15 ms·

'Be' is nice, end of story

313 points by BirAdam 4y ago

shrthnd 4y ago
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/timing_is_everything https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/timing_is_everything
randall 4y ago
Beos had serato in 1999. http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/aboutbe/pressreleases/99-01-28_scratch.html http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/ab...
- neura 4y ago
  That... is amazing! Gives me the warm fuzzies. Thanks for posting.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  I remember being at the Hollywood Bowl in I believe 1998 and the consoles that are midway back with the audience in that little booth were all running BeOS. They had their niche
- boredemployee 4y ago
  That's crazy. And pioneer can't make rekordbox to work with linux in 2022.
  - duped 4y ago
    Audio has been a disaster on Linux for a long time (yes I know about jack, ardour, pipe wire, and so on). It's not surprising that pro audio applications ignore it wholesale.
    - prox 4y ago
      Graphics are also so-so. Unless you do really specific graphics work (like movie cgi) it’s a no go for a lot of professionals.
      - anthk 4y ago
        OpenGL, Vulkan, CUDA, colord... People used Cinelerra and Cinepaint. Now you have Krita and Blender.
    - aa-jv 4y ago
      Pro Audio applications simply don't ignore it wholesale - Linux has plenty of pro audio software. Get an audio-focused distribution such as Ubuntu Studio, and you'll change your mind fast about how disastrous audio is on Linux - it just isn't. In fact, you can build the slickest, lowest-latency DAW on Linux, with stats that beat MacOS, even ...
      - duped 4y ago
        Tell me when Pro Tools supports Linux. Or Ableton. Or Cubase. Or FL Studio. Today there is one major DAW that supports Linux, which is Bitwig. But there are very few plugins and the vast majority of the revenue and users are on Windows and MacOS. The TL;DR is that there's not a convincing argument to support Linux today by the major developers. It's a chicken and egg problem to be sure. I've tried Ubuntu Studio. It's not better except that it had early support for preempt rt. I still think Linux audio is a disaster.
        aa-jv 4y ago
        Based on decades of experience, I do not agree one bit. Pro Tools isn't the only DAW game in town, in fact its not even the most commonly used any more and its also not the 'best' DAW for many jobs - merely the most entrenched in peoples minds as a "pro tool". So many producers are giving it up for cheaper and more effective tools such as REAPER, which not only runs circles around Pro Tools but also runs really, really great on Linux. As does Ardour, which is easily in the same class of any of the other DAW's in terms of capabilities. See also, Waveform, Zrythmn, Qtractor and MusE. As does BitWig Studio - an Ableton Live analog, arguably more powerful and feature-rich than Ableton Live, which makes sense as it is being built by ex-Ableton folks. FL Studio? LMMS! Renoise! Linux Audio really rocks. Not to mention: ZynthianOS! Oh my! Monome NORNS! Holy heck! >one major DAW Sorry, no, this is wrong. REAPER is a major DAW, runs natively. Same with BitWig, Ardour and Harrison Mixbus. So thats at least 4. [1] >very few plugins I challenge you to actually install Ubuntu Studio and repeat this claim. Plus, VST plugins run great under Ubuntu Studio. You should probably try it again and update your understanding of the scene - you might've had a point 10 years ago, but as of today: just no. Linux audio is amazing. >I still think Linux audio is a disaster. I think you don't have enough modern experience to make this claim. My Presonus-based Ubuntu Studio DAW is the lowest latency, easiest to use and set up DAW in the studio. While the other producers are cussing through the hoops of eLicense and dongle management and unsigned/outdated kext's for super-expensive boutique/cocktail hardware, the Linux DAW users in my studio are happily whistling through the edits with their USB and Firewire-based audio i/o devices, many of which work quite happily 'out of the box', "apt update && apt upgrade" dilemma notwithstanding .. [1] - If these DAW's can do it, there is technically no reason the other DAW's can't - its just the fixed idea that "linux audio sucks" that prevents this from happening in the industry. Linux audio does not, in reality, suck - it actually ROCKS, hard. Linux audio only sucks if you say it does. There are certainly no valid technical reasons for a lack of ports from the market-mindset vendors .. just the mindset you proffer, which is, imho, plain wrong.
- airfoil 4y ago
  I had no idea! Very cool. Thank you so much for this!
- pdntspa 4y ago
  Wow! And Serato is still my preferred DVS. In many ways I think it carries on the spirit of Be, in that it does what it does extremely well and extremely reliably. In my 15-some-odd years of messing/performing with it, it's only crashed on me once for a reason that I couldn't attribute to something else. (and luckily that was during a practice session) Sadly, now I use it to drive a Pioneer XDJ console. And they made me pay extra for DVS support without the Serato box :( But it's a pretty fly 4-deck system!
- the_other 4y ago
  Serato's great software. I very much hope one day to see another integrated Be-inspired system emerge, in the vein of 00s era Apple (and the original BeBox). Narrow product line, tight hardware-software integration; striking, thoughtful and fun UI; notably different paradigm and features from the competition such that it scratches an itch the others are ignoring. This bit of history gives me so much hope (tinged with sadness that it's just a daydream). If I knew more about OS or filesystem construction, or how to sell to VCs, I'd push the idea hard myself.
  - SSLy 4y ago
    https://teenage.engineering/products/op-1/original https://teenage.engineering/products/op-1/original https://shop.play.date/ https://shop.play.date/ https://www.analogue.co/pocket https://www.analogue.co/pocket i guess
wyldfire 4y ago
Is this column written by the same author(s) of PC Magazine's ARF?
- BirAdam 4y ago
  Nope.
eduction 4y ago
>the next generation of Apple’s Macintosh operating system: Copeland. I’m sorry but it’s Copland, after the composer Aaron Copland. Having read altogether too many editions of Macworld in the post Steve, pre Steve era, that error (repeated later in the text) leapt off the page. (Admittedly, this would be kind of an hilarious name for a failed OS.)
- BirAdam 4y ago
  Corrected.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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abruzzi 4y ago
I didn't realize there were so few BeBoxen made. I wonder if I kept mine what it would be worth to a collector?
- DinkMeeker 4y ago
  I was surprised by the low number as well. I still have mine.
  - aa-jv 4y ago
    Fellow BeBox owner, in the house! Perhaps we should meet somewhere ..
- helf 4y ago
  Well, I sold mine for almost $800 like a decade ago and they are only getting harder to find. I wish I had kept mine.
  - E39M5S62 4y ago
    Same. I had a dual 133mhz back in ~2000. I regret selling it, but bills had to be paid and I just couldn't use it as my main computer at that point.
throw_m239339 4y ago
> From there, things only got worse for Be. The company lingered around until 2001 when it sold its copyrights to Palm for $11 million USD. In 2002, Be brought litigation against Microsoft for anticompetitive practices, but the suit was settled out of court for $23.25 million. After purchasing BeOS, Palm promptly discontinued the OS. Palm itself later had some problems, split, and sold. The rights to BeOS are now in the hands of Access Co along with PalmOS. I wonder what did Apple do that BeOS didn't to succeed. And didn't Microsoft basically "save" Apple at some point?
- macintux 4y ago
  Apple had a long history and corresponding fan base, which helped, and of course Steve Jobs. Microsoft invested some money in Apple to help alleviate anti-trust issues, but from my reading the more substantive assistance was a commitment to ship Office for Mac. https://medium.com/the-techlife/why-did-microsoft-invest-150-million-in-microsoft-in-1997-cf67ff802c66 https://medium.com/the-techlife/why-did-microsoft-invest-150...
  - Someone 4y ago
    I don’t think anti-trust was the reason for that deal with Apple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company: “Later testimony in the United States v. Microsoft Corp. case revealed that, at the time, Apple was threatening Microsoft with a multibillion-dollar lawsuit over the allegedly stolen code, and in return Bill Gates was threatening the cancellation of Microsoft Office for Mac. In August 1997, Apple and Microsoft announced a settlement deal. Apple would drop all current lawsuits, including all lingering issues from the "Look & Feel" lawsuit and the "QuickTime source code" lawsuit, and agree to make Internet Explorer for Mac the default browser on the Macintosh unless the user explicitly chose the bundled Netscape browser. In return, Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office, Internet Explorer, and various developer tools and software for the Mac for the next 5 years, and purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock. The companies also agreed to mutual collaboration on Java technologies, and to cross-license all existing patents, and patents obtained during the five-year deal, with one another”
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tartoran 4y ago
