5 ms·

The Great Illusion: When We Believed BeOS Would Save the World

70 points by naves 1y ago

aaron695 1y ago
[dead]
leakycap 1y ago
I was a Mac fan when it looked like BeOS was going to be the next Mac OS - some Mac magazines even sent bootable BeOS CD-ROMS. I remember booting my Performa to BeOS and being amazed how different the same hardware felt. After OS X, I worked on a backend team for AT&T. Their entire mobile network at the time - billing, backend, customer service notes... ALL of it was in NeXTStep being streamed from centralized servers out to basic PCs running Citrix. It was wild to know NeXT had made inroads so many places. I imagine that is why Steve had any sort of relationship with AT&T when he pitched the iPhone and got them to do it. They already saw he could deliver for them on a B&W NeXT-based product used well into the 2000s.
- orangecat 1y ago
  I remember booting my Performa to BeOS and being amazed how different the same hardware felt. No kidding. It took until the M1 to make macOS feel anything close to the responsiveness of BeOS on a 150MHz PowerPC.
  - ksec 1y ago
    While M1 - M4 are fast. I still think macOS is relatively slow in terms of responsiveness / latency compared to BeOS even with M series. This probably go back to Early Windows or DOS where everything feels instantaneous.
    - leakycap 1y ago
      I agree & still use a PowerBook running actual OS 9 as my "second brain" Nothing else is as fast, I don't get slowed down by it Even cursor movement on modern macOS is slow
    - loloquwowndueo 1y ago
      Windows, instantaneous? Haha. I never used anything older than 3.0 but unless you mean those older versions indeed, nope - it never felt anything even close to “instantaneous”. (Unless you’re talking about how frequently it crashes).
      - Retric 1y ago
        Pre USB peripherals + CRT monitors could have really low input latency by modern standards. Windows would chug from all sorts of issues, but some things did feel instantaneous.
      - anthk 1y ago
        Loading was slow indeed, even with DMA bound IDE drivers. But once they were in RAM, the latency from a PS2 input was almost nil, as if you were using a kitchen appliance.
        leakycap 1y ago
        Same with ADB. I've yet to feel a USB mouse feel as connected as the old ADB mouses did.
  - WillAdams 1y ago
    The enraging thing is NeXTstep ran acceptably on a 25MHz 68040 (and okay on the 68030 --- the lucky folks had 33MHz "Turbo" '040 boards) --- the performance Rhapsody promised was amazing, but Adobe reneged on a free license of Display PostScript, and Apple spent 10 years recreating that as Quartz (née Display PDF) --- the transparency and drop shadows are nice, but I'd rather have the performance.
    - leakycap 1y ago
      Yes, Mac OS X not only looked like Kai's Photo Goo when it came out, it felt about as responsive. I had a B&W '030 NeXTStation and it took 5+ minutes to boot and a long time to launch apps, I wish I'd had a turbo!
      - WillAdams 1y ago
        At that time, I was using similar performance hardware running Windows (a ThinkPad 755c), Mac OS (a Mac w/ a 68040 processor at my workplace --- can't recall which, I was eventually upgraded to a 9500/180MP), and my NeXT Cube (68040 25MHz) --- the Cube was the most reliable and nicest of them all.
- ksec 1y ago
  >I imagine that is why Steve had any sort of relationship with AT&T when he pitched the iPhone and got them to do it. Well iPhone was launched with Cingular, which wasn't AT&T at the time.
  - leakycap 1y ago
    Cingular acquired the "old" AT&T Wireless in 2004 New AT&T Wireless bought Cingular later
- betamaxthetape 1y ago
  > After OS X, I worked on a backend team for AT&T. Their entire mobile network at the time - billing, backend, customer service notes... ALL of it was in NeXTStep being streamed from centralized servers out to basic PCs running Citrix. Oh, I would absolutely love to know more details about this. I'm fascinated by the history of telecoms. Would you consider writing a blog post about it? (Or if you prefer, my email is in my profile!)
desktopninja 1y ago
I fondly remember running beos5 PE on a computer with a amd k6 processor and ati tv wonder card. I think it was 400Mhz, maybe 600 and 192MB ram. Watched in awe as it purrr'd editing DVs from firewire and the turner. It was a glorious multimedia OS. BeDepot was awesome too! The ports for winamp (BeAmp), zsnes and genecyst/dgens were top notch. the hw support was great too. never had an issue with MS Sidewinder gamepad (gameport and usb versions).
davekeck 1y ago
“Muitithreabring”
LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago
