I miss BeOS, TBH. I ran a heavily customized BeOS R5.05 install that had upgraded bits from OpenBeOS (later, HaikuOS), ZetaOS etc.
I ran it as a daily driver on a Dell GX1 SFF that I swear was designed for BeOS: Max RAM the BeOS kernel supported without hackery was 768MB - The GX maxed out at 768MB; The GX1 had a Rage GPU that BeOS natively supported (Including 3D Acceleration!) which was a very short list; the GX1 had a supported NIC, IDE controllers, etc etc.
I had upgraded the CPU to a 1.4GHz Tualatin-S that, sadly, had to run at 1.04GHz as the GX1 wouldn't run a FSB higher than 100mhz so my 133mhz FSB Tualatin had to bop down a little. Still screamed.
sigh I miss that system. I would still be running it if lightning hadn't fried it.
It sat next to my NeXTstation Turbo Color that I used for way longer than was reasonable as my primary system, lol. The NeXT was a daily driver till 2008.
33mhz 040 w/ 128MB 60NS EDO. OPENSTEP4.2 + lots of ported goodies friends and I did. Even managed to get SSLv3 working and load newer websites! :D
... wish I hadn't sold it.
Oh yeah! I also had a Pre-FCC certification dual 66mhz BeBox. Cool machine. Slow as shit though. The 603e in it wasn't natively SMP capable IIRC. The GLU chip could either run one CPU with L2 cache or dual CPUs with L2 cache disabled. Coherency was done in software. Unless I am horribly misremembering. It was a nasty hack and showed.
You daily-drove a NeXTstation until 2008?! That's badass! kudos. I always appreciate people using stuff for as long as possible, especially when it's something awesome like a NeXT system, haha :)
Dude.. just found the "for ebay" album on your Flickr profile... omg :(
(Oooh also SGI Onyx2.. nice. I search the term "sgi" on Craigslist every day. All I have is a pair of O2's)
My friends had a running joke about me “over utilizing hardware”.
I used a NEC Versa P/75 (pentium 75 (no mmx), 40mb ram, 350mb HDD, 4GB CF card, modded ORiNOCO Gold cardbus WiFi card, heavily modded Windows 95b (not 95c, mind you. No no. Has to be 95b for reasons) for years. Dual battery packs I upgraded. Ram for 10+ hours and worked fine for MP3s, IRC, SSH, etc. :). I still have it. I didn’t stop using it on the regular till probably 2015-2016.
I have a Portege 3110ct that I upgraded to 192mb ram, 64gb ide ssd, usb2.0 pcmcia card, usb WiFi, etc. that I still use off and on. It was my primary mobile system for about 8 years. Runs a stripped down heavily customized Debian based Linux.
If you are mostly doing textual things, you can happily exist on anything made in the last 30 years assuming it has a basic tcp/ip stack and preferably SSHv2 support.
I recently dug my 386sx40 I grew up on out of storage. It desperately needs a ram upgrade and an FPU. Right now it has a 512k ISA trident video card, NE2000 ISA NIC, 250mb boot drive, 160mb storage drive, 12mb ram.
Runs windows 3.11 with CalmiraXP, Win32s, TCP/IP stack, lots of mods to the base OS (kernel tweaks for the cooperative multitasking functions etc).
… I feel like an old man ranting about the good old days. I’m only 35. I swear. Lol
That is indeed incredbible, my graduation thesis was porting my supervisors' particle engine from Objective-C/OpenGL into C++/OpenGL/MFC, because his NeXT Cube was going to be decommissioned. This was still during the 1990's.
I have a non-working Indigo 2 10k that I keep meaning to refurbish, but finding a monitor that supports sync on green that still works is exceedingly difficult.
I wonder if you can convince a dirt-cheap GBS8200 with GBS-Control mod, to convert sync-on-green to VGA. I'm not sure what options are available for pure sync extraction, since the GBS-Control also does color conversion, deinterlacing, rescaling frames to more or less lines, simulated scanlines on LCD displays, etc.
You remember correctly: the 603 was never intended for multiprocessing. It was amazing it worked as well as it did on the BeBox, but AFAIK it was the only 603-based computer ever to try. The G3, the 603's more-or-less direct follow-on, doesn't support it either. From the BeBox FAQ: "We use the Motorola 105 'Eagle' support chip, which allows for either one processor and an L2 cache or two processors without L2 caches. So, our two-processor PowerPC BeBox has no provision for an L2 cache."
Aha! I am mildly surprised I remembered that correctly as I hadn't thought about it in yeeears.
Thanks for the info :)
Is there any memoir, book, whatever detailing out decisions on the hardware? Like why did they go with the 603? etc?
I really wish there was some deep-dive book on the early history. I can't (well, couldnt. Havent looked in a while) find much info on the original hobbit based system.
The initial BeBox prototypes used AT&T Hobbit processors and DSP’s. When AT&T dropped the Hobbit, they chose PowerPC over a risc system from HP. At that point in time, all these non x86 systems seemed to be gathering industry support. Then WinTel exploded into the market hungry for cheap vanilla systems.
IIRC, there was a big load of details on everything to do with the BeBox and all the decisions made and even a timeline and an interview with Joe Palmer on BeBox.nu. You can probably still read it via Archive.org. I wonder what happened to Andrew Lampert... he vanished off the web. I really miss BeBox.nu and lost touch with a bunch of people when it vanished.
Cale Lewis/Dlazlo - if you read this or if anyone knows him please chime in below ;-) He was like the best guy on those forums. Miss that guy.
Semi-related, I keep wondering how long we'll keep scaling hardware coherency out. I'd like to some 128 core+ chips that act like 2+ disconnected systems, just with high speed fabric.
At AT&T (the mothership) we inherited a bunch of NeXT machines from the cellular company they invested in.
Me, I had next to my engineering books multiple BeOS boxed OS copies.