Im itching for a simple OS that is user friendly and just simple, something that would instant boot and would be functional offline. Linux is great and all but sometimes it feels too bloated for a simple limited purpose machine..
- yafbum 4y ago
  Raspberry Pi distros are nice for this
  - valeg 4y ago
    Also RISC OS
  - psd1 4y ago
    My Pi4 is a good minute to the login prompt, I would not call it "instant boot" in any way!
- aquova 4y ago
  Perhaps Serenity OS is right for you
- simula67 4y ago
  ArchLinux + Xfce would probably fit your bill.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  The era of these type of "simple" OSes has come to an end. Linux is now the king of hardware support and nothing out there can even try to compete, not even Windows. And "consumer" hardware support is getting harder and harder; we did not really improve the situation at all from the 90s. Linux drivers, while some of them are not proprietary (before you ask: Android drivers are mostly proprietary), are still inseparably linked to Linux itself, which means that for any non-Linux OS to succeed you first have to reimplement Linux.
  - MonkeyClub 4y ago
Shared404 4y ago
For those interested in a modern(ish) take on Be, Haiku may be interesting: https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/ E: Posted this before having time to read the article, glad to see it was mentioned!
- clxxx 4y ago
  > With everything surrounding the demise of Be being highly litigious, it is no surprise that the project wished to avoid legal complications over their name. They chose Haiku. > Why did they choose the name Haiku? Error messages from many applications in BeOS are written in haikus. Additionally, they felt that the art of haiku was representative of the elegance and simplicity of BeOS. It seems Haiku is BeOS, just renamed.
  - Thorrez 4y ago
    It's a rewrite: > an open source project was started whose aim was to recreate BeOS from scratch with full binary and source compatibility. This was OpenBeOS. The first release in 2002 was a community update to BeOS 5.0.3 with some open source replacements for Be code. The project name changed in 2004. With everything surrounding the demise of Be being highly litigious, it is no surprise that the project wished to avoid legal complications over their name. They chose Haiku.
rocket_surgeron 4y ago
BeOS 5.1 with the network stack patches is nice. That wasn't leaked until after Be stopped operating. 5.0, which was almost usable was only out for about 8 months before Be stopped operating. 4.5 and prior? What does the dog say? "Ruff" Yeah. 4.5 and prior could spin some teapots but not much else. By the time "good" BeOS came out all computers could spin teapots and Windows PCs had 3d hardware acceleration. BeOS barely had 2d hardware acceleration. In the year 2000, after five years of development, BeOS didn't have multi-user support, a stable network stack, or USB mass storage support. I think that people are remembering with rose-colored glasses about 5.0 (which if I remember right was "oops leaked lol" for free on a magazine disc) or 5.1 with all of the patches which started circulating after all of the laid-off Be employees started dumping files online. Those of us who struggled for months to get BeOS stable and useful on our Performa 6400/200s have more bittersweet memories.
- memsom 4y ago
  So - BeOS was very usable on Intel. It had a lot more support. It also had more modern browsers. I ran it as a main OS well in to the 2000's. On PowerPC is was a lot more hobbled. You sound like you were on PowerPC unfortunately. 4.5 and 5.0 were so similar that it really isn't worth talking about the differences - a few minor API differences. The main thing with 5.0 was that Tracker was opened, so they moved the About box in to the Kernel to prevent people using a fake one and preserve their copyright notices etc.. The API was really similar and mostly anything that compiles under R4.5 will run under R5. They also added in a bunch of 3rd party codec and changed some of the icons. In fact, Stinger (BeIA) was based on the 4.5 codebase, not the R5 codebase. This is apparent when you try to use the API and notice anything newer than 4.5 is not present.
Veliladon 4y ago
Even now over 20 years later we still haven't had anything near as cool as BeFS. Who needs an email client when the file system can literally index it all and your inbox and email messages are literally files in a folder in a Tracker window that's just displaying email specific metadata for its columns.
- helf 4y ago
  BeFS is one of the things I miss the most. My dream is an unholy merger of ZFS and BeFS.
- xnx 4y ago
  I think WinFS was trying to copy some of the good ideas, but it was abandoned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
- naikrovek 4y ago
  multiple comments about BeFS and none describe why it is so good.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    BeFS has file attributes (so you can say this file is an email I received, add from="Bob Smith <b.smith@example.com>", received="2022-11-15") and it can optionally but by default index all these attributes using an on-disk BTree. Many modern systems do have file attributes, although they're not always as capable as the ones in BeFS, and none of them to my knowledge chose to add all these BTrees because keeping them up-to-date is expensive.
    - p_l 4y ago
      NTFS provides on-disk indexes, that's where Windows Search stores its data... and how directories work in NTFS. Similar features can be handled in ZFS (the biggest issue is that IIRC its large K/V structure is AVL Tree, so you'd probably need to add a new object at ZPL layer). What is the big difference is that BeFS exposed the extended attributes easily in the file manager and APIs - compare it with other systems where the APIs were little known or not used - POSIX extended attributes which are very limited (4k), Solaris extended attributes (which let you open a file as a directory) but are Solaris only, WinNT which had the issue of WinNT being a niche among windows systems, etc. etc. BeOS in comparison required at least considerable porting work, at worst writing from scratch, and that meant the new features were much more visible.
pcurve 4y ago
New-ish video of actual BeBox running in HD video quality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkM9WbB8cWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkM9WbB8cWM I didn't know it had functional LED light meter in front of the case. very cool. Obligatory demo from the 90s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ
- classichasclass 4y ago
  It's actually the system load on each 603e. Source: dual BeBox/133 on my desk
  - helf 4y ago
    Still have one? I am jelly. Is there a working version of Haiku for them yet?
    - classichasclass 4y ago
      Sadly no, but still get a lot of wear out of R5. I have it on this BeBox and on a 6500/275 that I'm trying to figure out sound issues on.
      - helf 4y ago
        I wonder if they will ever target such an old ISA. What are your sound problems? I only briefly used BeOS on an actual mac and it, amazingly enough, worked without a hitch.
        classichasclass 4y ago
        Something with the AWACS driver (need to run off an instrumented build and boot the kernel in debug mode to see what's up, just gotta get a round tuit). The 6500 is technically Unsupported but Compatible in Be's support matrix. Some people report the sound works, some people report it doesn't. Ditto for the TAM, which is basically a 6500 in a cool suit with an LCD.
helf 4y ago
BeFS was amazing. I miss BeOS, TBH. I ran a heavily customized BeOS R5.05 install that had upgraded bits from OpenBeOS (later, HaikuOS), ZetaOS etc. I ran it as a daily driver on a Dell GX1 SFF that I swear was designed for BeOS: Max RAM the BeOS kernel supported without hackery was 768MB - The GX maxed out at 768MB; The GX1 had a Rage GPU that BeOS natively supported (Including 3D Acceleration!) which was a very short list; the GX1 had a supported NIC, IDE controllers, etc etc. I had upgraded the CPU to a 1.4GHz Tualatin-S that, sadly, had to run at 1.04GHz as the GX1 wouldn't run a FSB higher than 100mhz so my 133mhz FSB Tualatin had to bop down a little. Still screamed. sigh I miss that system. I would still be running it if lightning hadn't fried it. It sat next to my NeXTstation Turbo Color that I used for way longer than was reasonable as my primary system, lol. The NeXT was a daily driver till 2008. 33mhz 040 w/ 128MB 60NS EDO. OPENSTEP4.2 + lots of ported goodies friends and I did. Even managed to get SSLv3 working and load newer websites! :D ... wish I hadn't sold it. Oh yeah! I also had a Pre-FCC certification dual 66mhz BeBox. Cool machine. Slow as shit though. The 603e in it wasn't natively SMP capable IIRC. The GLU chip could either run one CPU with L2 cache or dual CPUs with L2 cache disabled. Coherency was done in software. Unless I am horribly misremembering. It was a nasty hack and showed. My BeBox! https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/albums/72157621937392496/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/albums/7215762193739249... My GX-1 and my NeXT :D https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/6676203105/in/photolist-73AQ7K-baXhA6-7u6dAA https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/6676203105/in/photolist...
- helf 4y ago
  My NeXT kit that I sold: https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/albums/72157623700712983 https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/albums/7215762370071298...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- classichasclass 4y ago