What an interesting site. News and history about Haiku and Beos only! Who would have thought? But nothing about the recently mentioned https://cosmoe.org https://cosmoe.org ? Or their former port to run it atop of Linux, like hosted AROS, or plan 9 from userspace?
phlakaton 1y ago
There are many features of BeOS I loved, but for some funny reason the one that just thoroughly won me over from day one was the three-second boot time on my crusty Mac. Might've been a bit of a cheat. You'd never know it. It was just glorious performance for the impatient. Of course, that version of the OS didn't do a whole lot. By the time R5 rolled around, the boot time had grown quite a bit. It was still damn fast though.
- bombcar 1y ago
  Back then booting and rebooting was something you did so many times (or at least when you “wanted to use the computer”) - my first experience with Linux was colored by “how fast did it boot”?
  - II2II 1y ago
    I solved that problem by compiling my own kernel. The speedup was dramatic. Of course, that was back in the days when an interested hobbiest could compile a lean kernel without fear of breaking dozens of things.
    - bombcar 1y ago
      That was Gentoo for me - it took forever to build but then the realization that all this autoprobes and other self-configuring things were taking an awful long time. I remember years of avoiding DHCP because if the client daemon didn’t get a response boot would hang waiting for it to time out …
      - II2II 1y ago
        The irony is that I started recompiling the kernel because it wouldn't detect a SCSI card unless parameters were passed to the kernel ... then I learned how long autoprobing was taking for hardware that I didn't even have! Did Gentoo provide much of a performance bump back then? I never really bothered with it since I was stuck with a 486 for the longest time, and by the time I did upgrade distributions were starting to offer "i586" builds (or something to that effect).
JohnDeHope 1y ago
I think it has the prettiest UI of the era, including Apple’s.
leakycap 1y ago
I love that BeOS/Haiku is still doing its thing, but I don't know what its thing is. The only "killer app/feature" I know of for Be/Haiku is https://www.tunetrackersystems.com/status.html https://www.tunetrackersystems.com/status.html a radio station automation program, and it's in a weird state where they can't provide hardware that works reliably.
johnea 1y ago
Nice article! So much great tech has been lost to aggressive business practices of entrenched companies it would have disrupted. The theme has been repeated... repeatedly: VHS vs Beta being maybe the typically cited archetype of business model vs technical specs. To me the dominant example in the world today though, is that s/w engineers continue to use windows 8-( C:? Does anyone ever stop to think about the abstraction of a file system directory hierarchy? The whole point is to remove the specifics of the h/w implementing it, and provide a logical abstraction of nested "directories". Explicitly specifying drive "letters", is the opposite of that. The only reason it ever existed was because the primordial DOS didn't have the horsepower to manage something like a unix mount. But why do we still have it in 2025? Business triumphs over technology. One aspect of the article that didn't track my experience was the description of linux in 2015. By that point I had long ago settled onto the fluxbox window manager, because I didn't like the constant churn of "desktop environments". It all just seemed too much like windows. In 2025 I'm still using it, and it's still exactly the same, which to me is one of it's greatest features. Personally, I don't want the latest brainchild of some UI engineer at Canonical disrupting my workflow. This veto power of equity over technical possibility is the story of modern tech development. Cory Doctorow cites this 2014 article in his post today: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli... tl;dr US political policy making is 100% controlled by large financial equity stake holders. The support, for or against, a policy by the overwhelming majority of the population has a 0% effect. This is also true of corporate decisions. "Innovation" is pursued if and only if it benefits equity, regardless of potential advantages to users, or the progress of the tech itself.
- DerekL 1y ago
  Beta wasn't better than VHS. It was better at a given tape speed, but the cassettes were smaller, so you'd have to use a lower speed to get the same recording time.
  - acegopher 1y ago
