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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.
> 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…
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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.
BeOS had a regular Unix like (even posix IIRC) dev environment. I was able to do most of the CS course work projects normally done on my University's Sun workstations on BeOS instead. Most of these of courses were data structures, algorithms, compilers, etc projects in C, and not things that required platform specific APIs. But arguably, BeOS' overall model - a single user desktop OS built on top of but hiding its mo…
Surely it had a cli, UNIX like directory navigation and a couple of UNIX command like utilities.
But good luck porting UNIX CLI software expecting a full POSIX environment.
If I am not mistaken, Haiku has done most of the work regarding POSIX support.
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Funny you should mention Windows 95. The company that sold that ended up doing pretty well.
Really? Most people I talk with these days seem to agree that the proprietary OS is a liability.
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Funny you should mention Windows 95. The company that sold that ended up doing pretty well.
Really? Most people I talk with these days seem to agree that the proprietary OS is a liability.
Anyways, Windows 10 may have its problems, but Microsoft the company is doing pretty well. Their stock is up about 50% this year (200% over the past 5). And that’s not to mention the fact that they’ve open sourced .NET among many other things.
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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.
I do like that you have to “sudo” a program to allow it to access certain files. Even if I am the only user, it stops malicious programs from modifying certain files without me noticing.
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Don’t mobile OS’ prioritize perceived latency above all other resources (besides battery)?
Considering how often I hit a button more than once because it took so long to do anything about the first one, that seems unlikely.
I am a mobile dev and use a plethora of iOS and Android devices all the time, often on many different software versions.
It’s not unique to any platform, and seems to be most often affecting the keyboard input, but occasionally seems to affect the rest of the UI as well.
Software updates will oscillate between breaking and fixing these things on and off between different devices.
I’ve been doing app development since iOS 3 and the first version of the App Store and used an ADP1. There’s no method to the madness I can see. Especially with the keyboard input.
Lord help you if you happen to be using a 4S or 5 or iPad 2/3. I often wait for up to 10-15 seconds for text input to catch up to itself, only to catch up to itself all at once - I can type whole sentences knowing by the time I wait for them to finish it’ll be the same 10-15 seconds to wait as if I’ve typed a single character.
"Would Tim Berners-Lee have used a BeBox to run the world’s first web server instead?"
The BeBox didn't ship until 1995. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first version of the web in 1991. So nope, that wouldn't have happened.
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.
Personally I don't know Android innards deeply, but when I was trying to backup and restore a rooted phone I did notice that every app's files have a different owner uid/gid and the apps typically won't launch without that set up correctly. So it would seem they implemented per-app separation in this instance by having a uid per app.
Imagine a world where Google had chosen to build on a kernel that had spent many decades with no filesystem permissions at all. Perhaps they'd have to pay the same app compatibility costs that Microsoft did going from 9x to NT kernel, or changing the default filesystem to ACL'd-down NTFS.