9 ms·

Using BeOS on a Power Mac (2001)

112 points by rdpintqogeogsaa 5y ago

sharmin123 5y ago
cable2600 5y ago
HaikuOS on a PC: https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/
blunte 5y ago
Question for you OS geeks: did we take the good things learned from BeOS and implement them in Windows/Linux/macOS?
- pavlov 5y ago
  A lot of BeOS veterans ended up at Android. Any direct influence would probably be felt most on the mobile side rather than desktop.
  - microtonal 5y ago
    Dominic Giampaolo, who made BeFS (the modern BeOS filesystem) works at Apple and is one of the main designers of APFS. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Giampaolo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Giampaolo
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Unfortunately the mess of Android APIs lacks any proof of BeOS influence.
- codr7 5y ago
  I ran BeOS off and on from the Intel transition to the end, I still regret not joining the party early enough to experience their custom hardware. I'd say mostly not. Sure, you can browse the Internet and play music at the same time on any platform today, but a lot has changed. Much of what was good about BeOS was breaking with the past and starting from zero based on today's desktop needs, a modern take on the Amiga in many ways. Existing platforms may be able to steal an idea or two, but that's different from being built from the ground up to solve a specific class of problems. To begin with, absolutely everything was multi-threaded, there was just no way around it. Fast file system queries that could be stored as shortcuts were nice, still haven't seen that implemented nearly as well elsewhere. I wrote some software interfacing the system C++ API's and found everything very convenient, clean and tidy compared to any other platform I've programmed.
  - watersb 5y ago
    Fast file system queries that could be stored as shortcuts were nice, still haven't seen that implemented nearly as well elsewhere. NTFS metadata architecture really inspired by BeFS, or at the least, a fellow traveler. You can tweak the Windows Explorer (the filesystem UI) to operate on arbitrary metadata. Well, I was able to get an email inbox, where each email message is a text file, just using Explorer the BeOS way, on Windows 2000. It wasn't exactly fast.
- tambourine_man 5y ago
  Not much, unfortunately. File system metadata query and responsiveness is something that I haven't seen matched still. The latter is an exhilarating feeling that I'll never forget. Also, the UI had a “fun” but still elegant feel to it that I was very fond of.
  - Veliladon 5y ago
    This. The filesystem has yet to be duplicated in terms of sheer metadata functionality and probably never will be again.
    - nerdponx 5y ago
      What's an example of something you could do with the BeOS filesystem that you can't do with today's filesystems and operating systems?
      - smallstepforman 5y ago
        Find file(s) with queries in less than a second? Save the query as a folder and now you have “live” searches? I cant tell you how often I waste time searching for the lication of a specific file. But never gad this probkem with BeOS/Haiku.
        rewgs 5y ago
        Okay that's sick. Absolutely awesome idea.
        PostThisTooFast 5y ago
      - wmf 5y ago
        BeFS maintained indices of extended attributes; in other OSes indexing is done in userspace which is safer and more flexible but can introduce race conditions between filesystem operations (e.g. moving a file) and updating the index.
- bitigchi 5y ago
  Haiku is still alive, no need to look for other things in other OSs. :)
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > Question for you OS geeks: did we take the good things learned from BeOS and implement them in Windows/Linux/macOS? Somewhat of an aside, but I wish there existed a kind of "encyclopedia" of operating system features (both UI and otherwise, with a special emphasis on "dead ends" like BeOS), that pulled together demos and documentation into one exhaustive reference. It seems like a lot of good ideas get lost is the sea of lowest common denominator solutions, and an ecyclopedic reference would make it easier to resurrect those ideas.
  - thequux 5y ago
    I tried to start a talk series last year about these dead ends, but only https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-525180-what_have_we_lost https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-525180-what_have_we_lost actually made it out. Perhaps I'll pick up the thread later, because there are a lot of dead ends that had some amazing ideas that it either wasn't the right time for (BeOS, DomainOS), bad business decisions (Genera), or particularly insular communities where they were used (OS/400, TRON)
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    https://archiveos.org/ https://archiveos.org/ is kind of a step in that direction, although not exactly the same
  - hackmiester 5y ago
    Try this: http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html
- wmf 5y ago
  Most of what I learned from BeOS was what not to do (endian-specific code, C++ ABI, proprietary toolchain, messages on top of byte streams, forced multithreading, etc.). I still don't understand where the responsiveness came from.
  - fault1 5y ago
    > I still don't understand where the responsiveness came from. personally, I thought it was because it was macos, which was riddled with a lot of legacy code, for example 68k emulation in the innards of the kernel, and tacked on cooperative/preemptive multitasking. I remember playing with a leaked version of Copeland/Gershwin. It felt way more modern in a different way than BeOS, but I can't remember how complete it was.
  - laumars 5y ago
    The multi-threading was probably part of the reason. SMP was quickly becoming more and more common place with even Power Macs having a second processor despite Mac OS 9 and it’s predecessors not supporting SMP (applications had to specifically be written to support it). Likewise on Intel, you had Windows 9x that didn’t support SMP so you were stuck with the NT line if you wanted multi processor support. I recall NT4 being pretty poor for desktop usage due to patchy driver support but Windows 2000 was amazing. Linux and BSD weren’t really desktop ready either. So BeOS was basically a workstation class operating system designed to be running on lower footprint hardware (the comparison someone else made to Amiga is pretty apt). As much as I typically hate Windows and prefer Linux and FreeBSD, Windows 2000 was pretty solid release and particularly when you place it in its era where only BeOS really competed with it in terms of performance and stability on commodity hardware.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > I still don't understand where the responsiveness came from. You can get a lot of snappiness from prioritizing GUI processes and lowering the priority of everything else. In modern machines, with lots of cores, you can also try to increase affinity of different interactive processes with a set of cores so that they avoid migrating and losing caches. Finally, Apple is placing low-priority process in the efficient cores and leaving interactive code on the performance ones.