    And you couldn't fit a whole movie on a single Betamax tape. That alone was a reason for VHS's acendancy.
diskzero 1y ago
Former Be employee here who ended up at Apple eventually. BeOS was way, way behind NeXTStep in so many ways. We also had fragile base class problems and had a lot of kernel issues. BeFS was cool but Dominic ended up at Apple (and is still there) so I feel Apple got generations of BeFS evolution. Jean Louis wanted an unrealistic price and Apple spent the smartest 400 million dollars that I can think of by buying NeXT. Apple got Steve, Avie, Bertrand and so many others. Many Be people ended up on board after journeys with Eazel and others. Some never made it to Apple due to their Danger/Android/Google paths. This saddens me even to this day.
- mike_hearn 1y ago
  Yeah, BeOS was nice in some ways but seriously overrated in these discussions. The "database file system" was just a regular file system with a somewhat crude indexing system for xattrs. By crude I mean it was up to apps to manage indexes, i.e. it wasn't really useful as a cooperative scheme to help apps work together. Files that had an xattr before an index was created wouldn't be incorporated into a newly created index, so in practice it was only useful to help an app find its own data quicker assuming it stored each data item only in individual files. If you connected a storage device and labelled a file with an xattr, it just wouldn't show up in indexes at all unless an app had created an index on that device first. People hear "database file system" and assume it had similar features to an RDBMS but it didn't. And of course it suffered the conceptual problems that kill off most attempts to extend the FS into a DB; users don't want to interact with their data via a one-size-fits-all file explorer filled with confusing things like tree widgets, and devs don't want to end up exposing a pseudo-API to other apps for technical or business reasons. The BeOS API had wider design issues too. C++ was one, as you note. Microsoft invented COM and NeXT invented Objective-C to dodge that. But the heavy use of multi-threading was another. People can't handle that even today, and they were doing this in 1995! It led to slick demoware but, as an HN commenter said last time, you could "deadlock the entire system". That was a Win3.1/MacOS Classic level design issue, but BeOS was targeting NT level hardware. When Be engineers went to Android and built a Be-inspired API, the first thing they did was tone down the multithreading and dump C++. The OS was less responsive but more stable and easier to program.
deadbabe 1y ago
This article is pure ChatGPT. Hits all the same beats and too many frequent uses of headings and text formatting.
- leakycap 1y ago
  Almost every post has a comment along these lines. I think at this point everyone on this site knows to keep an eye out for AI-assisted or AI-written articles, but do we need to comment on every post? After all, AI sounds like people. So it's pretty unremarkable when something sounds like AI, which sounds like writers.
ndiddy 1y ago
This is an obvious AI SEO spam site. Kinda interesting how AI has "innovated" here by making it viable to make SEO spam sites about extremely niche topics because generating the slop articles/pictures costs pennies.
- jkestner 1y ago
  If they’re just targeting HN, they can save those pennies too. You can’t make me RTFA!
egypturnash 1y ago
Is this entire post just an AI summary of a popular HN thread?
- paradox460 1y ago
  I hope so, because if an actual human wrote that, yeesh
- snickerbockers 1y ago
  that would certainly explain this extremely bizarre excerpt: >As a former Be employee recounted in the thread (one of those lucky ones who lived the dream from the inside): “You could deadlock the entire system, but I’ll be damned if your CD was going to stop playing perfectly. Not even a skip.” This, ladies and gentlemen, is poetry applied to computer science.
copperx 1y ago
Nice image, but what in the world is "muitithreabring"?
- nayuki 1y ago
  > https://i0.wp.com/www.desktoponfire.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/The-Great-Illusion-When-We-Believed-BeOS-Would-Save-the-World-And-Maybe-It-Was-Right.png https://i0.wp.com/www.desktoponfire.com/wp-content/uploads/2... And what are the tombstones of TALIGN1, Amigo, and UUS?
  - wmf 1y ago
    Taligent (a failed Apple/IBM joint OS), Amiga, and I'm not sure what UUS is. It's also funny to give Copland the Linux logo since those are completely unrelated.
- fnord77 1y ago
  AI goofing up
- cadamsdotcom 1y ago
  Welcome to the 2020s. You have a lot to catch up on. I suggest doing some reading about diffusion models.