  You remember correctly: the 603 was never intended for multiprocessing. It was amazing it worked as well as it did on the BeBox, but AFAIK it was the only 603-based computer ever to try. The G3, the 603's more-or-less direct follow-on, doesn't support it either. From the BeBox FAQ: "We use the Motorola 105 'Eagle' support chip, which allows for either one processor and an L2 cache or two processors without L2 caches. So, our two-processor PowerPC BeBox has no provision for an L2 cache."
a-dub 4y ago
this was nicely written. it's amusing to see the name of the blog, a popular column in pc magazine in the '90s bore the same name. i forget who wrote it, but it was one of the really well known computer journalists of the time, if i recall correctly. a notable absence is mention of the cpu utilization lights. to show off all that work they did to build a truly multiprocessor system, they had two strips of leds that ran up the front bezel of the system, indicating realtime utilization of the cpus. i remember playing with beos many years ago. i think they may have shipped an intel version after shutting down the hardware.
- helf 4y ago
  They did. The initial CPU target for BeOS was the AT&T H0BB1T DSP. The alpha copies were called Shark. I actually have system images for the hobbit builds still floating around somewhere. I never did get my hands on a prototype hobbit bebox, sadly. I almost bought one off a guy in France but the deal fell apart. Be produced a regular PowerPC version that could be installed on Macs (I think it may have required PCI macs?) and then an x86 version that was 32bit only and had a lot of ... quirks. But I used it for over a decade.
  - classichasclass 4y ago
    Correct, no NuBus support. It also doesn't support New World Macs and some of the later higher-speed 604s. Essentially it's that slice of beige four-digit Power Macs from the mid 1990s.
iseanstevens 4y ago
It was a really beautiful, functional, svelte & fast OS. IMHO, Apple made the right decision with Next because of Jobs. I’d sure like to see the results of the alternate timeline! I still feel like Be could be great for phones/mobile, maybe VR. (Just as it was so foundationally low latency) (Note I am aware of Haiku, etc. I’m using “Be” to mean something from its linage) Side note - Jean-Louis Gassée, founder(?) of Be is very insightful. He writes some excellent short form tech world analysis at http://mondaynote.com/ http://mondaynote.com/
- WillAdams 4y ago
  No multi-user support --- it was a non-starter. I'm much happier w/ Quartz (née Display PDF) than the typical image model division which BeOS had. That said, I really wish someone would get it (and Tron) running on a Raspberry Pi.
- jandrese 4y ago
  That said it had some issues. Their network stack was just weird enough to make porting Internet applications difficult, especially web browsers. When Be first arrived this was no big deal, but it quickly grew as a sticking point for user adoption. When you can download a native FreeBSD version of Netscape, but no Be version exists and the only alternative is an older hacked up version of Mosaic you have a problem. They did eventually fix this, but it was too little too late.
erisian 4y ago
Cool story I heard about Be once: the engineers could override their managers and had final say.
- ako 4y ago
  We all know how that ended. /s
  - smallstepforman 4y ago
    Well the Android core devs were ex BeOS engineers, as were the iPod touch engineers (which later became the iPhone), so I’d assume the engineers knew what they were doing. Sadly, the DotCom crash in 1999 removed funding from BeInc, we could have had these devices a decade earlier.
    - memsom 4y ago
      At one point there were half a dozen ex-Be Inc engineers working on Android... Dianne Hackbourne and Ficus Kirkpatrick come to mind, but there were more. Dominic Giampaolo did APFS for Apple as well.
sedatk 4y ago
I remember trying out BeOS on my PC in the late 90's. I was astonished that it supported my ASUS V3000 AGP video card out of the box. Windows NT couldn't do that; you had to install drivers. Everything worked just right with BeOS. Even its web browser (Netwatch?) was on par with Internet Explorer of the era. I was very impressed to say the least.
- classichasclass 4y ago
  NetPositive. Surprisingly capable for the time, very fast. They basically wrote it from scratch. For PowerPC BeOS, it was your only choice (x86 BeOS got Mozilla and Opera, and maybe a couple others).
  - sedatk 4y ago
    Yes, it had easily surpassed Netscape which was supposed to be the veteran of the era.
dominicm 4y ago
I worked on Haiku this summer as part of Google summer of code, and it just made me wish their attitude towards user experience was more prevalent in mainstream OSs. It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger or processes being grouped by application. There's sensible UX that doesn't expect me to be a wizard to understand what's going on or how to dig deeper. Obviously it has rough edges (as, well, honestly all operating systems do), but the things that do work work really well.
- gattilorenz 4y ago
  > It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger or processes being grouped by application. I think after Windows 7 the processes are grouped per application in Task Manager. We’re all grumpy about the redesigns of things we are familiar with, but little UX improvements happen all the time.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    I wish they would just put ProcessExplorer there instead...
    - naikrovek 4y ago
      process explorer is a lot too much for an average Windows user, I would think. it's dead easy to obtain if you want it, though.
  - rzzzt 4y ago
    Not the Details tab, though, and the name of the executable is shown there. The tree view in Process Explorer (shipped with Sysinternals) is the best of both worlds.
    - monista 4y ago
      I wanted to point to FOSS (GPL3) alternative ProcessHacker [1] which I'm using for years, and found out that their github link [2] now redirects to systeminformer [3], looks like repo rebranding, wasn't able to find it mentioned anywhere though. [1]: https://processhacker.sourceforge.io/ https://processhacker.sourceforge.io/ [2]: https://github.com/processhacker/processhacker/ https://github.com/processhacker/processhacker/ [3]: https://github.com/winsiderss/systeminformer/ https://github.com/winsiderss/systeminformer/
erwincoumans 4y ago
BeOS was fun. I recall attending BeGeistert and showing my Blender port (as a Not a Number/NaN employee) running on its software OpenGL driver (eventually I also beta-tested OpenGL hardware on BeOS). Be had a close knit community, with a similar passion as the earlier Commodore 64 'demo parties'. Official BeOS C++ API's included 'is_computer_on()' and 'is_computer_on_fire()': a sign that Be creators enjoyed working on their BeOS!
- layer8 4y ago
  > 'is_computer_on()' and 'is_computer_on_fire()' Someone should make a programming language where those are the keywords for true and false.
- statusbar 4y ago
  Here is a relevant discussion on twitter I was involved in about is_computer_on_fire(), a rack mounted BeBox in a performance show with a failed fan and an overheated CPU which melted off leaving the other one working! And then someone found and resurrected one of the rack mounted BeBoxes that we had used: https://twitter.com/jonahedwards/status/1499498729237147651 https://twitter.com/jonahedwards/status/1499498729237147651
jedberg 4y ago
The thing I loved most about BeOs is that it assumed you were a competent operator. They didn't hide "dangerous" settings from the user. For example, in the settings you could choose to turn each CPU in the machine on and off. But it didn't stop you from turning all of them off. And if you turned the last one off, the system halted, just as you'd expect. No warnings, nothing that stopped you. If you thought turning off all the CPUs was the right thing to do, then by golly you go ahead and do it!
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > No warnings, nothing that stopped you. I'm not sure I follow why this is a good thing. Having the option is good, but some sort of a sanity check and a warning dialog just seems like looking out for your users. For example, I recently used Linux on the desktop as my daily driver and wrote about my experiences [1]. At one point, I considered that the system was perhaps a bit of a mess in regards to the installed packages and, not wanting to do a clean reinstall, I figured that I'd just reinstall Python in particular. There's nothing mystifying about running an apt remove command, nor is there anything outrageous about the idea of removing some software and then later reinstalling it. However, as it turns out, this would probably break certain parts of the system, so I got a helpful warning instead: After this operation, 1 244 MB disk space will be freed. You are about to do something potentially harmful. To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!' By that time I had already entered "y" and pressed enter, not bothering to read the message, since the rest of the prompt looked like it normally would, so instead I got this output: Abort. And nothing broke. I think systems should look out more for the users like that, which would give the OS less of a bad reputation. Of course, it won't always save you, like Linus from LTT still ignored such a warning and ruined his install somewhat [2]. [1] https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/a-week-of-linux-instead-of-windows https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/a-week-of-linux-instead-of-... [2] https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M?t=634 https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M?t=634