- catb0t 5y ago
  https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/ is the open-source successor to BeOS and runs on amd64
natas 5y ago
I wish apple had bought Be instead of NeXT
- scelerat 5y ago
  Hard to imagine Apple today without the Second Coming of Jobs. Incredible, aquihire. Hard to imagine JL Gasee leading Apple in the same way.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Would’ve been interesting if a post-return Jobs Apple had bought Palm in the 2000s, after Palm had acquired both Be Inc. and Handspring.
- aaronbrethorst 5y ago
  ‘Posted from my RIM BlackBerry’
  - 404mm 5y ago
    Till this day I still miss the hardware mute/unmute button.
    - microtonal 5y ago
      What do you mean? iPhones have a hardware button for mute/unmute?
      - Underphil 5y ago
        I have a OnePlus 8T which also has a hardware mute switch. They're there, you've just gotta look around.
- simondotau 5y ago
  Heck no. BeOS was a tech demo that looked great because you couldn’t do anything complex with it. The list of missing features is endless. The longevity of the platform is unknowable. And there is no reason to think the injection of BeOS would have abated the steady decline of Apple’s relevance. NeXT gave Apple a mature platform which has withstood the test of time, underpinning multiple architecture changes and adaptation to dramatically different devices. And more importantly, it gave Steve Jobs back to Apple, who orchestrated its recovery from a decline into irrelevance.
thought_alarm 5y ago
It's worth noting that at this point in history (2001) Mac OS X is still a turkey; visually unique, but very slow and incomplete. It would have only been of interest to the freaks and geeks in the Unix/OpenStep community. I can only imagine there was much hand wringing in the old school Mac community about whether Apple was on the right track or not. It wasn't until version 10.3 in 2003 that OS X rounded into a form that would drive the final nail into the coffin of Classic Mac OS. In 2005, version 10.4 takes a giant step forward, leap frogs everything else on the market, and becomes a genuinely compelling alternative to both Windows users and Unix/Linux users. This is also the version that adopted arguably the only really compelling feature of BeOS (Spotlight), and the first version to support Intel. Apple's next release would be iPhoneOS 1.0.
- wmf 5y ago
  FWIW I preferred OS X to Windows 2000 and Mac OS 9 and used it as my daily driver starting with the public beta. But maybe I wasn't a very demanding user since I mostly used the terminal, OmniWeb, and Mail.
  - grecy 5y ago
    I did too, though I have to say it was painfully slow on my Beige G3, and only became actually usable at about 10.3 or 10.4 as the comment above said.
    - kergonath 5y ago
      I ran Cheetah and Puma on my 9600/233. I tried really hard to convince myself that it was useable. Though to be fair the UNIX underpinnings were a revelation and it felt like living in the (gorgeous) future. Just a very slow one. I then used a B&W G3 until it went out of support. It indeed became better with every new release, which was quite impressive.
- selestify 5y ago
  What was so revolutionary about 10.4?
pndy 5y ago
> This version has some special software that allows it install without repartitioning a Windows PC’s hard drive If memory serves me right, it was still possible to install BeOS from that booted OS image file onto whole partition, at the same time wiping existing Windows installation. Also I've run around Be FAQ site: > Will the BeOS run on the "iTanium" processor? Was that CPU really named with "i-thing" fashion back then?
- emteycz 5y ago
  > Was that CPU really named with "i-thing" fashion back then? Not really, the actual name was Itanium.
jploudre 5y ago
Whoa. I’m a physician now. I never never have guessed my article from 20 years ago would make the front page of HN! BeOS was tremendously snappy on that hardware but I ended up missing applications on the Mac.
- stillicidious 5y ago
  Awesome career twist, potentialy more interesting than the article :) Did you go from professional -> professional, or not much past hobbyist tech?
  - jploudre 5y ago
    I’ve always been a hobbyist on tech. I follow it like some people follow sports.
- classichasclass 5y ago
  Ha, made the same jump myself. Computers are much more fun as a hobby than as $DAYJOB.
  - watersb 5y ago
    Ed Roberts decided to stop playing with toys full-time, so he moved back home and became a dentist. Small-town doctor and mayor. After giving Bill and Paul their first personal computer gig. It would seem that the esteemed Dr. Roberts pathway has good company.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    I thought so and didn't pursue it in school. After answering phones for a living for a while I changed my mind.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  Congrats on your big life changes. It's funny, I just wrote up some experiences with the latest Haiku beta and also ended up missing applications despite the snappiness and amazingly trim fit into much less than 1G RAM. I'm sure many more apps will come soon though. https://www.friendlyskies.net/notebook/giving-haiku-os-beta-3-a-try https://www.friendlyskies.net/notebook/giving-haiku-os-beta-...
sircastor 5y ago
I had a friend who was very excited to show me BeOS running on a PowerMac 7600 back when we were in high school (1997 probably?) I thought it was interesting, including the UI being so different from what I’d seen otherwise (Mac OS 8 or Win3.1/95) but didn’t appreciate what it really was or why it would be appealing. In retrospect I’m of two minds. Competition is great, and having more than a duopoly of operating systems wold really put the pressure on to keep competitors honest. That said, I remember the dark days of the single short aisle of Mac programs at EggHead software, and how frustrating it can be to have few options. Really the only thing that makes ChromeOS possible is web applications