bastawhiz 1y ago
> Haiku OS, the open source project trying to recreate BeOS, was (and still is) proof that some dreams are too beautiful to die. It will never be the same as the original, but at least it tries. It’s like listening to a Beatles cover band: not the same thing, but it warms your heart. I'm not an expert on Haiku but I feel like this is needlessly dismissive of a lot of hard work from some smart and passionate people. 25 years later and the hardware is different and more varied, the things people do with their computers is wildly different, and concerns around things like security and compatibility are very different. Making an analogy that suggests it's a janky BeOS is just wrong. It's not worse, it's different. It might not be the original nostalgic vision the author wants, but that's what two decades does.
zem 1y ago
for the windows and mac users the lack of preinstalls and lack of apps might have been what killed beos, but for the linux users who might have been tempted to experiment (i was one!) it was the lack of drivers that delivered the death blow. i was perfectly happy to install the os myself and use it for whatever i could, but it did not support my network card and that was that.
bastawhiz 1y ago
Unrelated to my other comment, who owns the rights to BeOS these days? Palm seems to have sold it off to a company called ACCESS? But they don't seem to have any intention of doing anything with it, and I can't imagine the source is worth much to them. How reasonable is it for a company to push a two decade old project into the public (after taking the basic steps of deleting any licensed code and employee details)?
- diskzero 1y ago
  Extracting the licensed 3rd party code and doing the other cleanup needed to do a release would be a chore. I have done this for other code bases and it always ends up being a lot of work that involves lawyers. The BeOS code wasn’t huge (I remember the tarball being 98mb) but there was licensed code in the codecs, drivers, compilers, dev tools, possibly in NetPositive and more. It is cool to look at from a historical perspective, which would be the main reason to release it. I wouldn’t advise using the code as a foundation for any future project.
  - bastawhiz 1y ago
    I think it would be interesting to involve the Computer History Museum. I suspect a lot of people would be passionate about helping to archive the project properly. There's a lot of educational value in it, I think.
fnord77 1y ago
Someone where I worked got a BeBox. After a couple demos showing the CPU leds, it just sat there for years, doing nothing but consuming power.
GianFabien 1y ago
I did use BeOS on a PC of that era. I was impressed, but it was a bit under-cooked. In more recent times, I boot up Haiku-OS every time a new alpha version comes out. It certainly continues the tradition. But to my eyes it hasn't materially improved upon the decades old promise and fails to sufficiently take advantage of current hardware. With due respect to the Haiku-OS developers, I think that too much valuable effort is expended on trying to port all and sundry apps to Haiku. I would have thought that making a decision to port a single product and doing it well would be far more effective. It isn't that hard to learn a different product. For example, I have with minimal effort made the transition from MS Office, to Apple Page, etc to LibreOffice. As long as I can do what I require, I'm willing to adopt whatever is the standard.
snickerbockers 1y ago
>No decades-old Unix cruft, no Mach kernel heavy as an elephant, but an operating system born for multimedia, elegant as a Lamborghini and fast as… well, as a Lamborghini. >Windows still with that thirty-year-old architecture dressed up as modern? Check. macOS accumulating cruft since Bush Sr. was president? Check. said the man nostalgizing about a decade-old HN thread about a then-17-year-old operating system demo.
- p_ing 1y ago
  And why is "old" "bad"? NT continues to do many things correctly. Linux continues to do many things correctly. macOS continues to exist. Etc.
  - paulddraper 1y ago
    The quoted sentences suggest that
flohofwoe 1y ago
Tbh, today I'm kinda glad that BeOS hadn't "won". Using C++ for operating system APIs wasn't a great idea in hindsight, and even though BeOS' usage of C++ is quite sane it is unclear whether they would have resisted the pressure to move to 'modern' C++ with all its design warts. Or in an alternative universe, maybe if Apple had bought BeOS, C++ might have developed into a different direction and look very different from the modern C++ in our universe.

