10 ms·

BeOS Demo Video (1998) [video]

125 points by NaOH 12y ago

whoopdedo 12y ago
At 13:00 he demonstrates positional audio. Whoever uploaded this to Youtube reversed the channels so the sound pans right when he moves the source to the left. Twenty years later and why doesn't my computer come with a 3D mixer already?
npunt 12y ago
Ah this brings back memories! I happened to go to the Be developer conference back in summer 1996 - didn't know anyone, wasn't even a developer, just a curious high schooler interning at a mac user group down in LA. Hopped on an airplane alone to come out to San Jose because why not? I remember talking to some Apple exec sitting next to me in the presentation room as some Be people finished their speech. I asked about their prospects and he said something like 'yeah its been tough for us but Gil Amelio is going to turn things around'. Gil had just joined as CEO back in February. I remember thinking that the guy didn't sound like he really believed what he was saying though - there was a a certain resignation, or just a moment where he didn't feel he had to keep the 'everythings great' performance up for a high school kid. After the NeXT acquisition I remember thinking about this guy and that he probably didn't have a job anymore. Who knows, maybe that was actually Jonny Ive. At the conference there was a whole group of Apple people checking things out and talking to everyone. I don't remember if it was public knowledge that they were negotiating with Be at the time, but it was no secret why they were there. There was a lot of excitement among the developers there, but also a lot of trepidation - there was just loose talk of being useful for really specialized AV fields but no path or believable / clear idea of how this could go to mass market. Even a 15 year old knew that. Plus, Microsoft was unstoppable back then. A fair amount of talk among the devs was about how this could be the next Apple OS, and I think that's what excited people. But everything hinged on acquisition. Afterwards I think I exchanged a few emails with Dominic, because I was interested in BeFS. I didn't really know how to talk to him so I think I just offered him access to my mp3 server. Meanwhile when I got back to the mac user group, I installed the developer preview CD on some PowerComputing macs we had and they just transformed into beasts. BeOS was otherworldly, using it felt like you were 5 years in the future but in an alternative universe (full of tiny yellow title bars). Because all of the apps were just apps to show off Be's capabilities, it was also vaguely reminiscent of the 90s demoscene, with Be one-upping Future Crew by dropping an entire OS. History shows NeXT was the right move. But Be... they were something special.
Scottn1 12y ago
OMG brings back memories and makes me sad at same time it failed to gain ground. I was a BIG BeOS fan. In fact I'd probably be able to dig up from my storage the actual purchased BeOS package and the "The BeOS Bible" book I bought too. It was the "Opera Browser" of operating systems at the time to me. Lightweight, nimble, fast and just completely felt it was well thought out by brilliant engineers that weren't tied down to legacy. I remember pitching it to my co-workers and praising its ability to still play multiple movies smoothly in a dragging window even with other tasks running in the background, which at the time was really cool considering same hardware Windows/Linux could not. And to this day, it had my favorite all-time newsreader (can't remember the name but it was threaded news that used multiple windows) In the end, it just didn't the apps and the world was Microsoft centric and this thing called "Linux" was the buzz, along with Apple gaining ground.
alper 12y ago
Are current Linux distributions as good as this yet?
xj9 12y ago
This video always makes me wish Apple would have bought Be, Inc. instead of NeXT. The BeOS was much more interesting than NeXTSTEP!
- jbrooksuk 12y ago
  It'd be interesting to know where Apple would be if they had bought Be, Inc. Would we have iOS? Would Apple be successful? All very interesting!
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    Assuming that Apple had been successful, it would mean both major desktop systems wouldn't be UNIX based. On the other hand, Mac OS X being NeXTStep is what brought many back to Apple world in those hard years. I was at CERN when Apple used to visit us showing how Mac OS X was a good fit for UNIX developers, given its BSD heritage. So the BeOS route might have meant failure to recover from their situation. However as a fan of OS architectures, the alternative reality of a successful Apple with BeOS is quite interesting.
    - laumars 12y ago
      BeOS had a bash command line and partial POSIX compatibility, so it might still have faired well with UNIX developers. Particularly given that Linux was still playing catch up at that point in time.
      - pjmlp 12y ago
        It gave first class treatment to C++ and I doubt you could implement cleanly features like fork() or signal handling in its thread model. Sadly the "The Be Book" is not clear on what was supported, and I don't remember it any longer.
  - laumars 12y ago
    If I remember correctly, NeXT was largely bought for Steve Jobs rather than NeXTSTEP. Also the iPod and the iPhone (or rather the iPad, as that was what Apple were originally working on before they miniaturised it and released it as a smart phone) was Jobs' concept. Obviously prior art existed, but the digital music player and tablet markets were pretty underwhelming to the average layman before Apple released their products. So I don't think Apple's business would have exploded like it if they bought Be Inc. However Be's core business was multimedia (like Apple's was per-OS X) and that industry has since felt a little neglected by Apple as they seem to be concentrating more on gadgets than power users. So if I had to speculate, I'd say Be Inc / Apple's business would have grown with the media industry and stayed more faithful to their core users. I also think Apple would have consumed more of Linux's market share than it has done now because an Apple owned BeOS would still have retained, at least, partial POSIX compatibility meaning the leap from UNIX / Linux would be equivalent as it is now, but there would have been less fanboyism which was largely drummed up by Jobs to increase sales. I think, perversely, that has put many new users off from migrating to Apple from the FOSS community who want to use an open API without the corporate BS. Lastly, I think Macs might have become the de facto standard web developers machine. Partly because of being more true to it's core multimedia business (and the web now being as much a multimedia platform as any other these days), partly because of it's POSIX compatibility meaning it would be trivial to run the same Linux / OS X develop tools, partly because of it taking business from Linux (see above), partly because I think Apple would have continued to allow 3rd party manufacturers to build Apple-compatible machine (IIRC that was one of the first things Jobs terminated when he rejoined Apple), and partly because Windows users would feel less threatened making the switch (BeOS always felt a less significant paradigm shift from Windows than OS 9 / OS X did). So in short, I think OS X would have had a greater market share if Apple bought Be Inc, but I think Apple would have been less successful as a company since their biggest market at the moment is consumer gadgets (specifically the iPhone). This is all just guesswork, obviously. But sometimes it's fun to speculate.
