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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

#121

Post by harikb »

bsharitt wrote: post #115
harikb wrote: post #106

I remember the Palm acquisition. At that time Palm had invested heavily in webOS [1] which wasn't as performant. When they acquired BeOS, I thought it was going to be a turn around. But that didn't happen either. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS

First of all Be was purchased by Palm several years before webOS ever came out. WebOS didn't even exist in the same company. After Palm split into palmSource(software) and palmOne(hardware), the BeOs stuff(along side the old PalmOS stuff) went with palmSource. Later palmOne bought the rights to the full Palm name from palmSource and became Palm again and that Palm came out with webOS.

Thanks for the correction. Clearly, my recollection was wrong.

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

#122

Post by embeddedpro »

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…

The anti competitive business practices of Apple make it hard to imagine the world could be worse.

Instead of competition, Apple survives off marketing medium quality products at high prices.

I'm not sure how that's good for anyone unless they own Apple stock.

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

#123

Post by potta_coffee »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #54
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…

> the driver story is still a bit lacking That's a hell of an understatement right there. It still doesn't have any capability for accelerated video, does it? Unfortunately that's the story for any OS these days that isn't already firmly established. Which is a huge shame since they all suck in their own ways.

That's the case. I can't use Haiku til the video is sorted, and it looks like that's a long way out. I'd love to help but I don't know C++ and I don't have time to dive into something like that.

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

#124

Post by microtonal »

anthk wrote: post #55
bitL wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Linux could do that in 2001 just fine, and without crashing like Windows. XV was amazing. So was MPlayer.

High definition playback is still not as smooth as it could be in browsers on Linux (or if your CPU is fast enough, it will drain your battery more quickly), because most browsers only have experimental support for video acceleration.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_accelera...

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

#125

Post by AtlasBarfed »

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

Ok, so this is the big BeOS thing I've heard.

What technically enabled this on such limited hardware? Was there lack of security/containerization/sandboxing that made os call much faster and context switches better?

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

#126

Post by hinkley »

specialist wrote: post #64
dilap wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still wouldn't have it; no way Apple w/o Steve Jobs but w/ BeOS survives.

I mostly agree. Jobs was able to squeeze Microsoft. In a way I don't think any one else would or could. Referring to Microsoft outright stealing Apple's IP and Gates' subsequent settlement. The $150m investment. The commitment to maintain Office on Mac. Forever license to all of Microsoft's API, enabling Mail.app to have pretty great integration with Exchange, for example. BeOS was probably the better tech. But Jobs…

Schwartz was an odd duck in charge if another odd duck. His writing was a good read, but it was a little odd to see such antiestablishment talk from an establishment player. And in the near term, his own establishment suffered the most.

I used the hell out of Java, but most of their other tech was in the weird quadrant of cool stuff that I won’t use. Something about their fit and finish always left me cold. Or if not that, price point.

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

#127

Post by qubex »

danans wrote: post #68
_red wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

BeOS had a POSIX-compliant layer, but under the hood it was totally different from a UNIX.

Also, let’s keep in mind that Windows95 (released that same year) featured preemptive multitasking on a desktop user OS (albeit not a strong memory protection model), and WindowsNT has been available for a couple of years by then (having first shipped in 1993, If memory serves) and was a fully ‘modern’ OS (indeed it serves as the basis for the latter Windows), albeit with a comparatively large footprint.

I was an avid BeOS user (and coincidentally a NeXT user too) and I was enthralled by its capabilities, but in terms of system architecture it was a dead end.

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

#128

Post by morio »

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…

I used to work for Be in Menlo Park in a previous life and I can confirm that the code base quality would have made for a very bad outcome for Apple. Security was the least of the numerous serious issues. That said BeOS somewhat still exists in spirit as a lot of folks from Be went to build/contribute to Android.

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

#129

Post by chipotle_coyote »

I was another former Be "power user." And I think that was probably accurate -- if you weren't in the "BeOS lifestyle" during the admittedly short window that it was possible, it's hard to understand how much promise it looked like it had. When I tell people I ran it full-time for over a year, they wonder how I managed to get anything done, but...

- Pe was a great GUI text editor, competitive with BBEdit on the Mac

- GoBe Productive was comparable to AppleWorks, but maybe a little better at being compatible with Microsoft Office

- SoundPlay was a great MP3 player that could do crazy things that I still don't see anything doing 20 years later (it had speed control for files, including playing backwards, and could mix files that were queued up for playback; it didn't have any library management, but BeOS's file system let you expose arbitrary metadata -- like MP3 song/artist/etc. tags! -- right in file windows)

- Mail-It was the second-best email client I ever used, behind the now also sadly-defunct Mailsmith

- e-Picture was an object-based bitmapped graphics editor similar in spirit and functionality to Macromedia's Fireworks, and was something I genuinely missed for years after leaving BeOS

And there were other programs that were amazing, even though I didn't use them: Adamation's video editor (videoElements? something like that), their audio editor audioElements, Steinberg's Nuendo, objektSynth, and two programs which are incredibly still being sold today: Lost Marble's Moho animation program, now sold by Smith Micro for Mac and PC, and the radio automation package TuneTracker (incredibly now being sold as a turnkey bundle with Haiku). Also, for years, there was a professional-grade theatre light/audio control system, LCS CueStation, that ran on BeOS -- and it actually ran Broadway and Las Vegas productions. I remember seeing it running at the Cirque de Soleil permanent installation at Disney World in Orlando.

At the time Apple bought Next rather than Be, I thought they'd made a horrible mistake. Given Apple's trajectory afterward, of course, it's hard to say that looking back. It's very possible that if they'd bought Be, they'd have gone under, although I think that would have less to do with technology than with the management they'd have ended up with (or more accurately, stayed with). But it's still an interesting "what if."

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

#130

Post by CoolGuySteve »

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…

Microsoft went out of their way to prohibit computer manufacturers, namely Dell, from bundling BeOS:

https://www.osnews.com/story/681/be-inc-files-suit-against-m...

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