70 points by naves 1y ago

[dead]

I was a Mac fan when it looked like BeOS was going to be the next Mac OS - some Mac magazines even sent bootable BeOS CD-ROMS. I remember booting my Performa to BeOS and being amazed how different the same hardware felt. After OS X, I worked on a backend team for AT&T. Their entire mobile network at the time - billing, backend, customer service notes... ALL of it was in NeXTStep being streamed from centralized servers out to basic PCs running Citrix. It was wild to know NeXT had made inroads so many places. I imagine that is why Steve had any sort of relationship with AT&T when he pitched the iPhone and got them to do it. They already saw he could deliver for them on a B&W NeXT-based product used well into the 2000s.

orangecat 1y ago
I remember booting my Performa to BeOS and being amazed how different the same hardware felt. No kidding. It took until the M1 to make macOS feel anything close to the responsiveness of BeOS on a 150MHz PowerPC.
- ksec 1y ago
  While M1 - M4 are fast. I still think macOS is relatively slow in terms of responsiveness / latency compared to BeOS even with M series. This probably go back to Early Windows or DOS where everything feels instantaneous.
  - leakycap 1y ago
    I agree & still use a PowerBook running actual OS 9 as my "second brain" Nothing else is as fast, I don't get slowed down by it Even cursor movement on modern macOS is slow
  - loloquwowndueo 1y ago
    Windows, instantaneous? Haha. I never used anything older than 3.0 but unless you mean those older versions indeed, nope - it never felt anything even close to “instantaneous”. (Unless you’re talking about how frequently it crashes).
    - Retric 1y ago
      Pre USB peripherals + CRT monitors could have really low input latency by modern standards. Windows would chug from all sorts of issues, but some things did feel instantaneous.
    - anthk 1y ago
      Loading was slow indeed, even with DMA bound IDE drivers. But once they were in RAM, the latency from a PS2 input was almost nil, as if you were using a kitchen appliance.
      - leakycap 1y ago
        Same with ADB. I've yet to feel a USB mouse feel as connected as the old ADB mouses did.
- WillAdams 1y ago
  The enraging thing is NeXTstep ran acceptably on a 25MHz 68040 (and okay on the 68030 --- the lucky folks had 33MHz "Turbo" '040 boards) --- the performance Rhapsody promised was amazing, but Adobe reneged on a free license of Display PostScript, and Apple spent 10 years recreating that as Quartz (née Display PDF) --- the transparency and drop shadows are nice, but I'd rather have the performance.
  - leakycap 1y ago
    Yes, Mac OS X not only looked like Kai's Photo Goo when it came out, it felt about as responsive. I had a B&W '030 NeXTStation and it took 5+ minutes to boot and a long time to launch apps, I wish I'd had a turbo!
    - WillAdams 1y ago
      At that time, I was using similar performance hardware running Windows (a ThinkPad 755c), Mac OS (a Mac w/ a 68040 processor at my workplace --- can't recall which, I was eventually upgraded to a 9500/180MP), and my NeXT Cube (68040 25MHz) --- the Cube was the most reliable and nicest of them all.
ksec 1y ago
>I imagine that is why Steve had any sort of relationship with AT&T when he pitched the iPhone and got them to do it. Well iPhone was launched with Cingular, which wasn't AT&T at the time.
- leakycap 1y ago
  Cingular acquired the "old" AT&T Wireless in 2004 New AT&T Wireless bought Cingular later
betamaxthetape 1y ago
> After OS X, I worked on a backend team for AT&T. Their entire mobile network at the time - billing, backend, customer service notes... ALL of it was in NeXTStep being streamed from centralized servers out to basic PCs running Citrix. Oh, I would absolutely love to know more details about this. I'm fascinated by the history of telecoms. Would you consider writing a blog post about it? (Or if you prefer, my email is in my profile!)