mnml_ 12y ago
When I was a kid I was running BeOS and it was really cool at the time.
brunorsini 12y ago
I ran BeOS for almost a year around that time. I remember it as fairly stable and packed with neat little features that made it feel lean and modern. Then I started to get disappointed that the community didn't seem to be growing fast enough... It felt a bit like computing while stranded on a desert island
- KMag 12y ago
  I was tripple-booting Linux, Win2k, QNX, and often booting the BeOS demo from floppy. The BeOS driver for my 3c905 Ethernet card was buggy and about every other morning I'd wake up to find a dialog to the effect of "Your network driver has crashed. Click OK to restart the driver." It stunk to have a poor driver, but it was really cool that a bad driver didn't take down the system. A couple years later, I had a CD-R with some of my old financial records on it that got corrupted and would kernel panic Linux, Win2k, and OS X. These days, DVD and CD drivers should really be in user space. Though, I was playing around with semaphores and found a way to reliably kernel panic BeOS, though the exact same source ran perfectly on Linux. Enough kernel panics and I slowly got filesystem corruption. One morning I woke up to my disk light being on. It spun all night and wore a visible track into the coating of that floppy. Both the floppy drive and the floppy were ruined. I used the vendor's version of tar to back up my data before reinstalling the OS. That's when I learned that all of the NetPositive browser bookmarks were stored as zero-sized files with the links in metadata that wasn't preserved by tar. When resizing the partition once, I learned that non-tar-preserved metadata was also what kept the userspace drivers from showing up in the BeOS task bar. As much as it would have been cool to have OS X based on BeOS, QNX was much lighter weight and robust. Plus, the QNX Photon GUI subsystem was like X11 and Synergy on steroids. OS X is a lot of things, but the Xnu kernel is quite heavy, and it's not clear that it's possible to implement Mach ports in a lightweight manner. Both BeOS and QNX show it's possible to have a light weight high performance kernel that's isolated from most driver bugs.
  - A_COMPUTER 12y ago
    Haha, I was doing the same thing in college. It was a great time for messing with OSes. I started running BeOS and QNX on a daily basis because for some reason my machine started crashing in Windows and I needed to get work done. BeOS beat out Linux because the install was simple, it booted fast, and the desktop was a hell of a lot nicer. People forget this, but Sun created a Java runtime for BeOS before Linux. I agree about QNX though, it wasn't as stylish as BeOS, but it was far more robust and polished.
carlesfe 12y ago
I remember installing BeOS a long time ago, when I was fiddling with old linux distros which were almost impossible to install (what is the model of your RAMDAC? which is your interrupt controller? manually configure your modem!) I was absolutely amazed at the ease of install, running the software and the powerful GUI. I even ran it for some months as my only OS, since it had a web browser and e-mail client and the dialup config was very straightforward. After that time, I started missing a lot of software, especially browser updates, so I tried linux again and found that it had improved a bit, so I stuck with it. But I'll never forget how probably the best OS at that time failed into misery for the lack of software and a bit of promotion.
- ab5tract 12y ago
  Hey carlesfe, see my previous post -- it was not a simple lack of promotion but a complete lockout from pre-installation for any PC vendor who didn't want to get royally stomped on by Microsoft.
  - carlesfe 12y ago
    Well, same as Linux, but since the later had a big community, it was more vocal and that lead to a larger userbase in the end. Yes, pre-installed Windows (and the lack of drivers) used to suck back in the day, but BeOS was in an awkward middle point between being Microsoft and being Linux. I guess it was a bad time for that, it would have done better nowadays with an equivalent product.
    - ab5tract 12y ago
      Linux never had a chance with the average consumer at that time. Shall I pull up some GNOME 1 screenshots to show you? Do you know all of the refresh rates of your monitor, per resolution? "If you get this wrong, your monitor may become inoperable or explode" BeOS was a consumer OS, and was denied any access to consumers. Ignore vertical dynamics if you want, but the writing is clear as day to me.
      - 12y ago
ab5tract 12y ago
For anyone who is prone to ignore vertical dynamics, keep in mind that this OS was competing with Mac OS 8, Windows 98, and GNU/Linux in the Lesstif/GNOME 1.x era. In short, it trumped all the rest in speed, development environment, multimedia, stability... But the Wintel cartel was stronger than ever. Microsoft even settled with Be years afterwards for colluding to keep their OS off of any vendor computers. But that can't ever commit backwards into history what computing would be like if the best OS at the time had been given a fair shake.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  It was given a 2nd opportunity, but its owner was too greedy.
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    Crazy eh? OSX could have had BeOS undergarments instead of BSD.
  - cturner 12y ago
    It might have been the VC behind it, rather than him directly. We won't know until an insider writes a history.
- fulafel 12y ago
  What would have been the plausible avenue via which it could have taken off, even if Microsoft didn't take interest? There was no software, and the only connection to outside software world was the POSIX API supported for text-only apps. Their aim was to be acquired by Apple and get the throne that OS X now occupies, and after missing that chance they were left a niche hobbyist OS for Amiga refugees looking for a new technically superior underdog to root for.
  - ab5tract 12y ago
    There were quite a few interesting softwares on BeOS. It's always the same thing: "you have no software, so you have no users / you have no users, so you have no software". If I had to guess, I would say the real growth markets would be audio and video. Your claim that it was only ever a bid to be sold by Apple is a bit ridiculous, IMO. They needed to look for a buyer because they could not get a single preinstall. The 'OS X throne' you are talking about was by no means a guaranteed outcome. It took almost a decade from the NeXT purchase to having real traction amongst Mac professionals. My only point is that NO ONE can say for sure what would have happened if there were not a monopoly standing in the way, using illegal tactics to shoulder out potential competition.
