3 ms·

As someone who's never used it, what is so great about BeOS? I mean concretely, not in figurative language like this.

caycep 2y ago
if I recall, (and someone correct me if I'm wrong), it had deep multithreaded support/design, more so than any other desktop OS at the time, so it could run more simultaneous processes and apps w/o getting bogged down. at least I think there was a demo claiming this.
- diegocg 2y ago
  This was true at the time, but at the time Linux wasn't preemptive, had bad SMP support and no good threading implementation. BeOS was designed for SMP hardware, was preemptive and had good threading support, but besides that there is nothing really especial about it. "pervasive multithreading" simply consisted in using threads a lot (for 90's definition of "lot"). Creating and managing the threads by hand. In 90's C++. Modern operating systems have caught with that and gone beyond of what beos did.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    I wouldn't say there was nothing special about it, given the limitations at the time. Having threads spawn quickly, and quickly move between threads so fast as to have no visible user latency was one hell of a feat on BeOS hardware--a 66MHz PowerPC dual-CPU system, IIRC. But yeah, it's something we take for granted today.
    - amy-petrik-214 2y ago
      yea it was cool dual CPU hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox those two green lights on the front were CPU load per each CPU. and the geekport reminscent of Raspberry pi only later did they port it to x86, similar to NeXT.
    - caycep 2y ago
      also it looked like Optimus prime, that was kinda cool at the time
- nullindividual 2y ago
  I'm not sure it's SMP/multithreading support was anything terribly special; NT4 Workstation had the same capabilities.
krylon 2y ago
From what I heard, the filesystem was very cool. You could attach arbitrary key-value pairs to files, and e.g. rather than store song metadata in ID3 tags or whatever, it was stored as filesystem metadata, making it searchable by any program without knowledge of a file's internals. As I recall reading, one could create a virtual folder that contained the results of a search, e.g. "all MP3 files where artist='Pink Floyd'" and use that as a playlist. I have played around a bit with Haiku, but have not figured out how to do that so far.
- waddlesplash 2y ago
  Have you read the User Guide on these subjects? https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/workshop-filetypes+attributes.html https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/workshop-filetype...
  - adastra22 2y ago
    Far better is the book by the creator of the filesystem: http://www.nobius.org/dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf http://www.nobius.org/dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
  - krylon 2y ago
    I have not, but I shall! Thank you!
adastra22 2y ago
I used BeOS as my main driver for about a year and a half, back in the day. One thing that we take for granted now was it supported low-latency concurrency, so its user interface felt really, REALLY snappy. You could launch 4-5 different videos, in different windows all playing at once, and there was absolutely no jitter and lag. Unless you grew up with the user interfaces of the mid-90's (Windows 3.1/95, MacOS 7.6), you won't appreciate just how mind-boggling this was. The other big feature that unfortunately hasn't been broadly adopted by other operating systems was the file system. I know this one pretty well because I actually wrote my own driver for it (as a high school's hobby project mind you, so probably extremely cringe if I saw the source code again). BeOS didn't have a hierarchical file system so much as a relational database with built-in support for showing nested relationships as folders, and support for multi-megabyte blob types for the actual file data. Emails, for example, were stored with each header value as a separate column in the email table. If you opened your folder of emails, you could sort by sender, time received, subject, etc. just from the finder window. Within the BeOS API, you could write complex joins on the filesystem, e.g. between your emails and your contact list (which was also stored as metadata IIRC).
- rezaprima 2y ago
  Is the filesystem feature also in Haiku?
  - adastra22 2y ago
    I presume so as they advertise BeOS API compatibility. I’ve never used haiku though.
miles 2y ago
dr_dank summed it up back in 2003 [0]: "BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper. "He yanked the plug on the box. "Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened. "Damn." [0] https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66224&cid=6095472 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66224&cid=6095472

if I recall, (and someone correct me if I'm wrong), it had deep multithreaded support/design, more so than any other desktop OS at the time, so it could run more simultaneous processes and apps w/o getting bogged down. at least I think there was a demo claiming this.

diegocg 2y ago
This was true at the time, but at the time Linux wasn't preemptive, had bad SMP support and no good threading implementation. BeOS was designed for SMP hardware, was preemptive and had good threading support, but besides that there is nothing really especial about it. "pervasive multithreading" simply consisted in using threads a lot (for 90's definition of "lot"). Creating and managing the threads by hand. In 90's C++. Modern operating systems have caught with that and gone beyond of what beos did.
- adastra22 2y ago
  I wouldn't say there was nothing special about it, given the limitations at the time. Having threads spawn quickly, and quickly move between threads so fast as to have no visible user latency was one hell of a feat on BeOS hardware--a 66MHz PowerPC dual-CPU system, IIRC. But yeah, it's something we take for granted today.
  - amy-petrik-214 2y ago
    yea it was cool dual CPU hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox those two green lights on the front were CPU load per each CPU. and the geekport reminscent of Raspberry pi only later did they port it to x86, similar to NeXT.
  - caycep 2y ago
    also it looked like Optimus prime, that was kinda cool at the time
nullindividual 2y ago
I'm not sure it's SMP/multithreading support was anything terribly special; NT4 Workstation had the same capabilities.

krylon 2y ago

From what I heard, the filesystem was very cool. You could attach arbitrary key-value pairs to files, and e.g. rather than store song metadata in ID3 tags or whatever, it was stored as filesystem metadata, making it searchable by any program without knowledge of a file's internals. As I recall reading, one could create a virtual folder that contained the results of a search, e.g. "all MP3 files where artist='Pink Floyd'" and use that as a playlist. I have played around a bit with Haiku, but have not figured out how to do that so far.

waddlesplash 2y ago
Have you read the User Guide on these subjects? https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/workshop-filetypes+attributes.html https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/workshop-filetype...
- adastra22 2y ago
  Far better is the book by the creator of the filesystem: http://www.nobius.org/dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf http://www.nobius.org/dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf
- krylon 2y ago
  I have not, but I shall! Thank you!

adastra22 2y ago

I used BeOS as my main driver for about a year and a half, back in the day. One thing that we take for granted now was it supported low-latency concurrency, so its user interface felt really, REALLY snappy. You could launch 4-5 different videos, in different windows all playing at once, and there was absolutely no jitter and lag. Unless you grew up with the user interfaces of the mid-90's (Windows 3.1/95, MacOS 7.6), you won't appreciate just how mind-boggling this was. The other big feature that unfortunately hasn't been broadly adopted by other operating systems was the file system. I know this one pretty well because I actually wrote my own driver for it (as a high school's hobby project mind you, so probably extremely cringe if I saw the source code again). BeOS didn't have a hierarchical file system so much as a relational database with built-in support for showing nested relationships as folders, and support for multi-megabyte blob types for the actual file data. Emails, for example, were stored with each header value as a separate column in the email table. If you opened your folder of emails, you could sort by sender, time received, subject, etc. just from the finder window. Within the BeOS API, you could write complex joins on the filesystem, e.g. between your emails and your contact list (which was also stored as metadata IIRC).

rezaprima 2y ago
Is the filesystem feature also in Haiku?
- adastra22 2y ago
  I presume so as they advertise BeOS API compatibility. I’ve never used haiku though.

miles 2y ago

dr_dank summed it up back in 2003 [0]: "BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper. "He yanked the plug on the box. "Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened. "Damn." [0] https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66224&cid=6095472 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66224&cid=6095472