Carried them with me to <large U.S. airplane company> where I installed them on every machine possible. Great times. Running a NeXT pizza box one one side and BeOS
on a Dell Latitude on the other, and showing off the multitasking made some of my co-workers weep. (Turbo Color on the NeXT side with the frickin' sound box and monitor).
One of the <research scientists/future tech> co-workers was absolutely into Objective-C. Those were fantastic time showing what /could/ be done.
Thanks :) I wish I had kept more of them. I had to move a few times and got married and just didn’t have the space for 2000lbs of furniture sized systems lol.
The IRIS3130 went to a museum, at least!
As for the SSL… I’ll dig through my stuff and see what I have. On it. I have a screenshot of gmail loaded up… lemme find that.
Screenshot of gmail on my NeXTStation Turbo Color. It’s dated 2009 so I think I may actually have been using my NeXT through 2010 and had my dates off.
I played a bit with BeOS on an x86 box back then, and it always felt extremely responsive. The only machine that came close to that was the SGI that ended up on my secondary desk.
I worked on Haiku this summer as part of Google summer of code, and it just made me wish their attitude towards user experience was more prevalent in mainstream OSs.
It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger or processes being grouped by application. There's sensible UX that doesn't expect me to be a wizard to understand what's going on or how to dig deeper.
Obviously it has rough edges (as, well, honestly all operating systems do), but the things that do work work really well.
> It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger or processes being grouped by application.
I think after Windows 7 the processes are grouped per application in Task Manager.
We’re all grumpy about the redesigns of things we are familiar with, but little UX improvements happen all the time.
> I think after Windows 7 the processes are grouped per application in Task Manager. We’re all grumpy about the redesigns of things we are familiar with, but little UX improvements happen all the time.
You're right; I was mostly thinking about problems with Linux since thats my daily driver. It would have been better to say that Haiku gives developers the same UX affordances for interacting with their system as non-technical users.
When using Linux I'm frustrated by an overall lack of UX, but when using Windows/Mac it's developer specific UX that's ignored.
FWIW, as with the Task Manager thing, the thing about launching the graphical debugger on crashes was added to Windows eons ago. Even Windows 9x had it, contemporaneously with BeOS. If you had a debugger installed, a "Debug" button would appear between "Close" and "Details". Debug assertion failures will pop up a dialog from the C runtime allowing you to break into the debugger there, too.
Not the Details tab, though, and the name of the executable is shown there. The tree view in Process Explorer (shipped with Sysinternals) is the best of both worlds.
I wanted to point to FOSS (GPL3) alternative ProcessHacker [1] which I'm using for years, and found out that their github link [2] now redirects to systeminformer [3], looks like repo rebranding, wasn't able to find it mentioned anywhere though.
Thanks, I knew about Process Hacker but not System Informer. It's all a bit weird: the download page for System Informer only lists Process Hacker binaries, for "legacy operating systems", while there are no binaries yet for "supported operating systems".
> I think that shows what the target audience is. I think most people wouldn’t know what to do with that prompt, other than immediately discard it.
That's a fair complaint, and I'm definitely biased since I'm technically oriented. That said, discarding it is totally fine as long as people who want it at least get the option; and if even showing it is too confusing to users, it's a lot better to have a "developer" toggle in settings that enables all this stuff, rather than not having it at all.
Haiku's certainly not crazy accessible right now, but it has some ideas that I think other OSs should take note of.
> attitude towards user experience was more prevalent in mainstream OSs.
> It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger
If this is the concept of "mainstream" and sensible "user experience" it sounds like Haiku is a complete bunch of horseshit. (And this feature is easily available in Windows anyway)
i worked at be, in the year 2000, for seven months. i got laid off when the company went out of business and got acquired. a few relics from my time there.
edit: ugh, some people are reporting my links are forbidden. i removed my .htaccess file, which had some rules forbidding hot-linking. maybe that will help?
Even now over 20 years later we still haven't had anything near as cool as BeFS. Who needs an email client when the file system can literally index it all and your inbox and email messages are literally files in a folder in a Tracker window that's just displaying email specific metadata for its columns.
> Who needs an email client when the file system can literally index it all and your inbox and email messages are literally files in a folder in a Tracker window that's just displaying email specific metadata for its columns.
As it soon turned out, almost everybody. All that BeFS does, in exchange for a bunch of your disk space and CPU, is BTree indexes, for each index you want your filesystem gets a little slower and bigger. It starts out "Quite a bit worse than some of the alternatives available at the time" and goes down from there. If you switch the indexing off so as to get back reasonable performance, now your email folders are just unsorted and sorting them takes forever as it would on a Windows PC (except your Windows PC has an email client so you wouldn't do that).
This makes for a cool demo of course, which is important if your actual goal is to get Apple to hire you instead of Jobs, but there's a reason why your filesystem did not add this fairly simple feature and you still have an email client.
Naive question... if your email client would have to do that anyway, in exchange for a bunch of your disk space and CPU, does moving that responsibility to the OS make a net difference?
Is it that BeFS was indexing everything and not just the folders that needed to be indexed?
macos spotlight is also routinely indexing the file system, doesn't seem so different to me, naively
I believe Spotlight has a full text search, which is a pretty major improvement, at of course a considerable price. Feels like a reasonable choice for My Novel/ and not a sane choice for Movie Downloads/ (unless maybe Spotlight can read subtitles???)
Also, an actual email client can specialise. BeFS is very general, the attributes can be typed but there's only one string type (other types include 32-bit and 64-bit integers, floats) so a Subject and a Sender email address both get indexed the same way. An email client might reasonably optimise for @corp.example type address searches for example, but then also do some simple keyword optimisations for subject line too.
You could not turn off indexing for some/ all folders in BeOS only for an entire filesystem (and if you do a bunch of stuff doesn't work)
Dominic Giampaolo worked on Spotlight at Apple, and was the BFS guy at Be... he (along with another engineer) wrote BFS pretty much from scratch for the PR1 release.