spain 12y ago
If you like BeOS, you should check out Haiku which is an open-source OS inspired by BeOS [0]. [0] https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  It's a good project; thankfully there is still the BeOS book within it so you can write applications on it using the tidy BeOS API. I think there are GCC 2 and GCC 4 compatibility issues (attempting to maintain binary compatibility won't work with GCC 4), and they have got a package management system which some feel was too Linux-like, but it's an interesting project and can breathe life into an old computer somewhere. Speedy too!
gonzo 12y ago
I had an original BeBox, which I upgraded to the faster CPUs when available. I bought the BeOS team a case of champagne when they shipped a major release. I'm happy Apple bought NeXT.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  Out of interest, why are you happy that Apple bought NeXT instead of Be?
  - bestham 12y ago
    Can't answer for parent, but Steve Jobs is a good enough reason.
    - gonzo 12y ago
      This. Apple wouldn't be what they are today without the return of Jobs.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  I've still got my BeBox and boot it every year just to confirm it still works. It still works! I have no clue what I'll do with it - its not worth selling. Anyone got any clues?
  - robin_reala 12y ago
    http://www.computerhistory.org/ http://www.computerhistory.org/ don’t list a BeBox in their collection…
  - crxgames 12y ago
    I'd be interested in it.
    - fit2rule 12y ago
      What do you think it'd be worth to you? Shipping from Europe.
mrsirduke 12y ago
Running BeOS on my Pentium II Celeron 333 MHz was pure joy. It's such a shame it didn't amount to more than it did. That and OS/2.
- feld 12y ago
  There's plenty of OS/2 still in production. You should be concerned about that.
  - mrsirduke 12y ago
    You mean in ATM's? I'm almost more concerned by them running a full Windows XP, but that's just me.
    - Zardoz84 12y ago
      ATMS of Santander Bank (Banco Santander on spanish) keeps using OS/2. I just saw it a few month ago when one got bricked and I saw the old nice OS/2 bootup splash screen.
      - sigzero 12y ago
        Hey no OS/2 bashing. I was out of work and got a job building a satellite NOC using OS/2. :)
        protomyth 12y ago
        I views OS/2 like I view the AS/400, setup and let it run forever. Not cool, not current, but they do the job.
sudioStudio64 12y ago
I found my BeOS install CD and floppy the other day. I never really had hardware that could really use something like BeOS back then. If you liked this then you should consider supporting the Haiku project. They are keeping BeOS alive. https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/ I'm wondering though if anyone here can speak to how much C++ was used in writing the kernel? I've heard multiple stories...some say that all of it was very OO, some say it was C with classes kind of stuff.
furyg3 12y ago
I was lucky enough to have a friend working at BeOS at the very end. This is when they abandoned all hope of getting bought by Apple (erm... I mean gaining presence on the desktop) and focused on "Internet Appliances" like eVilla. BeOS was really amazing at the time, especially in comparison to 'next generation OSes' like Windows NT, the vaporware that was Copland, Linux (which was unusable for mortals) or Solaris. It was clear to me that the future was going to look like BeOS or NeXT, but I could actually easily download and run BeOS on my mac. It was incredibly useable... I installed it and was able to use it for months. It just needed apps. When Apple went with Jobs (and thus NeXT) I thought that made sense. But when I saw the early releases of Rhapsody I really thought they had made a huge mistake. BeOS was just so much better. It's really fun to fantasize about what the world would have been like if BeOS made it big. There's still a lot of tech there that has not yet made it into desktop OSes.
- baldfat 12y ago
  There has yet to be a better technology to win in the desktop OS. Examples 1) CPM was so much better than DOS 2) Amiga was 7 years ahead of its time (Though the OS had a ton of bugs the first 18 months) 3) BeOS 4) We still deal with a corporate IT that is 90% Window shops for corporate desktops. (Though Windows has gotten MUCH better) 5) Gnome and GTK+ gained more mind share than KDE :) Okay that one is personal opinion but :)
  - dheera 12y ago
    I think in most cases it's due to compatibility reasons. The "better" technology usually comes later and is thus less compatible with the rest of the ecosystem. I used to use Gnome in the Gnome 2.0 / KDE 3.x days. Even though I thought KDE was better, it simply wouldn't play nice with GTK and Gnome apps. Conflicting sound servers would crash, themes and widgets a mess between the two ecosystems, never-ending font issues.
    - Narishma 12y ago
      All those cases mentioned by the post you replied to came out earlier than the "worse" technologies that ended up winning.
jay-saint 12y ago
Ah the nostalgia. In 1999 I was a sophomore in college and built my first PC that was all my own. I used the legendary Abit BP6 Motherboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 I had a pair of Socket 370 Celeron 366a processors overclocked to 100mhz, which made the system think it had a pair of P3 550mhz cpus. BeOS was a great OS for experimenting SMP. The CPU monitor in the video would show you the loads for each CPU and you could click the left side to toggle a CPU on and off. You could immediately see frame rates drop and the remaining cpu's usage spike.
- cturner 12y ago
  Similar story. I put together a dual-P2/350s on (I think) a Tyan motherboard in December 1998 as a dedicated BeOS host. Wasn't good at budgeting and found myself in another state having run out of money a few weeks later, and had a bit of a challenge getting home. Parts of haiku remain impressive. Example, there's two performant message-bus mechanisms available via standard system calls: * The flagship IPC mechanism is the BMessage. You can exchange messages unicast, or broadcast using BRosterm, or pub/sub with StartWatching/SendNotices. * You can also treat the filesystem as an async messaging system using BPathMonitor. Yes, you can create RAM disks. They have FUSE as well. It runs pretty well under VirtualPC. There's a trick to configuring the mouse to touchscreen once you've installed the seamless-mouse tools.
- strictnein 12y ago
  Crazy, I have almost the exact same story and the exact same setup. I replaced a new 400mhz Pentium 2 setup with that Abit BP6 board and ran the 366mhz processors at 466mhz or 533mhz when it was cool out (I opened the window to help cool my system). Probably wasn't the greatest investment, since the 400mhz Pentium 2 was still a really nice processor when I did this (early 1999, I believe, towards the end of my freshman year of college). I ran multiple OSs: BeOS and Redhat Linux to do my CompSci work for school and then Win98 (which only supported one processor, of course) to play games, mainly Quake 2 and Tribes.
