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

by blunte 5y ago

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

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

by blunte 5y ago

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

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