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I bought an Amiga in the early 90's and enjoyed it immensely. Commodore went under and Amiga died. I bought BeOS in the late 90's and enjoyed it immensely like
by yason 7mo ago
I bought an Amiga in the early 90's and enjoyed it immensely. Commodore went under and Amiga died.
I bought BeOS in the late 90's and enjoyed it immensely like a breath of fresh air in a sewage pipe. BeOS died.
With my track record I really, really should've bought Windows. Twice, to make sure.
- makach 7mo agoI had to read this message twice, gotcha
- peterashford 7mo agoI think we were on the same track. I absolutely loved the Amiga and was about to jump on board BeOS when it went under. I never got to use BeOS as a daily driver (just ran their demo disk). How did you find it?
- prmoustache 7mo agoI ran it in a dual boot with linux install but I ended up using Linux more despite liking beos because of the ecosystem. There were just more software available on Linux, especially lightweight tui tools.
- yason 7mo agoFrom them internets after the x86 version got out, I think. Played enough with what I found around, and I ultimately bought (with real money) the BeOS 5.0 Personal Edition, made it dual-boot my Linux machine and knew that this is it! It felt like an Amiga but on soulless PC hardware instead! The exhilaration was unlimited! It booted fast, no old cruft, unorthodox designs, everything one-in-a-thousand a true harbinger customer loves! Eventually I think the setup gradually bit rot with no updates and unsupported hardware, so I reluctantly had to go back to Linux. I remember Ubuntu and Gnome 2 started to look pretty nice (well, for an inferior desktop environment) in the early years of 2000. (Unsurprisingly, years later Gnome came out with Gnome 3 and killed all the good stuff that Gnome 2 had accumulated. I can only wait and see how long Mate desktop survives.) I still keep a Haiku VM around and boot it every now and then.
- danans 7mo agoI ran BeOS on both the dual PowerPC desktop and later on an x86 laptop. Thanks to its posix-ish environment, I was able to do all my upper division CS projects on it. Others who had windows or macs had to "telnet" into a remote Unix workstation in an engineering lab to do the same.
- chocochunks 7mo agoI think I did this with phones. WebOS, BB10, Windows Phone 7 & 8. All dead lol.
- BirAdam 7mo agoI was Palm guy and not Blackberry, so I went from a Palm Treo to webOS. After that though, I went to iPhone. I considered Windows Phone though. The tiles and text orientation were so amazing. I am, however, glad that I never went down that road, not just because Windows Phone died, but also seeing what has happened to Windows more recently.
- ipaddr 7mo agoRecently?
- BirAdam 7mo agoWindows was first released in 1985. Windows 10 and 11 are therefore "recent".
- codepoet80 7mo agowebOS is still around -- sorta! https://www.webosarchive.org https://www.webosarchive.org
- thesuitonym 7mo agoI use webOS every day (LG television)
- cgk1951 7mo agoI was seriously interested in PenPoint, but it was too early for tablet PCs to succeed. Handwriting recognition was nowhere near mature enough yet and unfortunately that became the main issue in that niche. Even Apple pretty much failed with the Newton because of it. But PenPoint had a lovely UI and, if memory serves, an API much like Apple's Objective C. Microsoft had a hand in killing PenPoint, just as they did with BeOs. Jerry Kaplan told the story in his book "Startup".
- jvictor118 7mo agoThis post is really bringing me back! I knew talk of BeOS would stir up all us old heads. I think what we're all really nostalgic for is the days of tinkering with computers. When things lacked polish, and people put real effort into making their system nice. I remember corrupting my family computer hard drive trying to get a Linux dual-boot setup. Good times!
