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

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

#41

Post by _red » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:49 PM UTC

mumblemumble wrote: post #35

Ah, memories. Used to use BeOS as my primary OS for a year or two. I think it's the only OS I ever found to be truly intuitive and pleasant to work with. That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen Be over NeXT. The elephant in the room is security: NeXTSTEP, being Unix-based, has some amount of security baked in from the ground up. BeOS didn't; it was more akin to Windows 95 or cla…

Also, the the familial relations of MacOS and Linux made it possible to share code fairly seamlessly between both (providing not talking about hardware integration). In a world where we there was 3 separate universes: Windows, BeOS, and Linux it's possible Linux would've become more isolated.

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

#42

Post by 0xDEEPFAC » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:49 PM UTC

rvz wrote: post #36

BeOS was really something of what the future 'could' have almost been. Too bad that it was killed by better competitors. But again I think its fair to compare with the lessons learned from its successor 'Haiku' that can be learned by many other OSes: From what I can see from using Haiku for a bit, it has the bazar community element from the open-source culture with its package management and ports system from Linux a…

Well it wasn't as simple as "killed off by better competitors". It was actually both much better than Windows 98 and Mac OS at the time.

But ultimately the deathblow came from Apple which, after struggling with low sales and poor quality software, almost chose to buy BeInc's tech but dropped it so they could bring in Steve Jobs. So it was more like vendor lock-in (Windows) and corporate deals (Apple) as well as failing partners (Palm).

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

#43

Post by bitL » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:49 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #10

When I started University in 2000, I had a quad-boot system: Win98, Win2000, BeOS 5 and Slackware Linux (using the BeOS bootload as my primary because it had the prettiest colors). I mostly used Slackware and Win98 (for games), but BeOS was really neat. It had support for the old Booktree video capture cards, could capture video without dropping frames like VirtualDub often did, and it even had support for disabling…

I think BeOS was the only OS that allowed smooth playback of videos and work at the same time, something Windows was capable 5 and Linux 10 years later :D

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

#44

Post by ossworkerrights » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

Ah the memories! Had no idea Haiku was an open source implementation of BeOS. Port Electron to it, and I commit to writing tools for this OS in my spare time!

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

#45

Post by somesortofsystm » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:54 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

Apple began to re-kick ass when they made an amazing laptop (tiBook). This was the first truly viable Unix laptop, with promise to be a cut above the competition (there was none) in terms of style and usability.

tiBook was bonkers. Suddenly, I didn't really need to sit in the room, surrounded by boxes, but rather could go to the park and access the room from under a tree.

If Be had managed to capture that, I think it would have been an amazing time. Imagine if SGI had pulled off the first titanium, unibody laptop, designed specifically for 3D. Would Alien-ware?

If there had been a BeLaptop, things might have been a lot different in 2000/2001, when things started to look very, very interesting.

I mean, the fact that Apple shipped a Unix laptop when all the other 'super-' vendors were unable to pull it off.,,

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

#46

Post by Quequau » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:58 PM UTC

I used BeOS for most of the 2nd half of the '90s and I guess in my mind at least the regrettable, messy, and unethical end of BeOS in 2001-2002 is emblematic of the Dot Com collapse.

Crushed by Microsoft's anti-competitive business practices and sold for scrap to a failing company who was unable to actually do anything with parts they wound up with but who never the less made damn sure that no one else could either.

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

#47

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:59 PM UTC

mumblemumble wrote: post #35

Ah, memories. Used to use BeOS as my primary OS for a year or two. I think it's the only OS I ever found to be truly intuitive and pleasant to work with. That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen Be over NeXT. The elephant in the room is security: NeXTSTEP, being Unix-based, has some amount of security baked in from the ground up. BeOS didn't; it was more akin to Windows 95 or cla…

Security from what? Do user accounts really provide much benefit in the personal computing space? Where the median user count is 1?

Neither OS had the kind of security that is really useful today for this usecase, which is per-application.

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

#48

Post by turtlebits » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:59 PM UTC

rvz wrote: post #36

BeOS was really something of what the future 'could' have almost been. Too bad that it was killed by better competitors. But again I think its fair to compare with the lessons learned from its successor 'Haiku' that can be learned by many other OSes: From what I can see from using Haiku for a bit, it has the bazar community element from the open-source culture with its package management and ports system from Linux a…

I installed BeOS when it first came out. To me it was a cool tech demo, but it was fairly useless as it didn't have a usable browser (NetPositive was half baked at best), couldn't play a lot of video codecs and couldn't connect to a Windows network share.

I feel like if they launched a better experience for existing Windows users, it would have done much better.

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

#49

Post by mongol » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

_red wrote: post #41

mumblemumble wrote: post #35

Ah, memories. Used to use BeOS as my primary OS for a year or two. I think it's the only OS I ever found to be truly intuitive and pleasant to work with. That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen Be over NeXT. The elephant in the room is security: NeXTSTEP, being Unix-based, has some amount of security baked in from the ground up. BeOS didn't; it was more akin to Windows 95 or cla…

Also, the the familial relations of MacOS and Linux made it possible to share code fairly seamlessly between both (providing not talking about hardware integration). In a world where we there was 3 separate universes: Windows, BeOS, and Linux it's possible Linux would've become more isolated.

Hmm possibly. But it could also have been to Linux benefit. It would be alone among these in having then advantage of Unix heritage.

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

#50

Post by peatmoss » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 5:01 PM UTC

JBReefer wrote: post #32

localhost wrote: post #27

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/SG…

Don’t mobile OS’ prioritize perceived latency above all other resources (besides battery)?

That’s a great point, however they also lock down the enduser experience to something diminished from a fully general purpose computer.