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The author Jean-Louis Gassée was the head of BeOS, a modern multi threaded OS that Apple almost chose over Nextstep
by pcurve 5y ago
The author Jean-Louis Gassée was the head of BeOS, a modern multi threaded OS that Apple almost chose over Nextstep
- jeffbee 5y agoPardon me but even as a person who developed a few toy applications for BeOS back in the 90s, what about it could have been described as "modern", then or now? Certainly today, 25 years after the fact, it doesn't feel like an OS written partially in C++, that had a few SMP tricks but barely any working networking, is modern. Even at the time, its modernity was in question compared to even Windows NT.
- ianai 5y agoI liked the GUI. It also booted incredibly fast compared to windows at the time. I remember the GUI being responsive and laid out in a way I wished Windows was at the time. I remember reading about the prospects for BeOS 5 menus later. They were going to have a ribbon of color follow your menu selections through drop downs. I forget the look since it’s been so long, but it was a cool idea. Would have made drill downs easier to follow. Notably, modern OSes can be pretty finicky about menu drill downs and outright user hostile. It’s pretty easy to lose an entire drill down by moving the mouse a couple pixels one or another way too far, for instance. Mobile UI of course is amongst the most limited interfaces. We’ve gone backwards a lot in ways on mobile. It also seems mobile may be steering people away from certain careers by simply being good enough to ignore learning things like touch typing, Linux/foss, or hobbies that lead to tech careers. (Not sure how much sense this last point makes-just spreading to general trends I’ve heard or seen.) Edit-maybe I’d say BeOS had a certain polish that seems lacking even in todays FOSS GUIs/OSes but especially back then.
- User23 5y agoBeing able to play 8 quicktime movies smoothly at once on a PPC 603 while the UI remained responsive was pretty impressive back in 1997.
- KerrAvon 5y ago> Notably, modern OSes can be pretty finicky about menu drill downs and outright user hostile. It’s pretty easy to lose an entire drill down by moving the mouse a couple pixels one or another way too far, for instance. The Mac basically solved this problem in 1986 when Apple first introduced hierarchical menus. To make it work, the UI layer has to be able to avoid strict hit testing of the mouse cursor during menu tracking, which I would conjecture is probably difficult in some environments.
- Synaesthesia 5y agoThe indexed and searchable file system was pretty cool
- rayiner 5y agoIt still holds up pretty well. I’ll take a multi-threaded C++ GUI toolkit over Electron any day.
- Guillaume86 5y agoElectron has become the Godwin point of software performance discussions.
- xyzzyz 5y agoConsidering how everyone called everyone a Nazi over past 5 years, I think it's to safe to say that the Godwin's Law belongs to an era of internet that has expired.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- KerrAvon 5y agoYou’ve got to be kidding. The state of the art for the vast majority of desktop computer users was classic Mac OS and Windows 9x. Did you never see the BeOS demos where they yanked the plug out of the wall while doing heavy filesystem operations and booted straight back up without significant data loss? I don’t remember if NTFS existed back then, but most people wouldn’t use NT and successors until the turn of the century. There were gaping holes in functionality, but BeOS was a revelation at the time.
- jeffbee 5y agoNTFS came out years before BeFS and had journaling from day 1. At the time that people were experimenting with BeOS there were already millions of users of Windows NT. Even Windows NT 3.1 for workstations sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Be's all time cumulative net revenues were less than $5 million.
- wmf 5y agoAt the time there was an idea that normal PCs could never afford to run "professional" OSes like NT, Unix, or NeXTSTEP and thus BeOS was only competing with "PC" OSes like classic MacOS, Windows 95, or OS/2. In retrospect this was wrong, although it did take until 2001-2003 for real OSes to make their way to the mainstream.
- elzbardico 5y agoExactly, around 98 I ran Windows NT 4.0 at work, in a very expensive Pentium II with plenty of memory (I guess 64MB at the time). At home in my personal machine with an older AMD K-5 and only 16MB (another guess) Windows NT was not very usable, although it was way more stable than windows 95. And nevermind the price difference.
- JeanMeche 5y agoHe also was the head of Apple France.
- Hayvok 5y agoJLG also worked at Apple through the 80s. Ran the Mac team and a few other groups.