- JamesonNetworks 7mo agoThe true rite of passage for the child hacker I remember my dad and brother taking a floppy to copy a sys file to restore a win 3.1 install from the Sam’s display computer in the pre-internet days
- mech422 7mo agoHave you seen Genode (1) ? An operating system framework with a pretty usable OS built on top. Last I heard, it was getting pretty close to being usable as a daily driver. lots of cool tech (micro kernel(IIRC), capabilities, sandboxing as a first class citizen, GUI system, posix compatibility layer, etc). Its been around for ages, has full time developers (its used as the basis for some (all?) of their products. From the website: "Genode is based on a recursive system structure. Each program runs in a dedicated sandbox and gets granted only those access rights and resources that are needed for its specific purpose. Programs can create and manage sub-sandboxes out of their own resources, thereby forming hierarchies where policies can be applied at each level. The framework provides mechanisms to let programs communicate with each other and trade their resources, but only in strictly-defined manners. Thanks to this rigid regime, the attack surface of security-critical functions can be reduced by orders of magnitude compared to contemporary operating systems." 1 https://genode.org/ https://genode.org/
- erremerre 7mo agoI am in the same boat, every time I like something, it is a commercial failure. They should really hire me to check if I like whatever project they got in mind and if I do, cancel immediatetly and save the losses from being a failure.
- jnovek 7mo agoThey should have me do that with television programs.
- mgerdts 7mo agoYou aren’t alone: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/working-definitions/what-is-harbinger-failure https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/working-defini...
- _spduchamp 7mo agoThis is me. It's like a super power.
- MarsIronPI 7mo agohttps://xkcd.com/2270 https://xkcd.com/2270
- wjnc 7mo agoBuy whatever you want! Buy what makes you happy and buy two if it makes you happier! Do tell all your friends of your keen finds. But remember to buy some put options with each of your Lovely New Products! Thank me later.
- paodealho 7mo agoFunny thing. This never happened to me with tech/electronics, but happens from time to time with food items.
- henry_bone 7mo ago100%. Seems there's a whole class of us. If I'd been old enough at the time to by an early VCR, I'd have chosen betamax.
- conception 7mo agoCorrection, BeOS was killed. I’ll never get over Microsoft getting in trouble for including a browser in Windows but not for forcing companies to not allow BeOS to be installed when it was getting legs.
- limagnolia 7mo agoI studied the MS antitrust case extensively when it was happening, and I agree that the abuse against BeOS was MS greatest antitrust offense. However, as a fan of BeOS, I see no evidence at all that Be Inc. would have been successful if MS hadn't abused its position. Unfortunately we will never really know what might have been.
- tvaughan 7mo agoOS/2 Warp was out before Windows 95, and better.
- pjmlp 7mo agoIf we ignore the fact that it required 1000 euros more in additional hardware, thus most folks went with DOS/Windows 3.x instead, and when Windows 95 came around it was already too late for adoption.
- hamburglar 7mo agoTo pick a nit, I highly doubt you bought your OS/2 hardware with euros. :D
- pjmlp 7mo agoIf I used Escudos it would be useless for the folks reading my comment.
- hamburglar 7mo agoIt’s ok. The pedantry was unavoidable.
- hbbio 7mo agoDon't get me started on the Psion 5mx... Still have it, last time I checked it worked well.
- MarsIronPI 7mo agoI'm too young to remember BeOS but I've taken a superficial look at Haiku and I don't get the hype. What made BeOS so special? How is it different from GNU/Linux or BSDs?
- endemic 7mo agoI liked it because it was very fast (I would always demo the startup time vs. Windows) and had a clean, macOS-inspired UI.
- mixmastamyk 7mo agoSuper responsive—running ten things at once, on a Pentium 90 or PPC. The filesystem metadata was neat as well, and though we have these things today, it was unique in the 90s.
- rjrjrjrj 7mo agoKeep in mind that BeOS was released in 1995. BeOS had pervasive multithreading and a slick UI. The BeBox had dual CPUs, a novelty at the time and many years before multi-core CPUs. Linux was still very new, and didn't have much of a GUI at all (maybe basic X, but this was long before Gnome, KDE, Englightment, etc) Mac System 7 didn't have protected memory or preemptive multitasking. Windows 95 was brand new and while a big improvement over Windows 3.1, was still very prone to crashing.
- bobsalt 7mo ago^this, plus being able to play 3-4 quicktime videos at the same time smoked everyones brains around me. Using mac os 8/9 was a several times a day cursor freezing up and having to reboot. win95 was even worse
- rjrjrjrj 7mo agoI think I'm remembering this correctly - couldn't you move the window while the video inside continued to play?
- WesolyKubeczek 7mo agoLooks like you are a “harbinger of failure”, like me. I have this fondness for products that ultimately fail.