sharmin123 5y ago

cable2600 5y ago

HaikuOS on a PC: https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/

blunte 5y ago

Question for you OS geeks: did we take the good things learned from BeOS and implement them in Windows/Linux/macOS?

pavlov 5y ago
A lot of BeOS veterans ended up at Android. Any direct influence would probably be felt most on the mobile side rather than desktop.
- microtonal 5y ago
  Dominic Giampaolo, who made BeFS (the modern BeOS filesystem) works at Apple and is one of the main designers of APFS. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Giampaolo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Giampaolo
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Unfortunately the mess of Android APIs lacks any proof of BeOS influence.
codr7 5y ago
I ran BeOS off and on from the Intel transition to the end, I still regret not joining the party early enough to experience their custom hardware. I'd say mostly not. Sure, you can browse the Internet and play music at the same time on any platform today, but a lot has changed. Much of what was good about BeOS was breaking with the past and starting from zero based on today's desktop needs, a modern take on the Amiga in many ways. Existing platforms may be able to steal an idea or two, but that's different from being built from the ground up to solve a specific class of problems. To begin with, absolutely everything was multi-threaded, there was just no way around it. Fast file system queries that could be stored as shortcuts were nice, still haven't seen that implemented nearly as well elsewhere. I wrote some software interfacing the system C++ API's and found everything very convenient, clean and tidy compared to any other platform I've programmed.
- watersb 5y ago
  Fast file system queries that could be stored as shortcuts were nice, still haven't seen that implemented nearly as well elsewhere. NTFS metadata architecture really inspired by BeFS, or at the least, a fellow traveler. You can tweak the Windows Explorer (the filesystem UI) to operate on arbitrary metadata. Well, I was able to get an email inbox, where each email message is a text file, just using Explorer the BeOS way, on Windows 2000. It wasn't exactly fast.
tambourine_man 5y ago
Not much, unfortunately. File system metadata query and responsiveness is something that I haven't seen matched still. The latter is an exhilarating feeling that I'll never forget. Also, the UI had a “fun” but still elegant feel to it that I was very fond of.
- Veliladon 5y ago
  This. The filesystem has yet to be duplicated in terms of sheer metadata functionality and probably never will be again.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    What's an example of something you could do with the BeOS filesystem that you can't do with today's filesystems and operating systems?
    - smallstepforman 5y ago
      Find file(s) with queries in less than a second? Save the query as a folder and now you have “live” searches? I cant tell you how often I waste time searching for the lication of a specific file. But never gad this probkem with BeOS/Haiku.
      - rewgs 5y ago
        Okay that's sick. Absolutely awesome idea.
      - PostThisTooFast 5y ago
    - wmf 5y ago
      BeFS maintained indices of extended attributes; in other OSes indexing is done in userspace which is safer and more flexible but can introduce race conditions between filesystem operations (e.g. moving a file) and updating the index.
bitigchi 5y ago
Haiku is still alive, no need to look for other things in other OSs. :)
tablespoon 5y ago
> Question for you OS geeks: did we take the good things learned from BeOS and implement them in Windows/Linux/macOS? Somewhat of an aside, but I wish there existed a kind of "encyclopedia" of operating system features (both UI and otherwise, with a special emphasis on "dead ends" like BeOS), that pulled together demos and documentation into one exhaustive reference. It seems like a lot of good ideas get lost is the sea of lowest common denominator solutions, and an ecyclopedic reference would make it easier to resurrect those ideas.
- thequux 5y ago
