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BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

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

#101

Post by pjmlp »

bitL wrote: post #43
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

Bluebottle OS (written in Active Oberon, a GC enabled systems programming language) was also capable of it.

http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/WindowManager?...

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

#102

Post by slipheen »

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.

Microsoft was sued, and settled for $23M. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240052523/BeOS-will-liv...

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

#103

Post by joakleaf »

all2 wrote: post #65
rusk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when the Amiga bouncing ball demo was impressive? Ironically 3D graphics ended up being the Amiga's specific achilles heel once Doom and co came on the scene.

That's curious to me. Doom is specifically not 3D. Was it a publishing issue (that Doom and co weren't produced for the Amiga), or a power issue, or something else?

The Amiga had planer graphics modes, while the PC/VGA cards had chunky mode (in 320x200x256 color mode).

It means that, to set the color of a single pixel on the Amiga, you had to manipulate bits at multiple locations in memory (5 in 32 colours), while for the PC each pixel was just one memory location; In chunky mode you could just do something like: videomem[320*y+x]=158 to set the pixel at (x,y) to color 158, where videomem would point directly to the graphics memory (at address 0xa0000) -- It really was the simplest graphics mode to work with!

If you just copied 2D graphics (without scaling/rotating) the Amiga could do it quite will using the blitter/processor, but 3D texture mapping was more challenging because you constantly read and write to individual pixels (each pixel potentially requiring 5 memreads/writes on the Amiga vs. 1 on the PC).

Doom's wall texture mapping was affine, which basically means scaling+rotation operations were involved. The sprites were also scaled. Both operations a problem to the Amiga.

As software based 3D texture mapping games became the new hot thing in 1993-1997, the Amiga was left behind. Probably wouldn't have been a problem if the Amiga has survived until the 3D accelerators in the late 90s.

This is quite well described elsewhere. Google is your friend if you want to know more! :-)

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

#104

Post by microtonal »

andrewflnr wrote: post #76
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…

Funny you should mention Windows 95. The company that sold that ended up doing pretty well.

Sure, but at the time Windows 95 was released, they already had a couple of Windows NT releases (3.1, 3.5, and 3.51). Windows NT was a different, more modern operating system than the Windows 95/98/ME line. So, they did not have to evolve Windows 95 into a modern operating system. After ME, they 'just' switched their user base to another operating system and made this possible through API/ABI compatibility (which is quite a feat by itself).

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

#105

Post by mumblemumble »

pjmlp wrote: post #84
danans wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

BeOS was as UNIX like, as Amiga was. 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.

It had a bash shell, and used glibc, and partially implemented POSIX.

I was also able to get most my CS homework done in BeOS. But I definitely needed to keep FreeBSD around for when I hit a wall.

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

#107

Post by terminaljunkid »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #47
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.

Yes, in short - users & groups serve as a rudimentary implementation of capabilities. Best example is Android. But there's more to it.

Separating admin user from non admin user always has advantages and I do it even on Windows.

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

#108

Post by geuis »

deepaksurti wrote: post #66
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…

AYBABTU = All Your Base Are Belongs to Us, which is a mangled or broken translation in English of a Japanese phrase from a Japanese game `Zero Wing` [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us Edit: removed the extra A in the acronym

Got an extra A in there

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

#109

Post by microtonal »

msla wrote: post #74
philwelch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There also used to be other CPU architectures--though even at the time, enough people complained about "Wintel" that maybe it was obvious that the alternatives weren't ever going to catch on.

People complained about "Wintel" because the 32-bit x86 chips were so fast and cheap they destroyed the market for RISC designs and killed existing RISC workstation and server architectures, like SPARC and HPPA and MIPS. By the time the Pentium came around, the future looked like a completely monotonous stretch of Windows NT on x86 for ever and ever, amen. No serious hardware competition, other than Intel being smart…

To Microsoft's credit, the early Windows NT versions were multiplatform. I remember that my Windows NT 4.0 install CD had x86, Alpha, PowerPC, and MIPS support.
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