desktopninja 1y ago

I fondly remember running beos5 PE on a computer with a amd k6 processor and ati tv wonder card. I think it was 400Mhz, maybe 600 and 192MB ram. Watched in awe as it purrr'd editing DVs from firewire and the turner. It was a glorious multimedia OS. BeDepot was awesome too! The ports for winamp (BeAmp), zsnes and genecyst/dgens were top notch. the hw support was great too. never had an issue with MS Sidewinder gamepad (gameport and usb versions).

davekeck 1y ago

“Muitithreabring”

LargoLasskhyfv 1y ago

What an interesting site. News and history about Haiku and Beos only! Who would have thought? But nothing about the recently mentioned https://cosmoe.org https://cosmoe.org ? Or their former port to run it atop of Linux, like hosted AROS, or plan 9 from userspace?

phlakaton 1y ago

There are many features of BeOS I loved, but for some funny reason the one that just thoroughly won me over from day one was the three-second boot time on my crusty Mac. Might've been a bit of a cheat. You'd never know it. It was just glorious performance for the impatient. Of course, that version of the OS didn't do a whole lot. By the time R5 rolled around, the boot time had grown quite a bit. It was still damn fast though.

bombcar 1y ago
Back then booting and rebooting was something you did so many times (or at least when you “wanted to use the computer”) - my first experience with Linux was colored by “how fast did it boot”?
- II2II 1y ago
  I solved that problem by compiling my own kernel. The speedup was dramatic. Of course, that was back in the days when an interested hobbiest could compile a lean kernel without fear of breaking dozens of things.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    That was Gentoo for me - it took forever to build but then the realization that all this autoprobes and other self-configuring things were taking an awful long time. I remember years of avoiding DHCP because if the client daemon didn’t get a response boot would hang waiting for it to time out …
    - II2II 1y ago
      The irony is that I started recompiling the kernel because it wouldn't detect a SCSI card unless parameters were passed to the kernel ... then I learned how long autoprobing was taking for hardware that I didn't even have! Did Gentoo provide much of a performance bump back then? I never really bothered with it since I was stuck with a 486 for the longest time, and by the time I did upgrade distributions were starting to offer "i586" builds (or something to that effect).

JohnDeHope 1y ago

I think it has the prettiest UI of the era, including Apple’s.

leakycap 1y ago

I love that BeOS/Haiku is still doing its thing, but I don't know what its thing is. The only "killer app/feature" I know of for Be/Haiku is https://www.tunetrackersystems.com/status.html https://www.tunetrackersystems.com/status.html a radio station automation program, and it's in a weird state where they can't provide hardware that works reliably.

johnea 1y ago

Nice article! So much great tech has been lost to aggressive business practices of entrenched companies it would have disrupted. The theme has been repeated... repeatedly: VHS vs Beta being maybe the typically cited archetype of business model vs technical specs. To me the dominant example in the world today though, is that s/w engineers continue to use windows 8-( C:? Does anyone ever stop to think about the abstraction of a file system directory hierarchy? The whole point is to remove the specifics of the h/w implementing it, and provide a logical abstraction of nested "directories". Explicitly specifying drive "letters", is the opposite of that. The only reason it ever existed was because the primordial DOS didn't have the horsepower to manage something like a unix mount. But why do we still have it in 2025? Business triumphs over technology. One aspect of the article that didn't track my experience was the description of linux in 2015. By that point I had long ago settled onto the fluxbox window manager, because I didn't like the constant churn of "desktop environments". It all just seemed too much like windows. In 2025 I'm still using it, and it's still exactly the same, which to me is one of it's greatest features. Personally, I don't want the latest brainchild of some UI engineer at Canonical disrupting my workflow. This veto power of equity over technical possibility is the story of modern tech development. Cory Doctorow cites this 2014 article in his post today: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli... tl;dr US political policy making is 100% controlled by large financial equity stake holders. The support, for or against, a policy by the overwhelming majority of the population has a 0% effect. This is also true of corporate decisions. "Innovation" is pursued if and only if it benefits equity, regardless of potential advantages to users, or the progress of the tech itself.