  - ilyt 4y ago
    About Linus, I've migrated some people to Debian purely because they managed to fuck up the Ubuntu (or one of its flavours) upgrade somehow... and those were not linux-illiterate people. I dunno what it is but Ubuntu have weirdly higher rate of fuckups on upgrade than we've seen with Debian. Hell, it even survived that one time one of our admins upgraded by 2 releases of debian at once... Might be conjecture based on small sample size I have for Debian, but what Linus was doing shouldn't really fuck anything up... Steam package in Debian "just installed"
skibz 4y ago
> Error messages from many applications in BeOS are written in haikus. That’s awesome. Does anyone have some examples of these haikus?
- einr 4y ago
  https://8325.org/haiku/ https://8325.org/haiku/
georgeecollins 4y ago
This is a really interesting phrasing: >> There were problems within Apple that made the development of the OS nearly impossible, and to solve these problems Apple sought to purchase something that was close to their own vision. I think the truth is that Apple, and Apple + IBM worked on operating systems in this period and had trouble making a good one. Why it is hard for a mature company with legacy systems to create a new operating system is a difficult thing to explain. But it is not unusual. And worth understanding for people who want to innovate in large organizations.
- Narann 4y ago
  > Why it is hard for a mature company with legacy systems to create a new operating system is a difficult thing to explain. My theory is that you can't really _plan_ how to create and spread an OS: You need to put a dedicated enough person with enough time to write an interesting prototype that would brings you a subsequent advantage. And of course, you need the peoples that will judge wisely about the long run future of this prototype (remember Linux being considered bad?). After this, the prototype have to be mature enough for developers to and hardware makers to support it. That's a lot of _if_, and I suspect most OS (and in some way, softwares and language) are spontaneous creations that answer a need and become _good_ as a consequence of being used.
- somat 4y ago
  It is easier to achieve your architectural goals with greenfield development than modifying an existing system. However.. once you have an existing system, why are you going to throw the whole thing out, waste all those man-hours spent to make the thing, discard all the bugfixes you had to sweat over. It is very hard for a large organization to justify making something new. It is the reason IBM had to set up a secret ninja tiger team to make the pc. They tried a few times before, and ended up with really nice systems, far nicer than the pc. but they cost 10,000 dollars, in 1980, you are not gong to conquer the small business market for computers with a 10,000 dollar machine. so they set up a secret team, far away from the rest of the ibm mothership apparatus with the mission to make the cheapest computer possible, and they did, it cost 3,000 dollars had nothing compatible with any other ibm and sold like hotcakes.
- 4y ago
allenbrunson 4y ago
i worked at be, in the year 2000, for seven months. i got laid off when the company went out of business and got acquired. a few relics from my time there. my business card https://platinumball.net/be/business_card.jpg https://platinumball.net/be/business_card.jpg third floor break room. i saw jlg sitting on that couch, holding forth on the company, once or twice. https://platinumball.net/be/break_room.jpg https://platinumball.net/be/break_room.jpg a clipboard made out of a bebox motherboard. yep, i still have it https://platinumball.net/be/clipboard1.jpg https://platinumball.net/be/clipboard1.jpg https://platinumball.net/be/clipboard2.jpg https://platinumball.net/be/clipboard2.jpg edit: ugh, some people are reporting my links are forbidden. i removed my .htaccess file, which had some rules forbidding hot-linking. maybe that will help? https://platinumball.net/be https://platinumball.net/be
- jagged-chisel 4y ago
  All your links are 403 from here. > Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
  - chrisshroba 4y ago
    Same here
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- macintux 4y ago
  I can confirm that I now see your images.
- BirAdam 4y ago
  Do you mind if I add these to my article?
  - allenbrunson 4y ago
    hey, go right ahead! that's not even all my stuff. i have a couple of beos coffee cups, several boxed copies of beos, and several books. one thing, though: i am pretty sure that the haiku error messages were only in netpositive, the web browser, and not in any other beos apps.
tambourine_man 4y ago
I wonder why Gassée is not invited to more podcasts. He’s been at some of the most interesting companies in the industry at pivotal moments and crucial roles. There must be a ton of stories. His Monday Note blog is great.
mwcampbell 4y ago
> but he also stewarded many great projects: [...] the Macintosh Portable My understanding was that the Macintosh Portable was an awful product, because it was just too big and the screen wasn't backlit. I never saw one myself, though.
- throwaway82388 4y ago
  I got to use one, and my impression was that it an expensive, impractical, heavy, underpowered machine with a low contrast lcd that made the cursor difficult to see when it was in motion. It was also cool, futuristic, like nothing I’d seen before. It was a novelty, people crowded around it. But you’d have been better off lugging around an SE/30.
systems_glitch 4y ago
I first heard about Be hardware in 1997 or so, a friend in school's dad was a programmer for TWA and had convinced them to buy one of the dual 66 MHz boxes for him. When the 133 MHz boxes came out, he again got $work to buy one, and my friend got the 66 MHz version! I was very envious of the GeekPort, and for many years got by hacking on the PC parallel port...blew up more than one :P
ThinkBeat 4y ago
Be was amazing when it came out. I was introduced to it when the company came out to do a demo of it for the computer science department of the uni I was at. The multimedia abilities they demoed were amazing. Coming from Atari ST and TT this seemed like the next generation. I loved the BeFS. I could not afford a BeBox at the time and the uni. decided against buying any. We did have quite a few NeXTstations in the department which were nice. but I would have preferred Be.
- aa-jv 4y ago
  I was living in Hollywood at the time, hacking on SGI gear for clients. I attended a BeBox/BeOS demo at a girls school in Los Feliz, and was instantly hooked .. I dropped some hard-earned SGI cash on a BeBox right then and there. I still have it, as well as my other SGI machines. Its easily one of the sexiest machines in my retro-computing collection. Sure, the SGI boxes actually have some useful software - but the BeBox has sexier blinkenlights by far. ;)
przemub 4y ago
All of this makes me cry. I find these 25-years-old "news" much more fun and relevant for desktop, user-focused computing than today's Twitter debacle and endless monetization.
aa-jv 4y ago
I still have my BeBox, and boot it up every year in a kind of ritual, just to see that it still works. It is pretty amazing to see the thing boot .. the blinkenlights .. the hum and whir of the disks .. straight to the desktop just like the day I got it. And then open the dozen videos that stream seamlessly, which is all I do really. What a world it would have been if JLG had focused on the laptop as the driver of his revolution, as SJ did ..
helf 4y ago
Offtopic but since people were interested: 1. This is dated 2009 so I may have used my NeXT more like through 2010. Honestly a bit fuzzy on the time frame 2. Here’s a screenshot of when I got Omniweb to load gmail after a lot of fiddling: https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/3947037084/in/photolist-71MABw# https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/3947037084/in/photolist...
notakio 4y ago
I only ever got to play with BeOS on a Daystar Digital quad-PPC machine I "inherited" from work when it got replaced with more Mac hardware. I've always wanted to pick up an original BeBox, but even in the heyday of "cheap exotic hardware" (NeXT, SGI, etc) that was the mid-to-late 1990s, I never saw one pop up. As such, I am suitably envious (and find myself setting up alerting for my newly re-invigorated search for this grail, while downloading the Haiku .iso to spin up a VM, which, I assure my boss, is a fantastic use of my working hours), and greatly appreciative to have had the opportunity to read this today.
ralphc 4y ago
JLG is always good for a good quote or story. From the article, Today, imagine that you are a young Windows programmer and that I'm a venture capitalist and you come and see me and say, “Mr. Gasse, do I have a deal for you.” “Yes?” “I have the word processor for Windows that will kill Microsoft Word.” What am I to do if I'm a caring venture capitalist? I have to open the drawer and instead of pulling out the checkbook I should pull out the Magnum .357 and give you the coup de grace because this will stop what otherwise would be a long, ugly, expensive agony for your family.

