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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

#171

Post by SllX »

embeddedpro wrote: post #122
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.

If people willingly exchange currency for products from a company and are satisfied with the value that they get out of it to the point that they become repeat customers, then how can you judge that no one except stockholders are benefitting?

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

#172

Post by philwelch »

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…

I honestly think it was less any type of Wintel conspiracy and more that platforms have network effects. Between Palladium not working out and Microsoft actually making Windows NT for some RISC ISA's, there wasn't actually an Intel/Microsoft conspiracy to dominate the industry together. They each wanted to separately dominate their part of the industry and both largely succeeded, but MS would have been just as happy selling Windows NT for SPARC/Alpha/PowerPC workstations and Intel would have been just as happy to have Macs or BeBoxes using their chips.

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

#173

Post by drewfish »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #125
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

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?

I think it was their thread/process scheduler. It had a section of priorities which got hard realtime scheduling, then lower priority stuff got more "traditional" scheduling. (Alas, I don't know too much about thread/process scheduling so the details elude me.) That way the playback threads (and also other UI threads such as the window system) got the timeslices they needed.

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

#174

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #168
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The "correct" way to go about things is to choose the OS first, and then select compatible hardware.

Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if we weren't constrained by real world requirements? If I were to write an OS today, the hardware I'm targeting may become quite rare and/or expensive tomorrow. Or it may just go out of fashion. Regardless, very few people are going to buy new hardware just to try out an OS they're not even sure they want to use yet.

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

#175

Post by ttul »

I remember seeing a BeBox under someone's desk at the video game company I was interning at in 1997. I nearly lost my shit. When Be released an Intel-compatible build while I was at Santa Clara in 1998, I installed it onto one of the lab computers. Sorry about that, IT team.

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

#176

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

killion wrote: post #89

One of the last lines threw me off... "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.

the author of the article is in her early 20s, and it's all an ancient history to her, so prepare to get OK Boomered

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

#177

Post by Wowfunhappy »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #174
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The "correct" way to go about things is to choose the OS first, and then select compatible hardware. Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if we weren't constrained by real world requirements? If I were to write an OS today, the hardware I'm targeting may become quite rare and/or expensive tomorrow. Or it may just go out of fashion. Regardless, very few people are going to buy new hardware just to try out an OS they're not eve…

> very few people are going to buy new hardware just to try out an OS

We do have VM's and emulators, but yes, the cost of switching OS's is huge. That's true with or without broad hardware compatibility.

My point is this: I don't think the idea of OS-agnostic hardware ever really existed. The fact that most Windows PC's can also run Linux is an exceptional accomplishment, and not something other projects can be expected to replicate. You might get other OS's to boot, but not with full functionality.

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

#178

Post by rusk »

tialaramex wrote: post #170
rusk wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didnt know Doom was all integer ... quite a feat.

In the general sense though the lack of floating point, as well as flat video addressing seriously hampered Amiga in the 3D ahem space.

EDIT I just remebered there is definitely at least one routine I know of that performs calculations based on IEEE 754 - “fast inverse square” or something. That could be at the root [badum] of my confusion vis-a-vis Doom ...

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

#179

Post by rvz »

adamnemecek wrote: post #167
dnautics wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

...which is async.

...which also a Rust port does exist for Haiku at least after a quick search. [0]

[0] https://depot.haiku-os.org/#!/pkg/rust_bin/haikuports/1/36/0...

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

#180

Post by hugi »

SllX wrote: post #171
embeddedpro wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If people willingly exchange currency for products from a company and are satisfied with the value that they get out of it to the point that they become repeat customers, then how can you judge that no one except stockholders are benefitting?

Because Apple obviously sucks. I don't understand how hard it is for all their happy customers to understand that they suck. /s
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