 seconds on my Pentium II 266 system, which was a VERY BIG DEAL back then.
- danans 6y agoIIRC, it was the only desktop OS at the time that used a separate OS thread per window, and each window had a asynchronous message queue which received objects of type BMessage. Programmers were admonished to quickly process the messages, or if they could not, to hand the task off to a different thread, so that the message queue was not blocked. In contrast, other platforms at the time used 1 process per app, and would block all the apps other windows from updating while the active window was processing, unless the developer made a point of multithreading their apps UI. Some platforms blocked the entire system UI if a window froze. Today lots of platforms use BeOS' paradigm, and it seems obvious in retrospect, but at the time, it was very novel.