313 points by BirAdam 4y ago

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/timing_is_everything https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/timing_is_everything

Beos had serato in 1999. http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/aboutbe/pressreleases/99-01-28_scratch.html http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/ab...

neura 4y ago
That... is amazing! Gives me the warm fuzzies. Thanks for posting.
kristopolous 4y ago
I remember being at the Hollywood Bowl in I believe 1998 and the consoles that are midway back with the audience in that little booth were all running BeOS. They had their niche
boredemployee 4y ago
That's crazy. And pioneer can't make rekordbox to work with linux in 2022.
- duped 4y ago
  Audio has been a disaster on Linux for a long time (yes I know about jack, ardour, pipe wire, and so on). It's not surprising that pro audio applications ignore it wholesale.
  - prox 4y ago
    Graphics are also so-so. Unless you do really specific graphics work (like movie cgi) it’s a no go for a lot of professionals.
    - anthk 4y ago
      OpenGL, Vulkan, CUDA, colord... People used Cinelerra and Cinepaint. Now you have Krita and Blender.
  - aa-jv 4y ago
    Pro Audio applications simply don't ignore it wholesale - Linux has plenty of pro audio software. Get an audio-focused distribution such as Ubuntu Studio, and you'll change your mind fast about how disastrous audio is on Linux - it just isn't. In fact, you can build the slickest, lowest-latency DAW on Linux, with stats that beat MacOS, even ...
    - duped 4y ago
      Tell me when Pro Tools supports Linux. Or Ableton. Or Cubase. Or FL Studio. Today there is one major DAW that supports Linux, which is Bitwig. But there are very few plugins and the vast majority of the revenue and users are on Windows and MacOS. The TL;DR is that there's not a convincing argument to support Linux today by the major developers. It's a chicken and egg problem to be sure. I've tried Ubuntu Studio. It's not better except that it had early support for preempt rt. I still think Linux audio is a disaster.
      - aa-jv 4y ago
        Based on decades of experience, I do not agree one bit. Pro Tools isn't the only DAW game in town, in fact its not even the most commonly used any more and its also not the 'best' DAW for many jobs - merely the most entrenched in peoples minds as a "pro tool". So many producers are giving it up for cheaper and more effective tools such as REAPER, which not only runs circles around Pro Tools but also runs really, really great on Linux. As does Ardour, which is easily in the same class of any of the other DAW's in terms of capabilities. See also, Waveform, Zrythmn, Qtractor and MusE. As does BitWig Studio - an Ableton Live analog, arguably more powerful and feature-rich than Ableton Live, which makes sense as it is being built by ex-Ableton folks. FL Studio? LMMS! Renoise! Linux Audio really rocks. Not to mention: ZynthianOS! Oh my! Monome NORNS! Holy heck! >one major DAW Sorry, no, this is wrong. REAPER is a major DAW, runs natively. Same with BitWig, Ardour and Harrison Mixbus. So thats at least 4. [1] >very few plugins I challenge you to actually install Ubuntu Studio and repeat this claim. Plus, VST plugins run great under Ubuntu Studio. You should probably try it again and update your understanding of the scene - you might've had a point 10 years ago, but as of today: just no. Linux audio is amazing. >I still think Linux audio is a disaster. I think you don't have enough modern experience to make this claim. My Presonus-based Ubuntu Studio DAW is the lowest latency, easiest to use and set up DAW in the studio. While the other producers are cussing through the hoops of eLicense and dongle management and unsigned/outdated kext's for super-expensive boutique/cocktail hardware, the Linux DAW users in my studio are happily whistling through the edits with their USB and Firewire-based audio i/o devices, many of which work quite happily 'out of the box', "apt update && apt upgrade" dilemma notwithstanding .. [1] - If these DAW's can do it, there is technically no reason the other DAW's can't - its just the fixed idea that "linux audio sucks" that prevents this from happening in the industry. Linux audio does not, in reality, suck - it actually ROCKS, hard. Linux audio only sucks if you say it does. There are certainly no valid technical reasons for a lack of ports from the market-mindset vendors .. just the mindset you proffer, which is, imho, plain wrong.
airfoil 4y ago
I had no idea! Very cool. Thank you so much for this!
pdntspa 4y ago
Wow! And Serato is still my preferred DVS. In many ways I think it carries on the spirit of Be, in that it does what it does extremely well and extremely reliably. In my 15-some-odd years of messing/performing with it, it's only crashed on me once for a reason that I couldn't attribute to something else. (and luckily that was during a practice session) Sadly, now I use it to drive a Pioneer XDJ console. And they made me pay extra for DVS support without the Serato box :( But it's a pretty fly 4-deck system!
the_other 4y ago
Serato's great software. I very much hope one day to see another integrated Be-inspired system emerge, in the vein of 00s era Apple (and the original BeBox). Narrow product line, tight hardware-software integration; striking, thoughtful and fun UI; notably different paradigm and features from the competition such that it scratches an itch the others are ignoring. This bit of history gives me so much hope (tinged with sadness that it's just a daydream). If I knew more about OS or filesystem construction, or how to sell to VCs, I'd push the idea hard myself.
- SSLy 4y ago
  https://teenage.engineering/products/op-1/original https://teenage.engineering/products/op-1/original https://shop.play.date/ https://shop.play.date/ https://www.analogue.co/pocket https://www.analogue.co/pocket i guess

wyldfire 4y ago

Is this column written by the same author(s) of PC Magazine's ARF?

BirAdam 4y ago
Nope.

eduction 4y ago

>the next generation of Apple’s Macintosh operating system: Copeland. I’m sorry but it’s Copland, after the composer Aaron Copland. Having read altogether too many editions of Macworld in the post Steve, pre Steve era, that error (repeated later in the text) leapt off the page. (Admittedly, this would be kind of an hilarious name for a failed OS.)

BirAdam 4y ago
Corrected.
- deleted 4y ago
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abruzzi 4y ago

I didn't realize there were so few BeBoxen made. I wonder if I kept mine what it would be worth to a collector?

DinkMeeker 4y ago
I was surprised by the low number as well. I still have mine.
- aa-jv 4y ago
  Fellow BeBox owner, in the house! Perhaps we should meet somewhere ..
helf 4y ago
Well, I sold mine for almost $800 like a decade ago and they are only getting harder to find. I wish I had kept mine.
- E39M5S62 4y ago
  Same. I had a dual 133mhz back in ~2000. I regret selling it, but bills had to be paid and I just couldn't use it as my main computer at that point.

throw_m239339 4y ago

> From there, things only got worse for Be. The company lingered around until 2001 when it sold its copyrights to Palm for $11 million USD. In 2002, Be brought litigation against Microsoft for anticompetitive practices, but the suit was settled out of court for $23.25 million. After purchasing BeOS, Palm promptly discontinued the OS. Palm itself later had some problems, split, and sold. The rights to BeOS are now in the hands of Access Co along with PalmOS. I wonder what did Apple do that BeOS didn't to succeed. And didn't Microsoft basically "save" Apple at some point?

macintux 4y ago
Apple had a long history and corresponding fan base, which helped, and of course Steve Jobs. Microsoft invested some money in Apple to help alleviate anti-trust issues, but from my reading the more substantive assistance was a commitment to ship Office for Mac. https://medium.com/the-techlife/why-did-microsoft-invest-150-million-in-microsoft-in-1997-cf67ff802c66 https://medium.com/the-techlife/why-did-microsoft-invest-150...
- Someone 4y ago
  I don’t think anti-trust was the reason for that deal with Apple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company: “Later testimony in the United States v. Microsoft Corp. case revealed that, at the time, Apple was threatening Microsoft with a multibillion-dollar lawsuit over the allegedly stolen code, and in return Bill Gates was threatening the cancellation of Microsoft Office for Mac. In August 1997, Apple and Microsoft announced a settlement deal. Apple would drop all current lawsuits, including all lingering issues from the "Look & Feel" lawsuit and the "QuickTime source code" lawsuit, and agree to make Internet Explorer for Mac the default browser on the Macintosh unless the user explicitly chose the bundled Netscape browser. In return, Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office, Internet Explorer, and various developer tools and software for the Mac for the next 5 years, and purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock. The companies also agreed to mutual collaboration on Java technologies, and to cross-license all existing patents, and patents obtained during the five-year deal, with one another”

deleted 4y ago

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tartoran 4y ago

Im itching for a simple OS that is user friendly and just simple, something that would instant boot and would be functional offline. Linux is great and all but sometimes it feels too bloated for a simple limited purpose machine..