Before BFS, was OFS which was an actual database and was horribly buggy, requiring the BTree to be regenerated often enough that it was a "BIOS" level boot menu option on the BeBox running that version's Boot ROM.
A lot of the wonder at BFS stems from the marketing of OFS. BFS only retained the bare minimum features that OFS had, to make the database stuff still exist.
It doesn't seem entirely fair to say it stems from "marketing". There were and still are plenty of fully functional applications that rely on the filesystem attributes and indexing on BeOS/Haiku.
I'm sure it is way more limited than some original failed vision but limiting scope doesn't have to be a bad thing and I think what they ended up with does live up to the hype in some ways. That said, it certainly also has some flaws like not even being able to efficiently use the index for the built-in file find dialog because of case insensitivity.
No - it was marketing. The older Filesystem was a full on database and would allow the user to do all kinds of weird and wonderful things with metadata. But the Filesystem interface in BeOS prior to PR1 (well, technically AA) made it almost a herculean feat to interface an external non native file system to the OS.
BFS was written in a way that complied to a file system API that could then support other non-BFS file systems being plugged in. But because it was written in more of a traditional file system way, the database features got massively cut down to just attributes and indexes with live queries. It was a trade off. The database hype built by the DR releases (mainly for BeBox, I think only one made it publicly to Mac) was maintained because the attributes sort of mimicked the bare minimum functionality needed to tick a marketing box. But BFS really doesn't do much more than some other file systems have since done.
The OFS was more like the SQLServer based WinFS that Longhorn was going to have.
Well, I probably haven't seen the marketing you're referring to if it all happened before even that prerelease but people have kept talking about the BFS features for decades now and the interest is certainly not all based on some early marketing.
Yes it is a trade off. Not sure what other file systems you are referring to but I'm not aware of any others that enable the kind of applications BeOS had using these features. Those are also a key part of it.
> All that BeFS does, in exchange for a bunch of your disk space and CPU, is BTree indexes, for each index you want your filesystem gets a little slower and bigger. It starts out "Quite a bit worse than some of the alternatives available at the time" and goes down from there.
It’s true that indexes can impact performance but “quite a bit worse” is far from what I observed at the time. Even with hundreds of thousands of files it was quite responsive - Apple needed SSDs and 15 more years of development to get close, and Windows still hasn’t.
> Who needs an email client when the file system can literally index it all and your inbox and email messages are literally files in a folder in a Tracker window that's just displaying email specific metadata for its columns.
Everyone who uses more than one device to access his/her e-mail? Sure BeOS had nice features, but it seems to me that it solved the wrong problems.
Using this doesn't prevent you from using another email client to access the inbox too. It is true you don't get the same view to your data on all clients/platforms but then again this is usually true to a large extent always when using multiple generic email clients to access the same inbox.
BeFS has file attributes (so you can say this file is an email I received, add from="Bob Smith <b.smith@example.com>", received="2022-11-15") and it can optionally but by default index all these attributes using an on-disk BTree.
Many modern systems do have file attributes, although they're not always as capable as the ones in BeFS, and none of them to my knowledge chose to add all these BTrees because keeping them up-to-date is expensive.
NTFS provides on-disk indexes, that's where Windows Search stores its data... and how directories work in NTFS. Similar features can be handled in ZFS (the biggest issue is that IIRC its large K/V structure is AVL Tree, so you'd probably need to add a new object at ZPL layer).
What is the big difference is that BeFS exposed the extended attributes easily in the file manager and APIs - compare it with other systems where the APIs were little known or not used - POSIX extended attributes which are very limited (4k), Solaris extended attributes (which let you open a file as a directory) but are Solaris only, WinNT which had the issue of WinNT being a niche among windows systems, etc. etc.
BeOS in comparison required at least considerable porting work, at worst writing from scratch, and that meant the new features were much more visible.
That said it had some issues. Their network stack was just weird enough to make porting Internet applications difficult, especially web browsers. When Be first arrived this was no big deal, but it quickly grew as a sticking point for user adoption. When you can download a native FreeBSD version of Netscape, but no Be version exists and the only alternative is an older hacked up version of Mosaic you have a problem.
They did eventually fix this, but it was too little too late.
The thing I loved most about BeOs is that it assumed you were a competent operator. They didn't hide "dangerous" settings from the user.
For example, in the settings you could choose to turn each CPU in the machine on and off. But it didn't stop you from turning all of them off. And if you turned the last one off, the system halted, just as you'd expect. No warnings, nothing that stopped you. If you thought turning off all the CPUs was the right thing to do, then by golly you go ahead and do it!
I'm not sure I follow why this is a good thing. Having the option is good, but some sort of a sanity check and a warning dialog just seems like looking out for your users.
For example, I recently used Linux on the desktop as my daily driver and wrote about my experiences [1]. At one point, I considered that the system was perhaps a bit of a mess in regards to the installed packages and, not wanting to do a clean reinstall, I figured that I'd just reinstall Python in particular.
There's nothing mystifying about running an apt remove command, nor is there anything outrageous about the idea of removing some software and then later reinstalling it. However, as it turns out, this would probably break certain parts of the system, so I got a helpful warning instead:
After this operation, 1 244 MB disk space will be freed.
You are about to do something potentially harmful.
To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'
By that time I had already entered "y" and pressed enter, not bothering to read the message, since the rest of the prompt looked like it normally would, so instead I got this output:
Abort.
And nothing broke. I think systems should look out more for the users like that, which would give the OS less of a bad reputation.
Of course, it won't always save you, like Linus from LTT still ignored such a warning and ruined his install somewhat [2].