  I tried to start a talk series last year about these dead ends, but only https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-525180-what_have_we_lost https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-525180-what_have_we_lost actually made it out. Perhaps I'll pick up the thread later, because there are a lot of dead ends that had some amazing ideas that it either wasn't the right time for (BeOS, DomainOS), bad business decisions (Genera), or particularly insular communities where they were used (OS/400, TRON)
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  https://archiveos.org/ https://archiveos.org/ is kind of a step in that direction, although not exactly the same
- hackmiester 5y ago
  Try this: http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html
wmf 5y ago
Most of what I learned from BeOS was what not to do (endian-specific code, C++ ABI, proprietary toolchain, messages on top of byte streams, forced multithreading, etc.). I still don't understand where the responsiveness came from.
- fault1 5y ago
  > I still don't understand where the responsiveness came from. personally, I thought it was because it was macos, which was riddled with a lot of legacy code, for example 68k emulation in the innards of the kernel, and tacked on cooperative/preemptive multitasking. I remember playing with a leaked version of Copeland/Gershwin. It felt way more modern in a different way than BeOS, but I can't remember how complete it was.
- laumars 5y ago
  The multi-threading was probably part of the reason. SMP was quickly becoming more and more common place with even Power Macs having a second processor despite Mac OS 9 and it’s predecessors not supporting SMP (applications had to specifically be written to support it). Likewise on Intel, you had Windows 9x that didn’t support SMP so you were stuck with the NT line if you wanted multi processor support. I recall NT4 being pretty poor for desktop usage due to patchy driver support but Windows 2000 was amazing. Linux and BSD weren’t really desktop ready either. So BeOS was basically a workstation class operating system designed to be running on lower footprint hardware (the comparison someone else made to Amiga is pretty apt). As much as I typically hate Windows and prefer Linux and FreeBSD, Windows 2000 was pretty solid release and particularly when you place it in its era where only BeOS really competed with it in terms of performance and stability on commodity hardware.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > I still don't understand where the responsiveness came from. You can get a lot of snappiness from prioritizing GUI processes and lowering the priority of everything else. In modern machines, with lots of cores, you can also try to increase affinity of different interactive processes with a set of cores so that they avoid migrating and losing caches. Finally, Apple is placing low-priority process in the efficient cores and leaving interactive code on the performance ones.
catb0t 5y ago
https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/ is the open-source successor to BeOS and runs on amd64

natas 5y ago

I wish apple had bought Be instead of NeXT

scelerat 5y ago
Hard to imagine Apple today without the Second Coming of Jobs. Incredible, aquihire. Hard to imagine JL Gasee leading Apple in the same way.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Would’ve been interesting if a post-return Jobs Apple had bought Palm in the 2000s, after Palm had acquired both Be Inc. and Handspring.
aaronbrethorst 5y ago
‘Posted from my RIM BlackBerry’
- 404mm 5y ago
  Till this day I still miss the hardware mute/unmute button.
  - microtonal 5y ago
    What do you mean? iPhones have a hardware button for mute/unmute?
    - Underphil 5y ago
      I have a OnePlus 8T which also has a hardware mute switch. They're there, you've just gotta look around.
simondotau 5y ago
Heck no. BeOS was a tech demo that looked great because you couldn’t do anything complex with it. The list of missing features is endless. The longevity of the platform is unknowable. And there is no reason to think the injection of BeOS would have abated the steady decline of Apple’s relevance. NeXT gave Apple a mature platform which has withstood the test of time, underpinning multiple architecture changes and adaptation to dramatically different devices. And more importantly, it gave Steve Jobs back to Apple, who orchestrated its recovery from a decline into irrelevance.