yafbum 4y ago
Raspberry Pi distros are nice for this
- valeg 4y ago
  Also RISC OS
- psd1 4y ago
  My Pi4 is a good minute to the login prompt, I would not call it "instant boot" in any way!
aquova 4y ago
Perhaps Serenity OS is right for you
simula67 4y ago
ArchLinux + Xfce would probably fit your bill.
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
The era of these type of "simple" OSes has come to an end. Linux is now the king of hardware support and nothing out there can even try to compete, not even Windows. And "consumer" hardware support is getting harder and harder; we did not really improve the situation at all from the 90s. Linux drivers, while some of them are not proprietary (before you ask: Android drivers are mostly proprietary), are still inseparably linked to Linux itself, which means that for any non-Linux OS to succeed you first have to reimplement Linux.
- MonkeyClub 4y ago

Shared404 4y ago

For those interested in a modern(ish) take on Be, Haiku may be interesting: https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/ E: Posted this before having time to read the article, glad to see it was mentioned!

clxxx 4y ago
> With everything surrounding the demise of Be being highly litigious, it is no surprise that the project wished to avoid legal complications over their name. They chose Haiku. > Why did they choose the name Haiku? Error messages from many applications in BeOS are written in haikus. Additionally, they felt that the art of haiku was representative of the elegance and simplicity of BeOS. It seems Haiku is BeOS, just renamed.
- Thorrez 4y ago
  It's a rewrite: > an open source project was started whose aim was to recreate BeOS from scratch with full binary and source compatibility. This was OpenBeOS. The first release in 2002 was a community update to BeOS 5.0.3 with some open source replacements for Be code. The project name changed in 2004. With everything surrounding the demise of Be being highly litigious, it is no surprise that the project wished to avoid legal complications over their name. They chose Haiku.

rocket_surgeron 4y ago

BeOS 5.1 with the network stack patches is nice. That wasn't leaked until after Be stopped operating. 5.0, which was almost usable was only out for about 8 months before Be stopped operating. 4.5 and prior? What does the dog say? "Ruff" Yeah. 4.5 and prior could spin some teapots but not much else. By the time "good" BeOS came out all computers could spin teapots and Windows PCs had 3d hardware acceleration. BeOS barely had 2d hardware acceleration. In the year 2000, after five years of development, BeOS didn't have multi-user support, a stable network stack, or USB mass storage support. I think that people are remembering with rose-colored glasses about 5.0 (which if I remember right was "oops leaked lol" for free on a magazine disc) or 5.1 with all of the patches which started circulating after all of the laid-off Be employees started dumping files online. Those of us who struggled for months to get BeOS stable and useful on our Performa 6400/200s have more bittersweet memories.

memsom 4y ago
So - BeOS was very usable on Intel. It had a lot more support. It also had more modern browsers. I ran it as a main OS well in to the 2000's. On PowerPC is was a lot more hobbled. You sound like you were on PowerPC unfortunately. 4.5 and 5.0 were so similar that it really isn't worth talking about the differences - a few minor API differences. The main thing with 5.0 was that Tracker was opened, so they moved the About box in to the Kernel to prevent people using a fake one and preserve their copyright notices etc.. The API was really similar and mostly anything that compiles under R4.5 will run under R5. They also added in a bunch of 3rd party codec and changed some of the icons. In fact, Stinger (BeIA) was based on the 4.5 codebase, not the R5 codebase. This is apparent when you try to use the API and notice anything newer than 4.5 is not present.

Veliladon 4y ago

Even now over 20 years later we still haven't had anything near as cool as BeFS. Who needs an email client when the file system can literally index it all and your inbox and email messages are literally files in a folder in a Tracker window that's just displaying email specific metadata for its columns.

helf 4y ago
BeFS is one of the things I miss the most. My dream is an unholy merger of ZFS and BeFS.
xnx 4y ago
I think WinFS was trying to copy some of the good ideas, but it was abandoned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
naikrovek 4y ago
multiple comments about BeFS and none describe why it is so good.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  BeFS has file attributes (so you can say this file is an email I received, add from="Bob Smith <b.smith@example.com>", received="2022-11-15") and it can optionally but by default index all these attributes using an on-disk BTree. Many modern systems do have file attributes, although they're not always as capable as the ones in BeFS, and none of them to my knowledge chose to add all these BTrees because keeping them up-to-date is expensive.
  - p_l 4y ago
    NTFS provides on-disk indexes, that's where Windows Search stores its data... and how directories work in NTFS. Similar features can be handled in ZFS (the biggest issue is that IIRC its large K/V structure is AVL Tree, so you'd probably need to add a new object at ZPL layer). What is the big difference is that BeFS exposed the extended attributes easily in the file manager and APIs - compare it with other systems where the APIs were little known or not used - POSIX extended attributes which are very limited (4k), Solaris extended attributes (which let you open a file as a directory) but are Solaris only, WinNT which had the issue of WinNT being a niche among windows systems, etc. etc. BeOS in comparison required at least considerable porting work, at worst writing from scratch, and that meant the new features were much more visible.

pcurve 4y ago

New-ish video of actual BeBox running in HD video quality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkM9WbB8cWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkM9WbB8cWM I didn't know it had functional LED light meter in front of the case. very cool. Obligatory demo from the 90s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ

classichasclass 4y ago
It's actually the system load on each 603e. Source: dual BeBox/133 on my desk
- helf 4y ago
  Still have one? I am jelly. Is there a working version of Haiku for them yet?
  - classichasclass 4y ago
    Sadly no, but still get a lot of wear out of R5. I have it on this BeBox and on a 6500/275 that I'm trying to figure out sound issues on.
    - helf 4y ago
      I wonder if they will ever target such an old ISA. What are your sound problems? I only briefly used BeOS on an actual mac and it, amazingly enough, worked without a hitch.
      - classichasclass 4y ago
        Something with the AWACS driver (need to run off an instrumented build and boot the kernel in debug mode to see what's up, just gotta get a round tuit). The 6500 is technically Unsupported but Compatible in Be's support matrix. Some people report the sound works, some people report it doesn't. Ditto for the TAM, which is basically a 6500 in a cool suit with an LCD.

helf 4y ago

BeFS was amazing. I miss BeOS, TBH. I ran a heavily customized BeOS R5.05 install that had upgraded bits from OpenBeOS (later, HaikuOS), ZetaOS etc. I ran it as a daily driver on a Dell GX1 SFF that I swear was designed for BeOS: Max RAM the BeOS kernel supported without hackery was 768MB - The GX maxed out at 768MB; The GX1 had a Rage GPU that BeOS natively supported (Including 3D Acceleration!) which was a very short list; the GX1 had a supported NIC, IDE controllers, etc etc. I had upgraded the CPU to a 1.4GHz Tualatin-S that, sadly, had to run at 1.04GHz as the GX1 wouldn't run a FSB higher than 100mhz so my 133mhz FSB Tualatin had to bop down a little. Still screamed. sigh I miss that system. I would still be running it if lightning hadn't fried it. It sat next to my NeXTstation Turbo Color that I used for way longer than was reasonable as my primary system, lol. The NeXT was a daily driver till 2008. 33mhz 040 w/ 128MB 60NS EDO. OPENSTEP4.2 + lots of ported goodies friends and I did. Even managed to get SSLv3 working and load newer websites! :D ... wish I hadn't sold it. Oh yeah! I also had a Pre-FCC certification dual 66mhz BeBox. Cool machine. Slow as shit though. The 603e in it wasn't natively SMP capable IIRC. The GLU chip could either run one CPU with L2 cache or dual CPUs with L2 cache disabled. Coherency was done in software. Unless I am horribly misremembering. It was a nasty hack and showed. My BeBox! https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/albums/72157621937392496/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/albums/7215762193739249... My GX-1 and my NeXT :D https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/6676203105/in/photolist-73AQ7K-baXhA6-7u6dAA https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/6676203105/in/photolist...