About Linus, I've migrated some people to Debian purely because they managed to fuck up the Ubuntu (or one of its flavours) upgrade somehow... and those were not linux-illiterate people. I dunno what it is but Ubuntu have weirdly higher rate of fuckups on upgrade than we've seen with Debian. Hell, it even survived that one time one of our admins upgraded by 2 releases of debian at once...
Might be conjecture based on small sample size I have for Debian, but what Linus was doing shouldn't really fuck anything up... Steam package in Debian "just installed"
In my experience, DEB distros have somehow been more stable than RPM ones, but Debian and Ubuntu wouldn't be an order of magnitude off from one another (aside from Ubuntu giving you more leeway in regards to proprietary software out of the box).
Well, maybe apart from the whole "snap" debacle, which is more of an architectural issue in my eyes, going around the package manager (and even then doing it in a way that's a bit more counter-culture than what AppImage or Flatpak does; even if I can understand their desire for automatic updates).
Then again, I have no issue using Docker containers and actually liked older Ubuntu LTS Unity desktop environment (which was stable in my experience, contrary to what others experienced), so maybe I'm a bit of an oddball here.
This could have been something as simple as bad install media, ignoring dpkg error messages, incompatible package versions if something was manually installed, etc.
Linux these days is quite a bit easier, but there are still edge cases that can cause problems.
New-ish video of actual BeBox running in HD video quality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkM9WbB8cWM
I didn't know it had functional LED light meter in front of the case. very cool.
mmuman was still talking about it recently, but the issue is that the compiler used under BeOS is proprietary - Metrowerks mwcc, and is basically DOA now (do they even still make is commercially available?.) The PowerPC version of BeOS uses the proprietary Apple PEF exe format too, and there are almost no modern compilers that support that format (Retro68 is the only one I know of.) Haiku is therefore likely to not support anything legacy from BeOS PowerPC, and that makes even bootstrapping difficult, as you need a whole new OS to run the new code.
Something with the AWACS driver (need to run off an instrumented build and boot the kernel in debug mode to see what's up, just gotta get a round tuit). The 6500 is technically Unsupported but Compatible in Be's support matrix. Some people report the sound works, some people report it doesn't. Ditto for the TAM, which is basically a 6500 in a cool suit with an LCD.
That kind of multitasking was one of the most impressive things about it. I could play four MPEG videos at once smoothly (with the interface and other windows still responsive) while Windows struggled to play one on the same hardware. That and it booted in 30 seconds including detecting and loading built-in drivers for all my hardware (Windows took 1-2 minutes and needed drivers manually installed).
I never used BeOS much though, as there wasn't much software available for it. This was in ~2000.
Even better, they had a real I/O scheduler. I could transfer video from a DV tape reader with a tiny buffer while Mozilla compiled in the background and while the compiler got slower the tape drive never stalled and the UI never lagged. That was quite a change compared to Windows or classic macOS where you had to treat the system as a single-app device.
It's easy to boot quickly when you have very little supported hardware to look for. I remember compiling custom FreeBSD kernels with only the hardware on my box and racing my roommate's BeBox to login prompt. Then he would start playing a bunch of movies at once and I'd open up Netscape.
yes! The Blinkenlights on the front of the case were a hoot. I had a prototype BeBox for awhile and it was delight. I linked to some images in another comment.
BeOS was fun. I recall attending BeGeistert and showing my Blender port (as a Not a Number/NaN employee) running on its software OpenGL driver (eventually I also beta-tested OpenGL hardware on BeOS). Be had a close knit community, with a similar passion as the earlier Commodore 64 'demo parties'. Official BeOS C++ API's included 'is_computer_on()' and 'is_computer_on_fire()': a sign that Be creators enjoyed working on their BeOS!
Here is a relevant discussion on twitter I was involved in about is_computer_on_fire(), a rack mounted BeBox in a performance show with a failed fan and an overheated CPU which melted off leaving the other one working! And then someone found and resurrected one of the rack mounted BeBoxes that we had used: https://twitter.com/jonahedwards/status/1499498729237147651
Wow! And Serato is still my preferred DVS. In many ways I think it carries on the spirit of Be, in that it does what it does extremely well and extremely reliably. In my 15-some-odd years of messing/performing with it, it's only crashed on me once for a reason that I couldn't attribute to something else. (and luckily that was during a practice session)
Sadly, now I use it to drive a Pioneer XDJ console. And they made me pay extra for DVS support without the Serato box :( But it's a pretty fly 4-deck system!
I remember being at the Hollywood Bowl in I believe 1998 and the consoles that are midway back with the audience in that little booth were all running BeOS.
I very much hope one day to see another integrated Be-inspired system emerge, in the vein of 00s era Apple (and the original BeBox). Narrow product line, tight hardware-software integration; striking, thoughtful and fun UI; notably different paradigm and features from the competition such that it scratches an itch the others are ignoring.
This bit of history gives me so much hope (tinged with sadness that it's just a daydream). If I knew more about OS or filesystem construction, or how to sell to VCs, I'd push the idea hard myself.
Audio has been a disaster on Linux for a long time (yes I know about jack, ardour, pipe wire, and so on). It's not surprising that pro audio applications ignore it wholesale.
Pro Audio applications simply don't ignore it wholesale - Linux has plenty of pro audio software. Get an audio-focused distribution such as Ubuntu Studio, and you'll change your mind fast about how disastrous audio is on Linux - it just isn't. In fact, you can build the slickest, lowest-latency DAW on Linux, with stats that beat MacOS, even ...
Tell me when Pro Tools supports Linux. Or Ableton. Or Cubase. Or FL Studio. Today there is one major DAW that supports Linux, which is Bitwig. But there are very few plugins and the vast majority of the revenue and users are on Windows and MacOS. The TL;DR is that there's not a convincing argument to support Linux today by the major developers. It's a chicken and egg problem to be sure.
I've tried Ubuntu Studio. It's not better except that it had early support for preempt rt. I still think Linux audio is a disaster.
