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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

#161

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

anon9001 wrote: post #71
rayiner wrote: post #28

Oh man! I first tried BeOS personal edition when it came on a CD with Maximum PC magazine. (Referring to same demo CD, though the poster is not me: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1067159&s... . Also, how crazy is it that Ars Technica’s forums have two decade old posts? In 2000, that would be like seeing forum posts from 1980.) I remember being so happy when we got SDSL, and I could get online from…

> In 2000, that would be like seeing forum posts from 1980. That's the premise of Jason Scott's project launched in 1998 :) http://textfiles.com/

He also livestreams on Twitch; recently he's been streaming the archival of Apple II floppies.

https://www.twitch.tv/textfilesdotcom

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

#162

Post by lawnchair »

morio wrote: post #128
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.

Wow! Thanks so much for working on BeOS. This was a super fun OS to use.

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

#163

Post by projektfu »

asveikau wrote: post #99
msla wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The other thing people forget, which is still a bit incomprehensible to me, is that the multiple Unix vendors were saying they'll migrate to Windows NT on IA-64.

Perhaps Digital UNIX and HP/UX but HP/Compaq was a collaborator on IA-64. I don't think I heard of SUN or IBM saying that.

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

#164

Post by rusk »

joakleaf wrote: post #103
all2 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, wher…

Also Amiga didn’t have hardware floating point whereas DX series of PCs in the 90s did. Essential for all those tricky 3D calculations and texture maps.

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

#165

Post by pjmlp »

tialaramex wrote: post #151
pjmlp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As the name already implies, that is an UNIX ABI, the OS where C was born, and naturally the OS ABI.

x86-64 platforms not using the said ABI:

- macOS, "This article describes differences in the OS X x86-64 user-space code model from the code model described in System V Application Binary Interface", (https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/De...)

- Unisys Clear Path OS200 and MCP

- Android (where JNI is what matters)

- Chrome OS (where JavaScript and WASM is what matters)

So no, it isn't everything except Windows on x86-64 and then there are all the other OSes running on ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, SPARC, PIC and plenty of other less relevant CPUs .

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

#166

Post by jonny_eh »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #129

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 -…

You may have hinted at it, but I think Apple's subsequent turnaround after acquiring Next was mainly due to their founder, Steve Jobs, coming back to Apple.

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

#167

Post by adamnemecek »

dnautics wrote: post #158
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++.

...which is async.

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

#168

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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.

> Unfortunately that's the story for any OS these days that isn't already firmly established.

Maybe because we're coming at this from the wrong perspective?

I love the theoretical idea that I could build a generic x86 box that can boot into any OS I feel like using, but has that ever truly been the case? We certainly don't pick software this way—if you're running Linux, you're not going to buy a copy of Final Cut and expect it to work.

Well-established software will of course work almost everywhere, but niche projects don't have the ability. Unless you use something based on Java or Electron, which is equivalent to using Virtualbox (or ESXi) in this comparison.

It's long been said that one of Apple's major advantages with macOS is they don't need to support any hardware under the sun. Non-coincidentally, the recommended way to make a Hackintosh is to custom build a PC and explicitly select Mac-compatible hardware.

Now, if an OS doesn't for instance have support for any model GPUs at all, cherry picking hardware won't help. But perhaps this is where projects like BeOS need to focus their resources.

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

#169

Post by _8ljf »

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…

“That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen Be over NeXT.”

Yes. Except that it wasn’t acquiring NeXTSTEP that saved Apple’s skin; it was acquiring Steven P Jobs.

True, version 1 had been rough and flakey as hell, and honestly really didn’t work all that well.

But Steve 2.0? Damn, that one could sell.

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

#170

Post by tialaramex »

rusk wrote: post #164
joakleaf wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, wher…

Also Amiga didn’t have hardware floating point whereas DX series of PCs in the 90s did. Essential for all those tricky 3D calculations and texture maps.

No. Hardware floating point was _Quake_

Quake has software full 3D which runs appallingly if you can't do fast FP, it's targeting the new Pentium CPUs which all have fast FPUs onboard, it runs OK on a fast 486DX but it flies on a cheap Pentium.

Doom is just integer calculations, it's fixed point math.

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