DerekL 1y ago
Beta wasn't better than VHS. It was better at a given tape speed, but the cassettes were smaller, so you'd have to use a lower speed to get the same recording time.
- acegopher 1y ago
  And you couldn't fit a whole movie on a single Betamax tape. That alone was a reason for VHS's acendancy.

diskzero 1y ago

Former Be employee here who ended up at Apple eventually. BeOS was way, way behind NeXTStep in so many ways. We also had fragile base class problems and had a lot of kernel issues. BeFS was cool but Dominic ended up at Apple (and is still there) so I feel Apple got generations of BeFS evolution. Jean Louis wanted an unrealistic price and Apple spent the smartest 400 million dollars that I can think of by buying NeXT. Apple got Steve, Avie, Bertrand and so many others. Many Be people ended up on board after journeys with Eazel and others. Some never made it to Apple due to their Danger/Android/Google paths. This saddens me even to this day.

mike_hearn 1y ago
Yeah, BeOS was nice in some ways but seriously overrated in these discussions. The "database file system" was just a regular file system with a somewhat crude indexing system for xattrs. By crude I mean it was up to apps to manage indexes, i.e. it wasn't really useful as a cooperative scheme to help apps work together. Files that had an xattr before an index was created wouldn't be incorporated into a newly created index, so in practice it was only useful to help an app find its own data quicker assuming it stored each data item only in individual files. If you connected a storage device and labelled a file with an xattr, it just wouldn't show up in indexes at all unless an app had created an index on that device first. People hear "database file system" and assume it had similar features to an RDBMS but it didn't. And of course it suffered the conceptual problems that kill off most attempts to extend the FS into a DB; users don't want to interact with their data via a one-size-fits-all file explorer filled with confusing things like tree widgets, and devs don't want to end up exposing a pseudo-API to other apps for technical or business reasons. The BeOS API had wider design issues too. C++ was one, as you note. Microsoft invented COM and NeXT invented Objective-C to dodge that. But the heavy use of multi-threading was another. People can't handle that even today, and they were doing this in 1995! It led to slick demoware but, as an HN commenter said last time, you could "deadlock the entire system". That was a Win3.1/MacOS Classic level design issue, but BeOS was targeting NT level hardware. When Be engineers went to Android and built a Be-inspired API, the first thing they did was tone down the multithreading and dump C++. The OS was less responsive but more stable and easier to program.

deadbabe 1y ago

This article is pure ChatGPT. Hits all the same beats and too many frequent uses of headings and text formatting.

leakycap 1y ago
Almost every post has a comment along these lines. I think at this point everyone on this site knows to keep an eye out for AI-assisted or AI-written articles, but do we need to comment on every post? After all, AI sounds like people. So it's pretty unremarkable when something sounds like AI, which sounds like writers.

ndiddy 1y ago

This is an obvious AI SEO spam site. Kinda interesting how AI has "innovated" here by making it viable to make SEO spam sites about extremely niche topics because generating the slop articles/pictures costs pennies.

jkestner 1y ago
If they’re just targeting HN, they can save those pennies too. You can’t make me RTFA!

egypturnash 1y ago

Is this entire post just an AI summary of a popular HN thread?

paradox460 1y ago
I hope so, because if an actual human wrote that, yeesh
snickerbockers 1y ago
that would certainly explain this extremely bizarre excerpt: >As a former Be employee recounted in the thread (one of those lucky ones who lived the dream from the inside): “You could deadlock the entire system, but I’ll be damned if your CD was going to stop playing perfectly. Not even a skip.” This, ladies and gentlemen, is poetry applied to computer science.

copperx 1y ago

Nice image, but what in the world is "muitithreabring"?

nayuki 1y ago
> https://i0.wp.com/www.desktoponfire.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/The-Great-Illusion-When-We-Believed-BeOS-Would-Save-the-World-And-Maybe-It-Was-Right.png https://i0.wp.com/www.desktoponfire.com/wp-content/uploads/2... And what are the tombstones of TALIGN1, Amigo, and UUS?
- wmf 1y ago
  Taligent (a failed Apple/IBM joint OS), Amiga, and I'm not sure what UUS is. It's also funny to give Copland the Linux logo since those are completely unrelated.
fnord77 1y ago
AI goofing up
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
Welcome to the 2020s. You have a lot to catch up on. I suggest doing some reading about diffusion models.

