BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X • Hacker News Board

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#21

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:31 PM UTC

dilap wrote: post #18

pjmlp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how everyone blames Microsoft for what was OEMs doing a race to the bottom. OEMs had an option, yes they would had to pay more for licenses, but no one pointed them a gun, or did visits mafia style to forbid them to sell other systems.

It'd be business suicide to charge more just so they could offer an obscure OS as an option; in my mind, this is the kind of clear anticompetitive situation it'd be good to use the law to avoid. Instead the DOJ went after MS for bundling a web browser . So dumb.

There are laws about dumping prices, beyond that it is business as usual.

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#22

Post by spamizbad » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:31 PM UTC

asjw wrote: post #13

gnu8 wrote: post #5

We didn’t get to have this because Microsoft strangled it in the crib. I am never forgiving them for that.

The money wasted on the BeBox killed BeOS

The BeBox had an incredible amount of I/O and little to no professional grade software to take advantage of it.

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#23

Post by zozbot234 » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:32 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #20

In this alternative universe, Objective-C would have died, Swift would never happened, and C++ would rule across desktop and mobile OSes (thinking only of Windows, BeOS X, Symbian, Windows CE and what might have been BeOS based iOS). Also POSIX would be even less relevant, and very few would be buying BeOS X for doing Linux coding.

> and C++ would rule across desktop and mobile OSes

C++ in a non-standard version as compiled by gcc 2.96 release! Awesome.

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#24

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:33 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #23

pjmlp wrote: post #20

In this alternative universe, Objective-C would have died, Swift would never happened, and C++ would rule across desktop and mobile OSes (thinking only of Windows, BeOS X, Symbian, Windows CE and what might have been BeOS based iOS). Also POSIX would be even less relevant, and very few would be buying BeOS X for doing Linux coding.

> and C++ would rule across desktop and mobile OSes C++ in a non-standard version as compiled by gcc 2.96 release! Awesome.

What lack of imagination, as if they wouldn't be upgrading their toolchains.

In fact, Haiku does support more modern toolchains and the BeOS R5 is only kept around due to ABI issues with binary only BeOS software.

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#25

Post by beefhash » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #20

In this alternative universe, Objective-C would have died, Swift would never happened, and C++ would rule across desktop and mobile OSes (thinking only of Windows, BeOS X, Symbian, Windows CE and what might have been BeOS based iOS). Also POSIX would be even less relevant, and very few would be buying BeOS X for doing Linux coding.

> Also POSIX would be even less relevant, and very few would be buying BeOS X for doing Linux coding.

I don't think I'd enjoy a GNU userland/glibc/Linux monoculture, quite honestly. I'm glad POSIX exists to have a slightly less moving target.

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#26

Post by beagle3 » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #15

slipheen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, the two are related- Microsoft stopped it from having much of a chance as an independent OS.. This stopped us from getting it outside of a major vendor like Apple acquiring it. Apple saw this, so didn't want to pay as much as they might have if it were selling well on it's own. So Apple ended up going with NeXT "instead of plan Be" as it were.

I love how everyone blames Microsoft for what was OEMs doing a race to the bottom. OEMs had an option, yes they would had to pay more for licenses, but no one pointed them a gun, or did visits mafia style to forbid them to sell other systems.

Microsoft, the incumbent, offered OEMs cheaper Windows licenses as long as there was no dual boot, or a windows license was paid for every machine sold regardless of what it ran.

Under these terms, it was suicide for OEMs to offer anything except “only Windows”. I was actually working for another company whose software was killed by Microsoft by a similar “or else” threat from Microsoft at the time.

Microsoft was a bully doing (likely) illegal things, except the FTC wasn’t doing its job.

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#27

Post by localhost » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

Before I first saw BeOS running on a colleague's machine back in the ~mid-late 90s (same guy who introduced me to Python) I used an SGI Onyx Reality Engine machine [1] (roughly $250K computer back in the day) for molecular mechanics simulations and BeOS ran circles around it on perceived responsiveness. I really wish we have OS's that prioritize input/output latency over all else.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#28

Post by rayiner » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

Oh man! I first tried BeOS personal edition when it came on a CD with Maximum PC magazine. (Referring to same demo CD, though the poster is not me: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1067159&s.... Also, how crazy is it that Ars Technica’s forums have two decade old posts? In 2000, that would be like seeing forum posts from 1980.) I remember being so happy when we got SDSL, and I could get online from BeOS. (Before that, my computer had a winmodem.)

BeOS was always a very tasteful design. And well documented! I learned so much about low level programming from the Be Newsletters: https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/index.html. The BONE article is a great introduction to how a network stack works: https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue5-5.h.... I still have a copy of Dominic Giampalo’s BeFS book somewhere.

BeOS was very much a product of its time. (Microkernel, use of C++, etc.) What would a modern BeOS look like? My thought: use of a memory and thread safe language like Rust for the main app-level APIs. (Thread safety in BeOS applications, where every window ran in its own thread, was not trivial.) Probably more exokernel than microkernel, with direct access to GPUs and NICs and maybe even storage facilitated by hardware multiplexing. What else?

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#29

Post by dsr_ » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:39 PM UTC

asjw wrote: post #13

gnu8 wrote: post #5

We didn’t get to have this because Microsoft strangled it in the crib. I am never forgiving them for that.

The money wasted on the BeBox killed BeOS

I tend to agree. If they had targeted Mac or PC hardware (different at the time!) and perhaps built some nifty gizmos as add-in cards (LED blinkenlights array, GeekPort) they would have saved serious cash.

That was the time period when ordinary users could be persuaded to pay money for their operating systems and major upgrades.

Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#30

Post by jkestner » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:39 PM UTC

aazaa wrote: post #17

> In 1990, Jean-Louis Gassée, who replaced Jobs in Apple as the head of Macintosh development, was also fired from the company. He then also formed his own computer company with the help of another ex-Apple employee, Steve Sakoman. They called it Be Inc, and their goal was to create a more modern operating system from scratch based on the object-oriented design of C++, using proprietary hardware that could allow for…

I saw BeOS as a spiritual successor to the Amiga OS, where it might be used as a turnkey media creation system. I think Apple was the Microsoft of this market, and had enough user/developer inertia to make inroads impossible. They sold a depressing 1800 BeBoxes.