jason_slack 12y ago
Wow, I haven't seen this video in a long time. Buying a BeBox was one of the best things I ever did. I took out a loan for about $2,000 from my bank to get one and start writing apps. Not a lot materialized out of it financially but the experience was invaluable. I met a lot of people from the community that I still chat with to this day. Be, Inc had some really good ideas.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  Still got your BeBox? I turn mine on every now and then to make sure it still works - I don't think I can ever bring myself to sell it, but I'm still at a loss as to what I will do with it.
  - crxgames 12y ago
    Which model?
    - fit2rule 12y ago
      Rev A, 66mhz. I bought a new PC instead of upgrading to the 133mhz model, and ran NextStep on it, then BeOS .. then Linux. ;)
  - jason_slack 12y ago
    I do! A Rev A 66, IIRC.
- crxgames 12y ago
  I owned a dual 66mhz back a few years ago. Hands down the coolest piece of computing hardware I've ever purchased. I regret selling it at least once a month. I will never find another one. It still blows my mind how good the OS was. Could deadlock the entire system, but I'll be damned if your CD was going to stop playing perfectly. Not even a skip.
  - jason_slack 12y ago
    I did a lot of experiments writing C++ to lock up resources in an effort to try and crash the system. It was very hard to do. It was amazing to be banging on the system and my tunes were still humming away! It is funny to hear others say this too.
agumonkey 12y ago
I feel the same watching this or Shawshank redemption. There's some lost beauty in it. Even BeOS source code / API was beautiful. I remember some code to query and filter FS results based on metadata, not far from a tiny SQL C++ eDSL.
Aqueous 12y ago
BeOS is a good example why if you're already big you can be proprietary but if you're small it's better to release as open source (when there are big players in the market.) If BeOS had simply released its source early on it might still be very much alive and healthy today. Given that it achieved on the desktop what Linux still has not, it might have bested Linux in at least the desktop arena. It's main mistake was trying to make it in the proprietary OS market, up against both Microsoft and Apple. Certainly after Apple had failed to buy BeOS, their next best bet was transform BeOS into a GPL or BSD-licensed project. Now, we have Haiku OS, but it is a bit late, and can only ever be an approximation of the original experience / API.
sigzero 12y ago
I remember that. I also remember all the excitement around it and then it fizzled.
endeavour 12y ago
I remember being impressed that the BeOS media player could play audio CDs backwards in real-time. Not really sure why you'd want to but it was quite a good party trick.
- LoSboccacc 12y ago
  yeah, could transcode anything to anything in real time and feed it to an appropriate player. BeOS is the only OS which implemented the same UX of unix pipes in a way that actually made sense in a graphical environment.
lectrick 12y ago
Is it time yet for a new OS that emphasizes immutability, security, concurrency and other functional-language paradigms? I feel like even today, we are not seeing the true possible performance of our hardware due to all the "sediment layers" (as Jean-Louis Gassée put it) of our popular OS'es. We're also not seeing the possible reliability and security, either.
- tel 12y ago
  MirageOS? (http://openmirage.org/ http://openmirage.org/) I kid, but only a little.
jeffbush 12y ago
In early 2008, having graduated from college the year before, I was living in the midwest working at a company making warehouse management software. I decided I really wanted to work at Be. I sent them my resume for a position that was posted (I think I actually snail mailed it). I called the recruiter and she politely informed me that I wasn't qualified for it. Shortly after, I saw another position posted and applied again. Over the next 7 months, I continued to bug the recruiter regularly until someone finally broke down and gave me an interview. I bought a new suit just for it. When I showed up to interview, an engineer walked in with long hair and ripped up jeans. I ended up getting the job and worked there through the end of 2000. Even though it ended up imploding, it was a great experience. I learned an incredible amount and I'm still friends with a bunch of people I met there. Many of the people from Be ended up at Android.
- dang 12y ago
  I think you must mean 1998, not 2008? This is a good story. I'd be curious to hear about things you learned that are related to unusual aspects of what Be was doing.
  - jeffbush 12y ago
    Oops, yeah, 1998. I became very comfortable with multithreaded synchronization, since BeOS was "pervasively" multithreaded to try to scale to multiprocessor machines. Multithreaded programming is more common now. All synchronization in BeOS was based on counting semaphores (which could acquire with a count > 1), which I think are still not super common. There was a philosophy of simplicity that still resonates with me. For example, the scheduler algorithm used a simple exponential priority scheme that was easy to reason about intuitively. It was straightforward to get glitch free media playback. Many years later, I was trying to debug a glitch with audio playback on Linux. Each time it would glitch and someone would say "oh yeah, this other heuristic is kicking in, make these changes to the config." We'd do that, another glitch would happen, and they'd say "oh, these other two heuristics are interacting badly," this went on for like a month. I don't mean to bash Linux, because it is far more sophisticated now than BeOS was and handles far more use cases, but I miss the elegance and simplicity of BeOS. The thing that I found most interesting was the chance to interact closely with experts from so many different domains. When I started there, all of engineering fit on one floor (I think there were around 50 engineers). For better or worse, almost everything was built in-house. There were people who worked on graphics, the windowing system, 3D, kernel internals, device drivers, filesystems, application frameworks, etc. Everything was in one source tree, so you could check it out, type make, and have a full OS image in a few hours. I worked at Apple later, but there are thousands of engineers who work on MacOS, and you only get a chance to meet a small subset of them. There are hundreds of individual projects in their own source trees that are built individually and get pulled together by a complex mastering system. It seems almost impossible for one person to wrap their head around it. The fact that so much was built from scratch might be part of the reason that BeOS felt so snappy: it hadn't accumulated much cruft.
headgasket 12y ago
This is the perfect example as to why we need to focus on the customer problem not the technical solution.