Based on decades of experience, I do not agree one bit.
Pro Tools isn't the only DAW game in town, in fact its not even the most commonly used any more and its also not the 'best' DAW for many jobs - merely the most entrenched in peoples minds as a "pro tool".
So many producers are giving it up for cheaper and more effective tools such as REAPER, which not only runs circles around Pro Tools but also runs really, really great on Linux. As does Ardour, which is easily in the same class of any of the other DAW's in terms of capabilities. See also, Waveform, Zrythmn, Qtractor and MusE.
As does BitWig Studio - an Ableton Live analog, arguably more powerful and feature-rich than Ableton Live, which makes sense as it is being built by ex-Ableton folks.
FL Studio? LMMS! Renoise!
Linux Audio really rocks.
Not to mention: ZynthianOS! Oh my! Monome NORNS! Holy heck!
>one major DAW
Sorry, no, this is wrong. REAPER is a major DAW, runs natively. Same with BitWig, Ardour and Harrison Mixbus. So thats at least 4. [1]
>very few plugins
I challenge you to actually install Ubuntu Studio and repeat this claim. Plus, VST plugins run great under Ubuntu Studio. You should probably try it again and update your understanding of the scene - you might've had a point 10 years ago, but as of today: just no. Linux audio is amazing.
>I still think Linux audio is a disaster.
I think you don't have enough modern experience to make this claim. My Presonus-based Ubuntu Studio DAW is the lowest latency, easiest to use and set up DAW in the studio. While the other producers are cussing through the hoops of eLicense and dongle management and unsigned/outdated kext's for super-expensive boutique/cocktail hardware, the Linux DAW users in my studio are happily whistling through the edits with their USB and Firewire-based audio i/o devices, many of which work quite happily 'out of the box', "apt update && apt upgrade" dilemma notwithstanding ..
[1] - If these DAW's can do it, there is technically no reason the other DAW's can't - its just the fixed idea that "linux audio sucks" that prevents this from happening in the industry.
Linux audio does not, in reality, suck - it actually ROCKS, hard. Linux audio only sucks if you say it does.
There are certainly no valid technical reasons for a lack of ports from the market-mindset vendors .. just the mindset you proffer, which is, imho, plain wrong.
That wasn't leaked until after Be stopped operating.
5.0, which was almost usable was only out for about 8 months before Be stopped operating.
4.5 and prior?
What does the dog say? "Ruff"
Yeah. 4.5 and prior could spin some teapots but not much else. By the time "good" BeOS came out all computers could spin teapots and Windows PCs had 3d hardware acceleration. BeOS barely had 2d hardware acceleration.
In the year 2000, after five years of development, BeOS didn't have multi-user support, a stable network stack, or USB mass storage support.
I think that people are remembering with rose-colored glasses about 5.0 (which if I remember right was "oops leaked lol" for free on a magazine disc) or 5.1 with all of the patches which started circulating after all of the laid-off Be employees started dumping files online.
Those of us who struggled for months to get BeOS stable and useful on our Performa 6400/200s have more bittersweet memories.
So - BeOS was very usable on Intel. It had a lot more support. It also had more modern browsers. I ran it as a main OS well in to the 2000's.
On PowerPC is was a lot more hobbled. You sound like you were on PowerPC unfortunately.
4.5 and 5.0 were so similar that it really isn't worth talking about the differences - a few minor API differences. The main thing with 5.0 was that Tracker was opened, so they moved the About box in to the Kernel to prevent people using a fake one and preserve their copyright notices etc.. The API was really similar and mostly anything that compiles under R4.5 will run under R5. They also added in a bunch of 3rd party codec and changed some of the icons.
In fact, Stinger (BeIA) was based on the 4.5 codebase, not the R5 codebase. This is apparent when you try to use the API and notice anything newer than 4.5 is not present.
> With everything surrounding the demise of Be being highly litigious, it is no surprise that the project wished to avoid legal complications over their name. They chose Haiku.
> Why did they choose the name Haiku? Error messages from many applications in BeOS are written in haikus. Additionally, they felt that the art of haiku was representative of the elegance and simplicity of BeOS.
> an open source project was started whose aim was to recreate BeOS from scratch with full binary and source compatibility. This was OpenBeOS. The first release in 2002 was a community update to BeOS 5.0.3 with some open source replacements for Be code. The project name changed in 2004. With everything surrounding the demise of Be being highly litigious, it is no surprise that the project wished to avoid legal complications over their name. They chose Haiku.
All of this makes me cry. I find these 25-years-old "news" much more fun and relevant for desktop, user-focused computing than today's Twitter debacle and endless monetization.
Im itching for a simple OS that is user friendly and just simple, something that would instant boot and would be functional offline. Linux is great and all but sometimes it feels too bloated for a simple limited purpose machine..
Aside from maybe three years in the late '00s when Ubuntu was basically just Debian with much better defaults and that turned out to be a very good thing, I've always kinda disliked Linux unless I start from something very minimal and build it up, carefully curating everything. It doesn't feel bloated if you do that. It still breaks in weird and/or stupid ways but at least you know how everything fits together so you can fix it. But, it's also a ton of work, so I just run macOS these days.
If you want a near-instant-boot appliance with Linux, try Librelec. I think it's made for Kodi but you can use it for other things. Lakka (Retroarch) uses it and gets me to a GUI, ready to interact with, rendering under DRM (so, no X or Wayland) in like 3 seconds flat on a Raspberry Pi. Or, FreeDOS isn't a crazy option for appliance-type machines, depending on what you want to run.
The era of these type of "simple" OSes has come to an end. Linux is now the king of hardware support and nothing out there can even try to compete, not even Windows. And "consumer" hardware support is getting harder and harder; we did not really improve the situation at all from the 90s. Linux drivers, while some of them are not proprietary (before you ask: Android drivers are mostly proprietary), are still inseparably linked to Linux itself, which means that for any non-Linux OS to succeed you first have to reimplement Linux.