helf 4y ago
My NeXT kit that I sold: https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/albums/72157623700712983 https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/albums/7215762370071298...
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classichasclass 4y ago
You remember correctly: the 603 was never intended for multiprocessing. It was amazing it worked as well as it did on the BeBox, but AFAIK it was the only 603-based computer ever to try. The G3, the 603's more-or-less direct follow-on, doesn't support it either. From the BeBox FAQ: "We use the Motorola 105 'Eagle' support chip, which allows for either one processor and an L2 cache or two processors without L2 caches. So, our two-processor PowerPC BeBox has no provision for an L2 cache."

a-dub 4y ago

this was nicely written. it's amusing to see the name of the blog, a popular column in pc magazine in the '90s bore the same name. i forget who wrote it, but it was one of the really well known computer journalists of the time, if i recall correctly. a notable absence is mention of the cpu utilization lights. to show off all that work they did to build a truly multiprocessor system, they had two strips of leds that ran up the front bezel of the system, indicating realtime utilization of the cpus. i remember playing with beos many years ago. i think they may have shipped an intel version after shutting down the hardware.

helf 4y ago
They did. The initial CPU target for BeOS was the AT&T H0BB1T DSP. The alpha copies were called Shark. I actually have system images for the hobbit builds still floating around somewhere. I never did get my hands on a prototype hobbit bebox, sadly. I almost bought one off a guy in France but the deal fell apart. Be produced a regular PowerPC version that could be installed on Macs (I think it may have required PCI macs?) and then an x86 version that was 32bit only and had a lot of ... quirks. But I used it for over a decade.
- classichasclass 4y ago
  Correct, no NuBus support. It also doesn't support New World Macs and some of the later higher-speed 604s. Essentially it's that slice of beige four-digit Power Macs from the mid 1990s.

iseanstevens 4y ago

It was a really beautiful, functional, svelte & fast OS. IMHO, Apple made the right decision with Next because of Jobs. I’d sure like to see the results of the alternate timeline! I still feel like Be could be great for phones/mobile, maybe VR. (Just as it was so foundationally low latency) (Note I am aware of Haiku, etc. I’m using “Be” to mean something from its linage) Side note - Jean-Louis Gassée, founder(?) of Be is very insightful. He writes some excellent short form tech world analysis at http://mondaynote.com/ http://mondaynote.com/

WillAdams 4y ago
No multi-user support --- it was a non-starter. I'm much happier w/ Quartz (née Display PDF) than the typical image model division which BeOS had. That said, I really wish someone would get it (and Tron) running on a Raspberry Pi.
jandrese 4y ago
That said it had some issues. Their network stack was just weird enough to make porting Internet applications difficult, especially web browsers. When Be first arrived this was no big deal, but it quickly grew as a sticking point for user adoption. When you can download a native FreeBSD version of Netscape, but no Be version exists and the only alternative is an older hacked up version of Mosaic you have a problem. They did eventually fix this, but it was too little too late.

erisian 4y ago

Cool story I heard about Be once: the engineers could override their managers and had final say.

ako 4y ago
We all know how that ended. /s
- smallstepforman 4y ago
  Well the Android core devs were ex BeOS engineers, as were the iPod touch engineers (which later became the iPhone), so I’d assume the engineers knew what they were doing. Sadly, the DotCom crash in 1999 removed funding from BeInc, we could have had these devices a decade earlier.
  - memsom 4y ago
    At one point there were half a dozen ex-Be Inc engineers working on Android... Dianne Hackbourne and Ficus Kirkpatrick come to mind, but there were more. Dominic Giampaolo did APFS for Apple as well.

sedatk 4y ago

I remember trying out BeOS on my PC in the late 90's. I was astonished that it supported my ASUS V3000 AGP video card out of the box. Windows NT couldn't do that; you had to install drivers. Everything worked just right with BeOS. Even its web browser (Netwatch?) was on par with Internet Explorer of the era. I was very impressed to say the least.

classichasclass 4y ago
NetPositive. Surprisingly capable for the time, very fast. They basically wrote it from scratch. For PowerPC BeOS, it was your only choice (x86 BeOS got Mozilla and Opera, and maybe a couple others).
- sedatk 4y ago
  Yes, it had easily surpassed Netscape which was supposed to be the veteran of the era.

dominicm 4y ago

I worked on Haiku this summer as part of Google summer of code, and it just made me wish their attitude towards user experience was more prevalent in mainstream OSs. It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger or processes being grouped by application. There's sensible UX that doesn't expect me to be a wizard to understand what's going on or how to dig deeper. Obviously it has rough edges (as, well, honestly all operating systems do), but the things that do work work really well.

gattilorenz 4y ago
> It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger or processes being grouped by application. I think after Windows 7 the processes are grouped per application in Task Manager. We’re all grumpy about the redesigns of things we are familiar with, but little UX improvements happen all the time.
- ilyt 4y ago
  I wish they would just put ProcessExplorer there instead...
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    process explorer is a lot too much for an average Windows user, I would think. it's dead easy to obtain if you want it, though.
- rzzzt 4y ago
  Not the Details tab, though, and the name of the executable is shown there. The tree view in Process Explorer (shipped with Sysinternals) is the best of both worlds.
  - monista 4y ago
    I wanted to point to FOSS (GPL3) alternative ProcessHacker [1] which I'm using for years, and found out that their github link [2] now redirects to systeminformer [3], looks like repo rebranding, wasn't able to find it mentioned anywhere though. [1]: https://processhacker.sourceforge.io/ https://processhacker.sourceforge.io/ [2]: https://github.com/processhacker/processhacker/ https://github.com/processhacker/processhacker/ [3]: https://github.com/winsiderss/systeminformer/ https://github.com/winsiderss/systeminformer/

erwincoumans 4y ago

BeOS was fun. I recall attending BeGeistert and showing my Blender port (as a Not a Number/NaN employee) running on its software OpenGL driver (eventually I also beta-tested OpenGL hardware on BeOS). Be had a close knit community, with a similar passion as the earlier Commodore 64 'demo parties'. Official BeOS C++ API's included 'is_computer_on()' and 'is_computer_on_fire()': a sign that Be creators enjoyed working on their BeOS!

layer8 4y ago
> 'is_computer_on()' and 'is_computer_on_fire()' Someone should make a programming language where those are the keywords for true and false.
statusbar 4y ago
Here is a relevant discussion on twitter I was involved in about is_computer_on_fire(), a rack mounted BeBox in a performance show with a failed fan and an overheated CPU which melted off leaving the other one working! And then someone found and resurrected one of the rack mounted BeBoxes that we had used: https://twitter.com/jonahedwards/status/1499498729237147651 https://twitter.com/jonahedwards/status/1499498729237147651

jedberg 4y ago

The thing I loved most about BeOs is that it assumed you were a competent operator. They didn't hide "dangerous" settings from the user. For example, in the settings you could choose to turn each CPU in the machine on and off. But it didn't stop you from turning all of them off. And if you turned the last one off, the system halted, just as you'd expect. No warnings, nothing that stopped you. If you thought turning off all the CPUs was the right thing to do, then by golly you go ahead and do it!