125 points by NaOH 12y ago

At 13:00 he demonstrates positional audio. Whoever uploaded this to Youtube reversed the channels so the sound pans right when he moves the source to the left. Twenty years later and why doesn't my computer come with a 3D mixer already?

npunt 12y ago

Ah this brings back memories! I happened to go to the Be developer conference back in summer 1996 - didn't know anyone, wasn't even a developer, just a curious high schooler interning at a mac user group down in LA. Hopped on an airplane alone to come out to San Jose because why not? I remember talking to some Apple exec sitting next to me in the presentation room as some Be people finished their speech. I asked about their prospects and he said something like 'yeah its been tough for us but Gil Amelio is going to turn things around'. Gil had just joined as CEO back in February. I remember thinking that the guy didn't sound like he really believed what he was saying though - there was a a certain resignation, or just a moment where he didn't feel he had to keep the 'everythings great' performance up for a high school kid. After the NeXT acquisition I remember thinking about this guy and that he probably didn't have a job anymore. Who knows, maybe that was actually Jonny Ive. At the conference there was a whole group of Apple people checking things out and talking to everyone. I don't remember if it was public knowledge that they were negotiating with Be at the time, but it was no secret why they were there. There was a lot of excitement among the developers there, but also a lot of trepidation - there was just loose talk of being useful for really specialized AV fields but no path or believable / clear idea of how this could go to mass market. Even a 15 year old knew that. Plus, Microsoft was unstoppable back then. A fair amount of talk among the devs was about how this could be the next Apple OS, and I think that's what excited people. But everything hinged on acquisition. Afterwards I think I exchanged a few emails with Dominic, because I was interested in BeFS. I didn't really know how to talk to him so I think I just offered him access to my mp3 server. Meanwhile when I got back to the mac user group, I installed the developer preview CD on some PowerComputing macs we had and they just transformed into beasts. BeOS was otherworldly, using it felt like you were 5 years in the future but in an alternative universe (full of tiny yellow title bars). Because all of the apps were just apps to show off Be's capabilities, it was also vaguely reminiscent of the 90s demoscene, with Be one-upping Future Crew by dropping an entire OS. History shows NeXT was the right move. But Be... they were something special.

Scottn1 12y ago

OMG brings back memories and makes me sad at same time it failed to gain ground. I was a BIG BeOS fan. In fact I'd probably be able to dig up from my storage the actual purchased BeOS package and the "The BeOS Bible" book I bought too. It was the "Opera Browser" of operating systems at the time to me. Lightweight, nimble, fast and just completely felt it was well thought out by brilliant engineers that weren't tied down to legacy. I remember pitching it to my co-workers and praising its ability to still play multiple movies smoothly in a dragging window even with other tasks running in the background, which at the time was really cool considering same hardware Windows/Linux could not. And to this day, it had my favorite all-time newsreader (can't remember the name but it was threaded news that used multiple windows) In the end, it just didn't the apps and the world was Microsoft centric and this thing called "Linux" was the buzz, along with Apple gaining ground.

alper 12y ago

Are current Linux distributions as good as this yet?

xj9 12y ago

This video always makes me wish Apple would have bought Be, Inc. instead of NeXT. The BeOS was much more interesting than NeXTSTEP!

jbrooksuk 12y ago
It'd be interesting to know where Apple would be if they had bought Be, Inc. Would we have iOS? Would Apple be successful? All very interesting!
- pjmlp 12y ago
  Assuming that Apple had been successful, it would mean both major desktop systems wouldn't be UNIX based. On the other hand, Mac OS X being NeXTStep is what brought many back to Apple world in those hard years. I was at CERN when Apple used to visit us showing how Mac OS X was a good fit for UNIX developers, given its BSD heritage. So the BeOS route might have meant failure to recover from their situation. However as a fan of OS architectures, the alternative reality of a successful Apple with BeOS is quite interesting.
  - laumars 12y ago
    BeOS had a bash command line and partial POSIX compatibility, so it might still have faired well with UNIX developers. Particularly given that Linux was still playing catch up at that point in time.
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      It gave first class treatment to C++ and I doubt you could implement cleanly features like fork() or signal handling in its thread model. Sadly the "The Be Book" is not clear on what was supported, and I don't remember it any longer.
- laumars 12y ago
  If I remember correctly, NeXT was largely bought for Steve Jobs rather than NeXTSTEP. Also the iPod and the iPhone (or rather the iPad, as that was what Apple were originally working on before they miniaturised it and released it as a smart phone) was Jobs' concept. Obviously prior art existed, but the digital music player and tablet markets were pretty underwhelming to the average layman before Apple released their products. So I don't think Apple's business would have exploded like it if they bought Be Inc. However Be's core business was multimedia (like Apple's was per-OS X) and that industry has since felt a little neglected by Apple as they seem to be concentrating more on gadgets than power users. So if I had to speculate, I'd say Be Inc / Apple's business would have grown with the media industry and stayed more faithful to their core users. I also think Apple would have consumed more of Linux's market share than it has done now because an Apple owned BeOS would still have retained, at least, partial POSIX compatibility meaning the leap from UNIX / Linux would be equivalent as it is now, but there would have been less fanboyism which was largely drummed up by Jobs to increase sales. I think, perversely, that has put many new users off from migrating to Apple from the FOSS community who want to use an open API without the corporate BS. Lastly, I think Macs might have become the de facto standard web developers machine. Partly because of being more true to it's core multimedia business (and the web now being as much a multimedia platform as any other these days), partly because of it's POSIX compatibility meaning it would be trivial to run the same Linux / OS X develop tools, partly because of it taking business from Linux (see above), partly because I think Apple would have continued to allow 3rd party manufacturers to build Apple-compatible machine (IIRC that was one of the first things Jobs terminated when he rejoined Apple), and partly because Windows users would feel less threatened making the switch (BeOS always felt a less significant paradigm shift from Windows than OS 9 / OS X did). So in short, I think OS X would have had a greater market share if Apple bought Be Inc, but I think Apple would have been less successful as a company since their biggest market at the moment is consumer gadgets (specifically the iPhone). This is all just guesswork, obviously. But sometimes it's fun to speculate.