While on a practical level I think you're 100% correct, the irony is that there does seem to be a growing appetite for simpler OS projects, which go hand-in-hand with a growing sense of frustration and disappointment with what Linux has become. (In some ways it now represents a lot of what I was trying to escape by moving to it in the first place!)
Well the Android core devs were ex BeOS engineers, as were the iPod touch engineers (which later became the iPhone), so I’d assume the engineers knew what they were doing. Sadly, the DotCom crash in 1999 removed funding from BeInc, we could have had these devices a decade earlier.
At one point there were half a dozen ex-Be Inc engineers working on Android... Dianne Hackbourne and Ficus Kirkpatrick come to mind, but there were more.
I remember trying out BeOS on my PC in the late 90's. I was astonished that it supported my ASUS V3000 AGP video card out of the box. Windows NT couldn't do that; you had to install drivers. Everything worked just right with BeOS. Even its web browser (Netwatch?) was on par with Internet Explorer of the era. I was very impressed to say the least.
NetPositive. Surprisingly capable for the time, very fast. They basically wrote it from scratch. For PowerPC BeOS, it was your only choice (x86 BeOS got Mozilla and Opera, and maybe a couple others).
I only ever got to play with BeOS on a Daystar Digital quad-PPC machine I "inherited" from work when it got replaced with more Mac hardware. I've always wanted to pick up an original BeBox, but even in the heyday of "cheap exotic hardware" (NeXT, SGI, etc) that was the mid-to-late 1990s, I never saw one pop up. As such, I am suitably envious (and find myself setting up alerting for my newly re-invigorated search for this grail, while downloading the Haiku .iso to spin up a VM, which, I assure my boss, is a fantastic use of my working hours), and greatly appreciative to have had the opportunity to read this today.
> but he also stewarded many great projects: [...] the Macintosh Portable
My understanding was that the Macintosh Portable was an awful product, because it was just too big and the screen wasn't backlit. I never saw one myself, though.
I got to use one, and my impression was that it an expensive, impractical, heavy, underpowered machine with a low contrast lcd that made the cursor difficult to see when it was in motion. It was also cool, futuristic, like nothing I’d seen before. It was a novelty, people crowded around it.
But you’d have been better off lugging around an SE/30.
it's amusing to see the name of the blog, a popular column in pc magazine in the '90s bore the same name. i forget who wrote it, but it was one of the really well known computer journalists of the time, if i recall correctly.
a notable absence is mention of the cpu utilization lights. to show off all that work they did to build a truly multiprocessor system, they had two strips of leds that ran up the front bezel of the system, indicating realtime utilization of the cpus.
i remember playing with beos many years ago. i think they may have shipped an intel version after shutting down the hardware.
The initial CPU target for BeOS was the AT&T H0BB1T DSP. The alpha copies were called Shark. I actually have system images for the hobbit builds still floating around somewhere. I never did get my hands on a prototype hobbit bebox, sadly. I almost bought one off a guy in France but the deal fell apart.
Be produced a regular PowerPC version that could be installed on Macs (I think it may have required PCI macs?) and then an x86 version that was 32bit only and had a lot of ... quirks. But I used it for over a decade.
Correct, no NuBus support. It also doesn't support New World Macs and some of the later higher-speed 604s. Essentially it's that slice of beige four-digit Power Macs from the mid 1990s.
This is a really interesting phrasing:
>> There were problems within Apple that made the development of the OS nearly impossible, and to solve these problems Apple sought to purchase something that was close to their own vision.
I think the truth is that Apple, and Apple + IBM worked on operating systems in this period and had trouble making a good one. Why it is hard for a mature company with legacy systems to create a new operating system is a difficult thing to explain. But it is not unusual. And worth understanding for people who want to innovate in large organizations.
> Why it is hard for a mature company with legacy systems to create a new operating system is a difficult thing to explain
In general, the hardest problem for such companies is backwards compatibility.
In the case of Apple, it was doubly so: they tried to build a pre-emptive multitasking operating system with memory protection that was backwards compatible (both for applications and system extensions) with an existing OS that had cooperative multitasking, did not have memory protection, and had OS support for patching system calls (a feature that allowed third parties to develop of such things as Switcher (https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...), After Dark, Adobe Font Manager, and RAM Doubler).
It is easier to achieve your architectural goals with greenfield development than modifying an existing system. However.. once you have an existing system, why are you going to throw the whole thing out, waste all those man-hours spent to make the thing, discard all the bugfixes you had to sweat over. It is very hard for a large organization to justify making something new.
It is the reason IBM had to set up a secret ninja tiger team to make the pc. They tried a few times before, and ended up with really nice systems, far nicer than the pc. but they cost 10,000 dollars, in 1980, you are not gong to conquer the small business market for computers with a 10,000 dollar machine. so they set up a secret team, far away from the rest of the ibm mothership apparatus with the mission to make the cheapest computer possible, and they did, it cost 3,000 dollars had nothing compatible with any other ibm and sold like hotcakes.
> Why it is hard for a mature company with legacy systems to create a new operating system is a difficult thing to explain.
My theory is that you can't really _plan_ how to create and spread an OS: You need to put a dedicated enough person with enough time to write an interesting prototype that would brings you a subsequent advantage. And of course, you need the peoples that will judge wisely about the long run future of this prototype (remember Linux being considered bad?). After this, the prototype have to be mature enough for developers to and hardware makers to support it.
That's a lot of _if_, and I suspect most OS (and in some way, softwares and language) are spontaneous creations that answer a need and become _good_ as a consequence of being used.