thought_alarm 5y ago

It's worth noting that at this point in history (2001) Mac OS X is still a turkey; visually unique, but very slow and incomplete. It would have only been of interest to the freaks and geeks in the Unix/OpenStep community. I can only imagine there was much hand wringing in the old school Mac community about whether Apple was on the right track or not. It wasn't until version 10.3 in 2003 that OS X rounded into a form that would drive the final nail into the coffin of Classic Mac OS. In 2005, version 10.4 takes a giant step forward, leap frogs everything else on the market, and becomes a genuinely compelling alternative to both Windows users and Unix/Linux users. This is also the version that adopted arguably the only really compelling feature of BeOS (Spotlight), and the first version to support Intel. Apple's next release would be iPhoneOS 1.0.

wmf 5y ago
FWIW I preferred OS X to Windows 2000 and Mac OS 9 and used it as my daily driver starting with the public beta. But maybe I wasn't a very demanding user since I mostly used the terminal, OmniWeb, and Mail.
- grecy 5y ago
  I did too, though I have to say it was painfully slow on my Beige G3, and only became actually usable at about 10.3 or 10.4 as the comment above said.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    I ran Cheetah and Puma on my 9600/233. I tried really hard to convince myself that it was useable. Though to be fair the UNIX underpinnings were a revelation and it felt like living in the (gorgeous) future. Just a very slow one. I then used a B&W G3 until it went out of support. It indeed became better with every new release, which was quite impressive.
selestify 5y ago
What was so revolutionary about 10.4?

pndy 5y ago

> This version has some special software that allows it install without repartitioning a Windows PC’s hard drive If memory serves me right, it was still possible to install BeOS from that booted OS image file onto whole partition, at the same time wiping existing Windows installation. Also I've run around Be FAQ site: > Will the BeOS run on the "iTanium" processor? Was that CPU really named with "i-thing" fashion back then?

emteycz 5y ago
> Was that CPU really named with "i-thing" fashion back then? Not really, the actual name was Itanium.

jploudre 5y ago

Whoa. I’m a physician now. I never never have guessed my article from 20 years ago would make the front page of HN! BeOS was tremendously snappy on that hardware but I ended up missing applications on the Mac.

stillicidious 5y ago
Awesome career twist, potentialy more interesting than the article :) Did you go from professional -> professional, or not much past hobbyist tech?
- jploudre 5y ago
  I’ve always been a hobbyist on tech. I follow it like some people follow sports.
classichasclass 5y ago
Ha, made the same jump myself. Computers are much more fun as a hobby than as $DAYJOB.
- watersb 5y ago
  Ed Roberts decided to stop playing with toys full-time, so he moved back home and became a dentist. Small-town doctor and mayor. After giving Bill and Paul their first personal computer gig. It would seem that the esteemed Dr. Roberts pathway has good company.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  I thought so and didn't pursue it in school. After answering phones for a living for a while I changed my mind.
themodelplumber 5y ago
Congrats on your big life changes. It's funny, I just wrote up some experiences with the latest Haiku beta and also ended up missing applications despite the snappiness and amazingly trim fit into much less than 1G RAM. I'm sure many more apps will come soon though. https://www.friendlyskies.net/notebook/giving-haiku-os-beta-3-a-try https://www.friendlyskies.net/notebook/giving-haiku-os-beta-...

sircastor 5y ago

I had a friend who was very excited to show me BeOS running on a PowerMac 7600 back when we were in high school (1997 probably?) I thought it was interesting, including the UI being so different from what I’d seen otherwise (Mac OS 8 or Win3.1/95) but didn’t appreciate what it really was or why it would be appealing. In retrospect I’m of two minds. Competition is great, and having more than a duopoly of operating systems wold really put the pressure on to keep competitors honest. That said, I remember the dark days of the single short aisle of Mac programs at EggHead software, and how frustrating it can be to have few options. Really the only thing that makes ChromeOS possible is web applications