bastawhiz 1y ago

> Haiku OS, the open source project trying to recreate BeOS, was (and still is) proof that some dreams are too beautiful to die. It will never be the same as the original, but at least it tries. It’s like listening to a Beatles cover band: not the same thing, but it warms your heart. I'm not an expert on Haiku but I feel like this is needlessly dismissive of a lot of hard work from some smart and passionate people. 25 years later and the hardware is different and more varied, the things people do with their computers is wildly different, and concerns around things like security and compatibility are very different. Making an analogy that suggests it's a janky BeOS is just wrong. It's not worse, it's different. It might not be the original nostalgic vision the author wants, but that's what two decades does.

zem 1y ago

for the windows and mac users the lack of preinstalls and lack of apps might have been what killed beos, but for the linux users who might have been tempted to experiment (i was one!) it was the lack of drivers that delivered the death blow. i was perfectly happy to install the os myself and use it for whatever i could, but it did not support my network card and that was that.

bastawhiz 1y ago

Unrelated to my other comment, who owns the rights to BeOS these days? Palm seems to have sold it off to a company called ACCESS? But they don't seem to have any intention of doing anything with it, and I can't imagine the source is worth much to them. How reasonable is it for a company to push a two decade old project into the public (after taking the basic steps of deleting any licensed code and employee details)?

diskzero 1y ago
Extracting the licensed 3rd party code and doing the other cleanup needed to do a release would be a chore. I have done this for other code bases and it always ends up being a lot of work that involves lawyers. The BeOS code wasn’t huge (I remember the tarball being 98mb) but there was licensed code in the codecs, drivers, compilers, dev tools, possibly in NetPositive and more. It is cool to look at from a historical perspective, which would be the main reason to release it. I wouldn’t advise using the code as a foundation for any future project.
- bastawhiz 1y ago
  I think it would be interesting to involve the Computer History Museum. I suspect a lot of people would be passionate about helping to archive the project properly. There's a lot of educational value in it, I think.

fnord77 1y ago

Someone where I worked got a BeBox. After a couple demos showing the CPU leds, it just sat there for years, doing nothing but consuming power.

GianFabien 1y ago

I did use BeOS on a PC of that era. I was impressed, but it was a bit under-cooked. In more recent times, I boot up Haiku-OS every time a new alpha version comes out. It certainly continues the tradition. But to my eyes it hasn't materially improved upon the decades old promise and fails to sufficiently take advantage of current hardware. With due respect to the Haiku-OS developers, I think that too much valuable effort is expended on trying to port all and sundry apps to Haiku. I would have thought that making a decision to port a single product and doing it well would be far more effective. It isn't that hard to learn a different product. For example, I have with minimal effort made the transition from MS Office, to Apple Page, etc to LibreOffice. As long as I can do what I require, I'm willing to adopt whatever is the standard.

snickerbockers 1y ago

>No decades-old Unix cruft, no Mach kernel heavy as an elephant, but an operating system born for multimedia, elegant as a Lamborghini and fast as… well, as a Lamborghini. >Windows still with that thirty-year-old architecture dressed up as modern? Check. macOS accumulating cruft since Bush Sr. was president? Check. said the man nostalgizing about a decade-old HN thread about a then-17-year-old operating system demo.

p_ing 1y ago
And why is "old" "bad"? NT continues to do many things correctly. Linux continues to do many things correctly. macOS continues to exist. Etc.
- paulddraper 1y ago
  The quoted sentences suggest that

flohofwoe 1y ago

Tbh, today I'm kinda glad that BeOS hadn't "won". Using C++ for operating system APIs wasn't a great idea in hindsight, and even though BeOS' usage of C++ is quite sane it is unclear whether they would have resisted the pressure to move to 'modern' C++ with all its design warts. Or in an alternative universe, maybe if Apple had bought BeOS, C++ might have developed into a different direction and look very different from the modern C++ in our universe.