mnml_ 12y ago

When I was a kid I was running BeOS and it was really cool at the time.

brunorsini 12y ago

I ran BeOS for almost a year around that time. I remember it as fairly stable and packed with neat little features that made it feel lean and modern. Then I started to get disappointed that the community didn't seem to be growing fast enough... It felt a bit like computing while stranded on a desert island

KMag 12y ago
I was tripple-booting Linux, Win2k, QNX, and often booting the BeOS demo from floppy. The BeOS driver for my 3c905 Ethernet card was buggy and about every other morning I'd wake up to find a dialog to the effect of "Your network driver has crashed. Click OK to restart the driver." It stunk to have a poor driver, but it was really cool that a bad driver didn't take down the system. A couple years later, I had a CD-R with some of my old financial records on it that got corrupted and would kernel panic Linux, Win2k, and OS X. These days, DVD and CD drivers should really be in user space. Though, I was playing around with semaphores and found a way to reliably kernel panic BeOS, though the exact same source ran perfectly on Linux. Enough kernel panics and I slowly got filesystem corruption. One morning I woke up to my disk light being on. It spun all night and wore a visible track into the coating of that floppy. Both the floppy drive and the floppy were ruined. I used the vendor's version of tar to back up my data before reinstalling the OS. That's when I learned that all of the NetPositive browser bookmarks were stored as zero-sized files with the links in metadata that wasn't preserved by tar. When resizing the partition once, I learned that non-tar-preserved metadata was also what kept the userspace drivers from showing up in the BeOS task bar. As much as it would have been cool to have OS X based on BeOS, QNX was much lighter weight and robust. Plus, the QNX Photon GUI subsystem was like X11 and Synergy on steroids. OS X is a lot of things, but the Xnu kernel is quite heavy, and it's not clear that it's possible to implement Mach ports in a lightweight manner. Both BeOS and QNX show it's possible to have a light weight high performance kernel that's isolated from most driver bugs.
- A_COMPUTER 12y ago
  Haha, I was doing the same thing in college. It was a great time for messing with OSes. I started running BeOS and QNX on a daily basis because for some reason my machine started crashing in Windows and I needed to get work done. BeOS beat out Linux because the install was simple, it booted fast, and the desktop was a hell of a lot nicer. People forget this, but Sun created a Java runtime for BeOS before Linux. I agree about QNX though, it wasn't as stylish as BeOS, but it was far more robust and polished.

carlesfe 12y ago

I remember installing BeOS a long time ago, when I was fiddling with old linux distros which were almost impossible to install (what is the model of your RAMDAC? which is your interrupt controller? manually configure your modem!) I was absolutely amazed at the ease of install, running the software and the powerful GUI. I even ran it for some months as my only OS, since it had a web browser and e-mail client and the dialup config was very straightforward. After that time, I started missing a lot of software, especially browser updates, so I tried linux again and found that it had improved a bit, so I stuck with it. But I'll never forget how probably the best OS at that time failed into misery for the lack of software and a bit of promotion.

ab5tract 12y ago
Hey carlesfe, see my previous post -- it was not a simple lack of promotion but a complete lockout from pre-installation for any PC vendor who didn't want to get royally stomped on by Microsoft.
- carlesfe 12y ago
  Well, same as Linux, but since the later had a big community, it was more vocal and that lead to a larger userbase in the end. Yes, pre-installed Windows (and the lack of drivers) used to suck back in the day, but BeOS was in an awkward middle point between being Microsoft and being Linux. I guess it was a bad time for that, it would have done better nowadays with an equivalent product.
  - ab5tract 12y ago
    Linux never had a chance with the average consumer at that time. Shall I pull up some GNOME 1 screenshots to show you? Do you know all of the refresh rates of your monitor, per resolution? "If you get this wrong, your monitor may become inoperable or explode" BeOS was a consumer OS, and was denied any access to consumers. Ignore vertical dynamics if you want, but the writing is clear as day to me.
    - 12y ago

ab5tract 12y ago

For anyone who is prone to ignore vertical dynamics, keep in mind that this OS was competing with Mac OS 8, Windows 98, and GNU/Linux in the Lesstif/GNOME 1.x era. In short, it trumped all the rest in speed, development environment, multimedia, stability... But the Wintel cartel was stronger than ever. Microsoft even settled with Be years afterwards for colluding to keep their OS off of any vendor computers. But that can't ever commit backwards into history what computing would be like if the best OS at the time had been given a fair shake.

pjmlp 12y ago
It was given a 2nd opportunity, but its owner was too greedy.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  Crazy eh? OSX could have had BeOS undergarments instead of BSD.
- cturner 12y ago
  It might have been the VC behind it, rather than him directly. We won't know until an insider writes a history.
fulafel 12y ago
What would have been the plausible avenue via which it could have taken off, even if Microsoft didn't take interest? There was no software, and the only connection to outside software world was the POSIX API supported for text-only apps. Their aim was to be acquired by Apple and get the throne that OS X now occupies, and after missing that chance they were left a niche hobbyist OS for Amiga refugees looking for a new technically superior underdog to root for.
- ab5tract 12y ago
  There were quite a few interesting softwares on BeOS. It's always the same thing: "you have no software, so you have no users / you have no users, so you have no software". If I had to guess, I would say the real growth markets would be audio and video. Your claim that it was only ever a bid to be sold by Apple is a bit ridiculous, IMO. They needed to look for a buyer because they could not get a single preinstall. The 'OS X throne' you are talking about was by no means a guaranteed outcome. It took almost a decade from the NeXT purchase to having real traction amongst Mac professionals. My only point is that NO ONE can say for sure what would have happened if there were not a monopoly standing in the way, using illegal tactics to shoulder out potential competition.

spain 12y ago

If you like BeOS, you should check out Haiku which is an open-source OS inspired by BeOS [0]. [0] https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/

72deluxe 12y ago
It's a good project; thankfully there is still the BeOS book within it so you can write applications on it using the tidy BeOS API. I think there are GCC 2 and GCC 4 compatibility issues (attempting to maintain binary compatibility won't work with GCC 4), and they have got a package management system which some feel was too Linux-like, but it's an interesting project and can breathe life into an old computer somewhere. Speedy too!

gonzo 12y ago

I had an original BeBox, which I upgraded to the faster CPUs when available. I bought the BeOS team a case of champagne when they shipped a major release. I'm happy Apple bought NeXT.