> From there, things only got worse for Be. The company lingered around until 2001 when it sold its copyrights to Palm for $11 million USD. In 2002, Be brought litigation against Microsoft for anticompetitive practices, but the suit was settled out of court for $23.25 million. After purchasing BeOS, Palm promptly discontinued the OS. Palm itself later had some problems, split, and sold. The rights to BeOS are now in the hands of Access Co along with PalmOS.
I wonder what did Apple do that BeOS didn't to succeed. And didn't Microsoft basically "save" Apple at some point?
Apple bought a real, mature OS with all the fixins was one thing. And while Apple was deeply troubled and nearly contrived to mismanage itself out of existence, it was still a much bigger company than Be, Inc - with products, customers, etc - something Be didn't really have.
Apple had a much bigger market. They had problems with mismanagement to be sure but every designer, many authors and photographers, tons of schools, etc. had Macs on their desks. That gave them enough revenue to get a new OS out the door, and the industrial design on the iMac and Titanium PowerBook were enough to keep sales up during the bridge period.
I worked on an internet appliance using BeOS around 2000. The device worked, but was unfortunately slow due to the compromises Sony had to make to hit their price point (most notably running the display in portrait mode without hardware rotation, meaning every paint had to rotate in software!) and the lack of software really contributed - the NetPositive browser was fast and had some nice ideas but you’d run into more sites which would have worked in Netscape or Internet Explorer and didn’t have Flash.
I really liked BeOS: BFS’ database-like capabilities are still unmatched and it was years ahead of the curve on stability (I remember crashing the graphics driver & watching it restart, the open apps repainted, and I kept working) and consistent performance (Windows and macOS still have more UI lag under load despite much faster hardware). The fatal flaws, however, were the lack of permissions and immature networking. It was also harder to port Unix software, which mattered a lot at the time since that meant a ton of technical workers could use a Mac with OS X but not a BeOS system. I’m not sure what the assessment was for running Classic Mac apps either but suspect that already hard task would have been harder with a more limited OS. Even at the time I thought Apple made the right call, much as it meant I couldn’t unload some Be shares I’d picked up at a profit.
Not for Portuguese designer, many authors and photographers, tons of schools,...
We only had one Apple official reseller store in Lisbon for the whole country, and outside a couple of university labs and companies with headquarters on the capital, they were only seen on computer magazines.
Oh, definitely. My experience at the time is limited to the United States where you had things like “Apples for the teachers” programs where you could save supermarket receipts and the store would donate a percent of the combined total to the local school in the form of new Macs. Those niches were Apple’s air supply.
Apple had a long history and corresponding fan base, which helped, and of course Steve Jobs.
Microsoft invested some money in Apple to help alleviate anti-trust issues, but from my reading the more substantive assistance was a commitment to ship Office for Mac.
“Later testimony in the United States v. Microsoft Corp. case revealed that, at the time, Apple was threatening Microsoft with a multibillion-dollar lawsuit over the allegedly stolen code, and in return Bill Gates was threatening the cancellation of Microsoft Office for Mac. In August 1997, Apple and Microsoft announced a settlement deal. Apple would drop all current lawsuits, including all lingering issues from the "Look & Feel" lawsuit and the "QuickTime source code" lawsuit, and agree to make Internet Explorer for Mac the default browser on the Macintosh unless the user explicitly chose the bundled Netscape browser. In return, Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office, Internet Explorer, and various developer tools and software for the Mac for the next 5 years, and purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock. The companies also agreed to mutual collaboration on Java technologies, and to cross-license all existing patents, and patents obtained during the five-year deal, with one another”
IMHO, Apple were circling the drain until the original tiBook product launch.
If SGI or BeBox had been the first to market with such a sexy laptop, we'd still have them around.
It was the lack of focus on laptops which killed Be and SGI (and others), but it was the focus on laptops as personal computing devices which saved Apple.
I'd kill for an alternative-universe SGI or Be laptop. Imagine the tiBook with Irix or BeOS on it .. delicious ..
Apple already had an ecosystem from the Classic Mac OS. It had lots of apps, lots of loyal users, etc. It had issues, but Apple wasn't starting from scratch.
BeOS was simply new. That means trying to get everyone to support a new platform. If you weren't a Mac user back in the day, you might not know how hard it was - getting printers to work, having to buy Mac-specific accessories, etc. The Mac would have millions of users while BeOS would have none. Getting third-parties to support the platform would be incredibly difficult - it was so hard on the Mac already. This was way before a lot of work on platform independence. Also, if you'd run Linux 15-20 years ago on a laptop, you probably remember the issues around stuff like getting WiFi to work. BeOS was trying to launch a new ecosystem in an era before the web really took over and when native apps and drivers were important and not cross-platform.
Maybe think about a different question: why did Windows Phone fail when the iPhone and Android didn't? Well, it was a third platform and an also-ran with almost no marketshare. Developers didn't want to support a third platform when users saw no need for it. Users didn't want to buy into a third platform without apps.
Still, one of the major things for Be was that Microsoft forbid OEMs from offering BeOS on their machines - if they wanted to be able to get Windows OEM licenses. So Be was locked out of every PC company. If you were Dell, you might tell Be, "we'd love to offer customers the option of getting a Dell with BeOS, but we can't because we need Microsoft's Windows licenses." So if you bought a PC, it'd come with Windows and then you'd need to buy BeOS and install that. Now you had a great OS with nothing to run on it and you'd go back to Windows. Be did make BeOS free at one point, but it was too late (and even at free it lacked a reason to be run).
The Mac had built up marketshare, a userbase, application support, drivers, etc. for a decade when BeOS launched. BeOS launched at a time when Microsoft had sewn up the PC market and was in its full-monopoly, anti-competition stance. They used their power to crush all rivals on the PC.
Apple, even though they had some limited clones, was never really a rival. Apple was a hardware/software combo play and small enough to be ignored as a declining niche player. Did Microsoft "save" Apple? Probably not. They did invest some money and committed to make Microsoft Office available on Mac which certainly helped (remember, this is before the age when things could read .doc and .xls files and Microsoft was still in anti-competition mode where they'd try and break competitors products).
