3 ms·
Here's a contemporary interview from 2004 with a Palm director who was a former BeOS engineer: https://www.osnews.com/story/6148/interview-palmsources-george-h
by pavlov 2y ago
Here's a contemporary interview from 2004 with a Palm director who was a former BeOS engineer:
https://www.osnews.com/story/6148/interview-palmsources-george-hoffman-on-palmos-6-cobalt/ https://www.osnews.com/story/6148/interview-palmsources-geor...
Palm acquired the remains of Be, Inc. in 2001. The company made BeOS, a single-user desktop OS that caused a lot of waves in hacker circles in the late 1990s, but never found its niche or killer app.
After the acquisition, the Be engineers went to work creating a next-generation Palm OS that would retain most of the familar UI but was completely rewritten under the hood. Essentially like Windows 3.x -> Windows NT, but for PDAs and smartphones.
If the stars had aligned, maybe it could have been a contender against iOS and Android! I was always rooting for BeOS...
- dmitrygr 2y agoIt had a cute design, but many perf issues due to the SoCs of the day. An address book with 1000 entries took seconds to open and draw. This was because every line drawn required multiple RPC to the address provider process. On those SoCs there was no TLB or cache PIDs, so you had to flush all of it on context switch. Now imagine an RPC: at least two flushes - one on the way there, one on the way back. On a more modern core it would work a lot better! OUCHY!