72deluxe 12y ago
Out of interest, why are you happy that Apple bought NeXT instead of Be?
- bestham 12y ago
  Can't answer for parent, but Steve Jobs is a good enough reason.
  - gonzo 12y ago
    This. Apple wouldn't be what they are today without the return of Jobs.
fit2rule 12y ago
I've still got my BeBox and boot it every year just to confirm it still works. It still works! I have no clue what I'll do with it - its not worth selling. Anyone got any clues?
- robin_reala 12y ago
  http://www.computerhistory.org/ http://www.computerhistory.org/ don’t list a BeBox in their collection…
- crxgames 12y ago
  I'd be interested in it.
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    What do you think it'd be worth to you? Shipping from Europe.

mrsirduke 12y ago

Running BeOS on my Pentium II Celeron 333 MHz was pure joy. It's such a shame it didn't amount to more than it did. That and OS/2.

feld 12y ago
There's plenty of OS/2 still in production. You should be concerned about that.
- mrsirduke 12y ago
  You mean in ATM's? I'm almost more concerned by them running a full Windows XP, but that's just me.
  - Zardoz84 12y ago
    ATMS of Santander Bank (Banco Santander on spanish) keeps using OS/2. I just saw it a few month ago when one got bricked and I saw the old nice OS/2 bootup splash screen.
    - sigzero 12y ago
      Hey no OS/2 bashing. I was out of work and got a job building a satellite NOC using OS/2. :)
      - protomyth 12y ago
        I views OS/2 like I view the AS/400, setup and let it run forever. Not cool, not current, but they do the job.

sudioStudio64 12y ago

I found my BeOS install CD and floppy the other day. I never really had hardware that could really use something like BeOS back then. If you liked this then you should consider supporting the Haiku project. They are keeping BeOS alive. https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/ I'm wondering though if anyone here can speak to how much C++ was used in writing the kernel? I've heard multiple stories...some say that all of it was very OO, some say it was C with classes kind of stuff.

furyg3 12y ago

I was lucky enough to have a friend working at BeOS at the very end. This is when they abandoned all hope of getting bought by Apple (erm... I mean gaining presence on the desktop) and focused on "Internet Appliances" like eVilla. BeOS was really amazing at the time, especially in comparison to 'next generation OSes' like Windows NT, the vaporware that was Copland, Linux (which was unusable for mortals) or Solaris. It was clear to me that the future was going to look like BeOS or NeXT, but I could actually easily download and run BeOS on my mac. It was incredibly useable... I installed it and was able to use it for months. It just needed apps. When Apple went with Jobs (and thus NeXT) I thought that made sense. But when I saw the early releases of Rhapsody I really thought they had made a huge mistake. BeOS was just so much better. It's really fun to fantasize about what the world would have been like if BeOS made it big. There's still a lot of tech there that has not yet made it into desktop OSes.

baldfat 12y ago
There has yet to be a better technology to win in the desktop OS. Examples 1) CPM was so much better than DOS 2) Amiga was 7 years ahead of its time (Though the OS had a ton of bugs the first 18 months) 3) BeOS 4) We still deal with a corporate IT that is 90% Window shops for corporate desktops. (Though Windows has gotten MUCH better) 5) Gnome and GTK+ gained more mind share than KDE :) Okay that one is personal opinion but :)
- dheera 12y ago
  I think in most cases it's due to compatibility reasons. The "better" technology usually comes later and is thus less compatible with the rest of the ecosystem. I used to use Gnome in the Gnome 2.0 / KDE 3.x days. Even though I thought KDE was better, it simply wouldn't play nice with GTK and Gnome apps. Conflicting sound servers would crash, themes and widgets a mess between the two ecosystems, never-ending font issues.
  - Narishma 12y ago
    All those cases mentioned by the post you replied to came out earlier than the "worse" technologies that ended up winning.

jay-saint 12y ago

Ah the nostalgia. In 1999 I was a sophomore in college and built my first PC that was all my own. I used the legendary Abit BP6 Motherboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 I had a pair of Socket 370 Celeron 366a processors overclocked to 100mhz, which made the system think it had a pair of P3 550mhz cpus. BeOS was a great OS for experimenting SMP. The CPU monitor in the video would show you the loads for each CPU and you could click the left side to toggle a CPU on and off. You could immediately see frame rates drop and the remaining cpu's usage spike.

cturner 12y ago
Similar story. I put together a dual-P2/350s on (I think) a Tyan motherboard in December 1998 as a dedicated BeOS host. Wasn't good at budgeting and found myself in another state having run out of money a few weeks later, and had a bit of a challenge getting home. Parts of haiku remain impressive. Example, there's two performant message-bus mechanisms available via standard system calls: * The flagship IPC mechanism is the BMessage. You can exchange messages unicast, or broadcast using BRosterm, or pub/sub with StartWatching/SendNotices. * You can also treat the filesystem as an async messaging system using BPathMonitor. Yes, you can create RAM disks. They have FUSE as well. It runs pretty well under VirtualPC. There's a trick to configuring the mouse to touchscreen once you've installed the seamless-mouse tools.
strictnein 12y ago
Crazy, I have almost the exact same story and the exact same setup. I replaced a new 400mhz Pentium 2 setup with that Abit BP6 board and ran the 366mhz processors at 466mhz or 533mhz when it was cool out (I opened the window to help cool my system). Probably wasn't the greatest investment, since the 400mhz Pentium 2 was still a really nice processor when I did this (early 1999, I believe, towards the end of my freshman year of college). I ran multiple OSs: BeOS and Redhat Linux to do my CompSci work for school and then Win98 (which only supported one processor, of course) to play games, mainly Quake 2 and Tribes.

