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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

#151

Post by tialaramex »

pjmlp wrote: post #77
dfox wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ABI issues are exactly the reason why having C++ as OS API level language is a bad idea.

Not all, Android, IBM i (C++ has been slowly replacing PL/S), mbed, Windows, and OS X (IO Kit, now Driver Kit), are doing pretty alright. There is no such thing as C ABI, it only happens to work on OS that are, surprise surprise, written in C.

There is a C ABI. The "x86-64 System V ABI" (the ABI for C on everything except Windows on an x86-64, ie a typical PC) was designed by AMD working with early adopters on Linux and other platforms. Here are several extant ABI documents:

https://github.com/hjl-tools/x86-psABI/wiki/X86-psABI

The ABI for C needs to agree less stuff than a C++ ABI but it's still quite a lot of stuff, if these things don't get agreed then code won't work unless everybody uses the same (version of the) compiler.

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

#152

Post by wokkel »

amatecha wrote: post #136
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Real pre-emptive multitasking? I seem to recall that was one of the huge differentiating factors of it against Mac / Windows.

Amiga did this in 1985. It's just that for compatibility reasons Apple couldn't do this. Even funnier: the fastest hardware to run old MacOS (68k version) on: an Amiga computer.

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

#153

Post by projektfu »

tclancy wrote: post #144
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wouldn't the median need to be over 1? I get your point but am feeling pedantic today.

If more than 50% of personal computers have 1 or 0 users, then the median would be 1, assuming 0 users is less common than 1, regardless of how many users the remaining computers had.

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

#154

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by dnautics »

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.

In college I wrote a web server in beos and ported it back to Linux, learning pthreads along the way. Bonus achievement was making it multithreaded, so I got that for free, since beos makes you think architecturally as multithreaded first

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

#157

Post by mumblemumble »

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.

The company that sold classic Mac OS did, too.

But you have to consider what else was going on at the time: Microsoft was actively moving away from the DOS lineage. OS/2 had been in development since the mid-1980s, and, while that project came to an ugly end, they had also released the first version of Windows NT in the early '90s, and, by the late '90s, they were purposefully moving toward building their next-gen consumer OS on top of it.

Apple needed to be making similarly strong moves toward a multi-user OS with concerns like security baked in deeply. BeOS had the memory protection and the pre-emptive multitasking, which were definitely steps forward, but I don't think they would have taken Apple far enough to allow them to keep up with Microsoft. Which, in turn, would have allowed Microsoft to rest on its laurels, probably to the detriment of the Windows ecosystem.

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

#158

Post by dnautics »

adamnemecek wrote: post #83

BeOS was the way it was thanks to the async API. I think that a Rust port of BeOS would be amazing due to Rusts first class support of async.

BeOS did not use async, it used a "half-hearted, primitive, bug-ridden" implementation of actor model in C++.

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

#159

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

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

BeOS would also let you do that while playing them backwards; useless, but a nice demo of the multimedia capabilities of the OS.

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

#160

Post by tialaramex »

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

It was supposed to prove BeOS is a good idea. A problem they ran into with the BeBox and again later is that Be had lots of _fans_ rather than developers.

Fans think they're helping. If there's a hardware product then as a fan I should buy it right? Well, no, that's a subsidised development toolkit. Every unit that ships is VC sunk in the hope you'll write like Photoshop or Mosaic or 1-2-3 or something and create a market for this new system. When you instead compile two demo apps, call the support line to ask how to plug a mouse in, and tell all your friends to buy one as well, you are in fact not helping.

This is also because Be's original plan says competing with Windows is suicide (it was). They're going to build a system which is NOT a competitor for Windows, it's a whole separate environment. Maybe you have a Windows PC to do billing and surf that new Web, but in your studio you have a BeOS system and it doesn't matter that it can't print because that's not what it's for.

Be shouldn't have made it to the turn of the century, nowhere close. In 1998 the investors should have said we're sorry, there isn't money for this to continue Jean-Louis, better luck next time, and turn off the lights. BeOS gets sold off to whoever is in the market for pennies. But they got "lucky" they were in the right place at the right time. In 1999 you could raise an IPO for a dog turd so long as the offering paperwork said "Internet" on it and you were based on the US West Coast. The institutions got out, those fans who'd squandered the company's money and opportunity years earlier got in to replace them, and they all lost their shirts. In the process Be Inc. bought itself an extra couple of years runway.

(Edited to fix name)

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