Still, it seems more like Microsoft wanted to keep one player around to stave off anti-trust concerns - and Apple was the safe one to keep around. If they kept Be around, BeOS would need to get some meaningful marketshare (let's say 5%). At that point, what's to stop more people from running BeOS? Nothing - their Pc could just run BeOS. If they kept Apple around with 5% marketshare, what's to stop more people from running MacOS? The fact that they'd need to buy new hardware from Apple at a premium price point with inferior capabilities. That's safe. People can't switch. And Intel was killing PowerPC processors at the time and PCs were available for $500 while Apple finally introduced a budget machine at $1,300. Here's a $500 eMachines with 300MHz processor or an iMac for $1,300 and 233MHz processor - and things got worse from there as the years went on. The point being, Apple was never a threat to Windows because MacOS was tied to separate hardware. BeOS was a huge threat to Windows if Be got any traction. They needed to be killed.
Apple's real resurgence wasn't via Mac OS or even Mac OS X. It was via the iPod. They just started making so much money. Money means you can invest in things. Then the iPhone meant even more money. Then their computers were still expensive, but had a much lower premium than they used to - especially if you account for things like display quality.
Maybe Be could have launched a BePod, but they didn't. Maybe Be could have parlayed that success into a BePhone. Maybe Be could have used all that to become a player on the desktop. But they built the BeIA internet appliance which was just a computer, but worse. Apple removed the floppy drive and Be removed both the floppy and CD drive - at a time when computers were becoming music hubs.
BeOS launched in October 1995. Apple bought NeXT in 1996 and launched the iMac in 1998 and iPod in 2001. BeOS was such a flash in the pan. Blink and you'd miss its 5 year existence. BeOS R5 (the final released version) came out in March 2000, less than 5 years after the initial launch. In a lot of ways, they never really got any traction - but they did get a lot of love from the people who used it. BeOS was magical in many ways (even if somewhat unfinished in others). At a time when the Mac OS had cooperative multitasking and would just freeze up, at a time when Mac OS X was unusably slow, at a time when Windows was a jumble of crap that never quite worked right, BeOS was this clean, modern, happy system. In many ways, it had Mac-like polish and coordination to it combined with such a modern developer experience and so many great ideas.
But it's hard to get over the hump necessary to create the momentum that brings developers and users. Apple already had those users and developers (even if it was a small community compared to Windows). Then Apple had some amazing hits with the iPod and iPhone.
I still have my BeBox, and boot it up every year in a kind of ritual, just to see that it still works.
It is pretty amazing to see the thing boot .. the blinkenlights .. the hum and whir of the disks .. straight to the desktop just like the day I got it. And then open the dozen videos that stream seamlessly, which is all I do really.
What a world it would have been if JLG had focused on the laptop as the driver of his revolution, as SJ did ..
I was living in Hollywood at the time, hacking on SGI gear for clients. I attended a BeBox/BeOS demo at a girls school in Los Feliz, and was instantly hooked .. I dropped some hard-earned SGI cash on a BeBox right then and there. I still have it, as well as my other SGI machines.
Its easily one of the sexiest machines in my retro-computing collection. Sure, the SGI boxes actually have some useful software - but the BeBox has sexier blinkenlights by far. ;)
I first heard about Be hardware in 1997 or so, a friend in school's dad was a programmer for TWA and had convinced them to buy one of the dual 66 MHz boxes for him. When the 133 MHz boxes came out, he again got $work to buy one, and my friend got the 66 MHz version! I was very envious of the GeekPort, and for many years got by hacking on the PC parallel port...blew up more than one :P
JLG is always good for a good quote or story. From the article,
Today, imagine that you are a young Windows programmer and that I'm a venture capitalist and you come and see me and say, “Mr. Gasse, do I have a deal for you.” “Yes?” “I have the word processor for Windows that will kill Microsoft Word.” What am I to do if I'm a caring venture capitalist? I have to open the drawer and instead of pulling out the checkbook I should pull out the Magnum .357 and give you the coup de grace because this will stop what otherwise would be a long, ugly, expensive agony for your family.
I miss BeOS, TBH. I ran a heavily customized BeOS R5.05 install that had upgraded bits from OpenBeOS (later, HaikuOS), ZetaOS etc.
I ran it as a daily driver on a Dell GX1 SFF that I swear was designed for BeOS: Max RAM the BeOS kernel supported without hackery was 768MB - The GX maxed out at 768MB; The GX1 had a Rage GPU that BeOS natively supported (Including 3D Acceleration!) which was a very short list; the GX1 had a supported NIC, IDE controllers, etc etc.
I had upgraded the CPU to a 1.4GHz Tualatin-S that, sadly, had to run at 1.04GHz as the GX1 wouldn't run a FSB higher than 100mhz so my 133mhz FSB Tualatin had to bop down a little. Still screamed.
sigh I miss that system. I would still be running it if lightning hadn't fried it.
It sat next to my NeXTstation Turbo Color that I used for way longer than was reasonable as my primary system, lol. The NeXT was a daily driver till 2008.
33mhz 040 w/ 128MB 60NS EDO. OPENSTEP4.2 + lots of ported goodies friends and I did. Even managed to get SSLv3 working and load newer websites! :D
... wish I hadn't sold it.
Oh yeah! I also had a Pre-FCC certification dual 66mhz BeBox. Cool machine. Slow as shit though. The 603e in it wasn't natively SMP capable IIRC. The GLU chip could either run one CPU with L2 cache or dual CPUs with L2 cache disabled. Coherency was done in software. Unless I am horribly misremembering. It was a nasty hack and showed.
My BeBox! https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/albums/7215762193739249...
My GX-1 and my NeXT :D https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/6676203105/in/photolist...