jason_slack 12y ago

Wow, I haven't seen this video in a long time. Buying a BeBox was one of the best things I ever did. I took out a loan for about $2,000 from my bank to get one and start writing apps. Not a lot materialized out of it financially but the experience was invaluable. I met a lot of people from the community that I still chat with to this day. Be, Inc had some really good ideas.

fit2rule 12y ago
Still got your BeBox? I turn mine on every now and then to make sure it still works - I don't think I can ever bring myself to sell it, but I'm still at a loss as to what I will do with it.
- crxgames 12y ago
  Which model?
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    Rev A, 66mhz. I bought a new PC instead of upgrading to the 133mhz model, and ran NextStep on it, then BeOS .. then Linux. ;)
- jason_slack 12y ago
  I do! A Rev A 66, IIRC.
crxgames 12y ago
I owned a dual 66mhz back a few years ago. Hands down the coolest piece of computing hardware I've ever purchased. I regret selling it at least once a month. I will never find another one. It still blows my mind how good the OS was. Could deadlock the entire system, but I'll be damned if your CD was going to stop playing perfectly. Not even a skip.
- jason_slack 12y ago
  I did a lot of experiments writing C++ to lock up resources in an effort to try and crash the system. It was very hard to do. It was amazing to be banging on the system and my tunes were still humming away! It is funny to hear others say this too.

agumonkey 12y ago

I feel the same watching this or Shawshank redemption. There's some lost beauty in it. Even BeOS source code / API was beautiful. I remember some code to query and filter FS results based on metadata, not far from a tiny SQL C++ eDSL.

Aqueous 12y ago

BeOS is a good example why if you're already big you can be proprietary but if you're small it's better to release as open source (when there are big players in the market.) If BeOS had simply released its source early on it might still be very much alive and healthy today. Given that it achieved on the desktop what Linux still has not, it might have bested Linux in at least the desktop arena. It's main mistake was trying to make it in the proprietary OS market, up against both Microsoft and Apple. Certainly after Apple had failed to buy BeOS, their next best bet was transform BeOS into a GPL or BSD-licensed project. Now, we have Haiku OS, but it is a bit late, and can only ever be an approximation of the original experience / API.

sigzero 12y ago

I remember that. I also remember all the excitement around it and then it fizzled.

endeavour 12y ago

I remember being impressed that the BeOS media player could play audio CDs backwards in real-time. Not really sure why you'd want to but it was quite a good party trick.

LoSboccacc 12y ago
yeah, could transcode anything to anything in real time and feed it to an appropriate player. BeOS is the only OS which implemented the same UX of unix pipes in a way that actually made sense in a graphical environment.

lectrick 12y ago

Is it time yet for a new OS that emphasizes immutability, security, concurrency and other functional-language paradigms? I feel like even today, we are not seeing the true possible performance of our hardware due to all the "sediment layers" (as Jean-Louis Gassée put it) of our popular OS'es. We're also not seeing the possible reliability and security, either.

tel 12y ago
MirageOS? (http://openmirage.org/ http://openmirage.org/) I kid, but only a little.

jeffbush 12y ago

In early 2008, having graduated from college the year before, I was living in the midwest working at a company making warehouse management software. I decided I really wanted to work at Be. I sent them my resume for a position that was posted (I think I actually snail mailed it). I called the recruiter and she politely informed me that I wasn't qualified for it. Shortly after, I saw another position posted and applied again. Over the next 7 months, I continued to bug the recruiter regularly until someone finally broke down and gave me an interview. I bought a new suit just for it. When I showed up to interview, an engineer walked in with long hair and ripped up jeans. I ended up getting the job and worked there through the end of 2000. Even though it ended up imploding, it was a great experience. I learned an incredible amount and I'm still friends with a bunch of people I met there. Many of the people from Be ended up at Android.

dang 12y ago
I think you must mean 1998, not 2008? This is a good story. I'd be curious to hear about things you learned that are related to unusual aspects of what Be was doing.
- jeffbush 12y ago
  Oops, yeah, 1998. I became very comfortable with multithreaded synchronization, since BeOS was "pervasively" multithreaded to try to scale to multiprocessor machines. Multithreaded programming is more common now. All synchronization in BeOS was based on counting semaphores (which could acquire with a count > 1), which I think are still not super common. There was a philosophy of simplicity that still resonates with me. For example, the scheduler algorithm used a simple exponential priority scheme that was easy to reason about intuitively. It was straightforward to get glitch free media playback. Many years later, I was trying to debug a glitch with audio playback on Linux. Each time it would glitch and someone would say "oh yeah, this other heuristic is kicking in, make these changes to the config." We'd do that, another glitch would happen, and they'd say "oh, these other two heuristics are interacting badly," this went on for like a month. I don't mean to bash Linux, because it is far more sophisticated now than BeOS was and handles far more use cases, but I miss the elegance and simplicity of BeOS. The thing that I found most interesting was the chance to interact closely with experts from so many different domains. When I started there, all of engineering fit on one floor (I think there were around 50 engineers). For better or worse, almost everything was built in-house. There were people who worked on graphics, the windowing system, 3D, kernel internals, device drivers, filesystems, application frameworks, etc. Everything was in one source tree, so you could check it out, type make, and have a full OS image in a few hours. I worked at Apple later, but there are thousands of engineers who work on MacOS, and you only get a chance to meet a small subset of them. There are hundreds of individual projects in their own source trees that are built individually and get pulled together by a complex mastering system. It seems almost impossible for one person to wrap their head around it. The fact that so much was built from scratch might be part of the reason that BeOS felt so snappy: it hadn't accumulated much cruft.

headgasket 12y ago

This is the perfect example as to why we need to focus on the customer problem not the technical solution.