KronisLV 4y ago
> No warnings, nothing that stopped you. I'm not sure I follow why this is a good thing. Having the option is good, but some sort of a sanity check and a warning dialog just seems like looking out for your users. For example, I recently used Linux on the desktop as my daily driver and wrote about my experiences [1]. At one point, I considered that the system was perhaps a bit of a mess in regards to the installed packages and, not wanting to do a clean reinstall, I figured that I'd just reinstall Python in particular. There's nothing mystifying about running an apt remove command, nor is there anything outrageous about the idea of removing some software and then later reinstalling it. However, as it turns out, this would probably break certain parts of the system, so I got a helpful warning instead: After this operation, 1 244 MB disk space will be freed. You are about to do something potentially harmful. To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!' By that time I had already entered "y" and pressed enter, not bothering to read the message, since the rest of the prompt looked like it normally would, so instead I got this output: Abort. And nothing broke. I think systems should look out more for the users like that, which would give the OS less of a bad reputation. Of course, it won't always save you, like Linus from LTT still ignored such a warning and ruined his install somewhat [2]. [1] https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/a-week-of-linux-instead-of-windows https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/a-week-of-linux-instead-of-... [2] https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M?t=634 https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M?t=634
- ilyt 4y ago
  About Linus, I've migrated some people to Debian purely because they managed to fuck up the Ubuntu (or one of its flavours) upgrade somehow... and those were not linux-illiterate people. I dunno what it is but Ubuntu have weirdly higher rate of fuckups on upgrade than we've seen with Debian. Hell, it even survived that one time one of our admins upgraded by 2 releases of debian at once... Might be conjecture based on small sample size I have for Debian, but what Linus was doing shouldn't really fuck anything up... Steam package in Debian "just installed"

skibz 4y ago

> Error messages from many applications in BeOS are written in haikus. That’s awesome. Does anyone have some examples of these haikus?

einr 4y ago
https://8325.org/haiku/ https://8325.org/haiku/

georgeecollins 4y ago

This is a really interesting phrasing: >> There were problems within Apple that made the development of the OS nearly impossible, and to solve these problems Apple sought to purchase something that was close to their own vision. I think the truth is that Apple, and Apple + IBM worked on operating systems in this period and had trouble making a good one. Why it is hard for a mature company with legacy systems to create a new operating system is a difficult thing to explain. But it is not unusual. And worth understanding for people who want to innovate in large organizations.

Narann 4y ago
> Why it is hard for a mature company with legacy systems to create a new operating system is a difficult thing to explain. My theory is that you can't really _plan_ how to create and spread an OS: You need to put a dedicated enough person with enough time to write an interesting prototype that would brings you a subsequent advantage. And of course, you need the peoples that will judge wisely about the long run future of this prototype (remember Linux being considered bad?). After this, the prototype have to be mature enough for developers to and hardware makers to support it. That's a lot of _if_, and I suspect most OS (and in some way, softwares and language) are spontaneous creations that answer a need and become _good_ as a consequence of being used.
somat 4y ago
It is easier to achieve your architectural goals with greenfield development than modifying an existing system. However.. once you have an existing system, why are you going to throw the whole thing out, waste all those man-hours spent to make the thing, discard all the bugfixes you had to sweat over. It is very hard for a large organization to justify making something new. It is the reason IBM had to set up a secret ninja tiger team to make the pc. They tried a few times before, and ended up with really nice systems, far nicer than the pc. but they cost 10,000 dollars, in 1980, you are not gong to conquer the small business market for computers with a 10,000 dollar machine. so they set up a secret team, far away from the rest of the ibm mothership apparatus with the mission to make the cheapest computer possible, and they did, it cost 3,000 dollars had nothing compatible with any other ibm and sold like hotcakes.
4y ago

allenbrunson 4y ago

i worked at be, in the year 2000, for seven months. i got laid off when the company went out of business and got acquired. a few relics from my time there. my business card https://platinumball.net/be/business_card.jpg https://platinumball.net/be/business_card.jpg third floor break room. i saw jlg sitting on that couch, holding forth on the company, once or twice. https://platinumball.net/be/break_room.jpg https://platinumball.net/be/break_room.jpg a clipboard made out of a bebox motherboard. yep, i still have it https://platinumball.net/be/clipboard1.jpg https://platinumball.net/be/clipboard1.jpg https://platinumball.net/be/clipboard2.jpg https://platinumball.net/be/clipboard2.jpg edit: ugh, some people are reporting my links are forbidden. i removed my .htaccess file, which had some rules forbidding hot-linking. maybe that will help? https://platinumball.net/be https://platinumball.net/be

jagged-chisel 4y ago
All your links are 403 from here. > Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
- chrisshroba 4y ago
  Same here
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
macintux 4y ago
I can confirm that I now see your images.
BirAdam 4y ago
Do you mind if I add these to my article?
- allenbrunson 4y ago
  hey, go right ahead! that's not even all my stuff. i have a couple of beos coffee cups, several boxed copies of beos, and several books. one thing, though: i am pretty sure that the haiku error messages were only in netpositive, the web browser, and not in any other beos apps.

tambourine_man 4y ago

I wonder why Gassée is not invited to more podcasts. He’s been at some of the most interesting companies in the industry at pivotal moments and crucial roles. There must be a ton of stories. His Monday Note blog is great.

mwcampbell 4y ago

> but he also stewarded many great projects: [...] the Macintosh Portable My understanding was that the Macintosh Portable was an awful product, because it was just too big and the screen wasn't backlit. I never saw one myself, though.

throwaway82388 4y ago
I got to use one, and my impression was that it an expensive, impractical, heavy, underpowered machine with a low contrast lcd that made the cursor difficult to see when it was in motion. It was also cool, futuristic, like nothing I’d seen before. It was a novelty, people crowded around it. But you’d have been better off lugging around an SE/30.

systems_glitch 4y ago

I first heard about Be hardware in 1997 or so, a friend in school's dad was a programmer for TWA and had convinced them to buy one of the dual 66 MHz boxes for him. When the 133 MHz boxes came out, he again got $work to buy one, and my friend got the 66 MHz version! I was very envious of the GeekPort, and for many years got by hacking on the PC parallel port...blew up more than one :P

ThinkBeat 4y ago

Be was amazing when it came out. I was introduced to it when the company came out to do a demo of it for the computer science department of the uni I was at. The multimedia abilities they demoed were amazing. Coming from Atari ST and TT this seemed like the next generation. I loved the BeFS. I could not afford a BeBox at the time and the uni. decided against buying any. We did have quite a few NeXTstations in the department which were nice. but I would have preferred Be.

aa-jv 4y ago
I was living in Hollywood at the time, hacking on SGI gear for clients. I attended a BeBox/BeOS demo at a girls school in Los Feliz, and was instantly hooked .. I dropped some hard-earned SGI cash on a BeBox right then and there. I still have it, as well as my other SGI machines. Its easily one of the sexiest machines in my retro-computing collection. Sure, the SGI boxes actually have some useful software - but the BeBox has sexier blinkenlights by far. ;)

przemub 4y ago

All of this makes me cry. I find these 25-years-old "news" much more fun and relevant for desktop, user-focused computing than today's Twitter debacle and endless monetization.

aa-jv 4y ago

I still have my BeBox, and boot it up every year in a kind of ritual, just to see that it still works. It is pretty amazing to see the thing boot .. the blinkenlights .. the hum and whir of the disks .. straight to the desktop just like the day I got it. And then open the dozen videos that stream seamlessly, which is all I do really. What a world it would have been if JLG had focused on the laptop as the driver of his revolution, as SJ did ..

helf 4y ago

Offtopic but since people were interested: 1. This is dated 2009 so I may have used my NeXT more like through 2010. Honestly a bit fuzzy on the time frame 2. Here’s a screenshot of when I got Omniweb to load gmail after a lot of fiddling: https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/3947037084/in/photolist-71MABw# https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/3947037084/in/photolist...

notakio 4y ago

I only ever got to play with BeOS on a Daystar Digital quad-PPC machine I "inherited" from work when it got replaced with more Mac hardware. I've always wanted to pick up an original BeBox, but even in the heyday of "cheap exotic hardware" (NeXT, SGI, etc) that was the mid-to-late 1990s, I never saw one pop up. As such, I am suitably envious (and find myself setting up alerting for my newly re-invigorated search for this grail, while downloading the Haiku .iso to spin up a VM, which, I assure my boss, is a fantastic use of my working hours), and greatly appreciative to have had the opportunity to read this today.

ralphc 4y ago

JLG is always good for a good quote or story. From the article, Today, imagine that you are a young Windows programmer and that I'm a venture capitalist and you come and see me and say, “Mr. Gasse, do I have a deal for you.” “Yes?” “I have the word processor for Windows that will kill Microsoft Word.” What am I to do if I'm a caring venture capitalist? I have to open the drawer and instead of pulling out the checkbook I should pull out the Magnum .357 and give you the coup de grace because this will stop what otherwise would be a long, ugly, expensive agony for your family.