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While I LOVE LOVE LOVED BeOS. It resonated with me and it was a great experience...it wasn't multiuser and didn't have some stuff that I forget, but seemed nece
by Damogran6 2y ago
While I LOVE LOVE LOVED BeOS. It resonated with me and it was a great experience...it wasn't multiuser and didn't have some stuff that I forget, but seemed necessary for a system to have long-term success. But mam did it cut out the cruft and wring out ALL of the HP of the hardware of the time.
- pavlov 2y agoWhy was multiuser so important? Apple’s most successful operating system in the Jobs 2.0 era isn’t multiuser either. BeOS would have been a fine foundation for smartphones and tablets. But of course it’s an open question whether Apple could have got that far in the 2000s without the return of Jobs. I suspect the company would have been acquired or merged with some unsuitable suitor like Sun.
- xattt 2y agoMulti-user would have likely been bolted on one way or another at some point, as had happened when other OSes gained fundamental new features.
- kbolino 2y agoWas any operating system actually able to go from single-user to multi-user so easily? Windows NT and OS X were totally rewritten from the ground up relative to their single-user predecessors Windows 9x and classic Mac OS.
- hypercube33 2y agoNT is closer to a mainframe OS than 9x and it came out in the win3 era
- kbolino 2y agoYeah, I actually used NT 3.51 for some time. However it was the NT line that replaced the 9x line, at least from the consumer perspective.
- nullindividual 2y agoNT had no predecessor (at least from Microsoft; architecturally it's predecessor would be VMS). It was ground-up multi-user. Mac OS [Classic] was not OS X's predecessor, either -- it was NeXTStep.
- kbolino 2y agoYou are right on the technical lineage, but I was referring to how these products were (ultimately) presented commercially. The facts that they are both older than one might think and they were developed with specific goals from the start I think more clearly illustrate that you can't just "bolt on" such fundamental differences.
- fasa99 2y agoyea, a big one. Once there was an intentionally multi-user-from-ground-up OS called "Multics". Dude named ken thompson or dennis ritchie or something worked on it but was like "bro, so bloated". So dude writes a DISK BENCHMARKING system, single user, called it "Unix" as if to castrate multics. The original unix was disk benchmarking, barebones. So we know how that moved into multi-user source: kernighans readingbook, "unix a memoir" or something like that, great read
- kbolino 2y agoI'm not sure how much that really counts. According to [1], the time that Unix spent as a single-user operating system was intentionally very short-lived. Even the earliest version of the operating system that can be reconstructed today had multiple logins and processes, though only one could be active at a time. It seems that, by the time Unix was written in C, ported to multiple architectures, and spreading outside of Bell Labs, it was already multi-user. [1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/10908 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/10908
- bee_rider 2y agoI agree that iOS isn’t multi-user in any real, like, multiple user accounts intended to be used by real people sense. I wonder, though, it is based on MacOS somehow, right? Which is based on BSD. Could there be some left over multi-user plumbing sticking around in a technical sense?
- PlutoIsAPlanet 2y agoYes, iOS still uses users in the technical "Unix" sense, they're just not mapped to actual physical users, but instead to various services. Android is in a similar boat. They're still an important way to manage filesystem access of programs.
- meibo 2y agoAndroid isn't in a similar boat, AOSP has full isolated Multi-User support that is realized through Unix users. You can create new users through Settings and they have their own home screen, apps and files. Most vendors have this enabled now and things like work accounts/MDM use the same system. https://source.android.com/docs/devices/admin/multi-user https://source.android.com/docs/devices/admin/multi-user
- anyfoo 2y agoiOS barely uses that. Processes commonly run as “mobile” or “root”, but it does not matter very much. POSIX users and access permissions are archaic, and, in my opinion, don’t match with how almost any device is being used nowadays. iOS implements its own concepts through entitlements, containers, vaults, sandboxes etc. (Look up the “Apple Platform Security Guide” for details.)
- nullindividual 2y ago> Shared iPad security in iPadOS > [...] User data is partitioned into separate directories, each in their own data protection domains and protected by both UNIX permissions and sandboxing. POSIX users are quite important.
- Damogran6 2y agoIt allows applications to run in different priviledge contexts and allows you inherit privilidges on a network, off the top of my head. Unless you _want_ your solitare game have the ability to enumerate your contacts and send mail.
- pavlov 2y agomacOS and iOS use a completely different mechanism to ensure a game doesn’t read my contacts or make network requests. It has nothing to do with Unix-style users. They could have built that on top of BeOS just as well as on NextStep.
- anthk 2y agoUnix permissions will allow you do to that perfectly fine.
- ranger_danger 2y ago> Why was multiuser so important? Because computing devices, and access to them, was not so ubiquitous back then. Families all had to share a single computer. Business users had to share access to large servers. There were no smartphones. Some had to travel to an educational setting just to see or use a computer.
- randkyp 2y agoHeh, funny you mention that, considering Be's pivot to BeIA. Some Be engineers also worked on the (unreleased) Palm OS Cobalt, and eventually, Android. (And then Fuschia, but I don't think that OS will ever hit smartphones.)