BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by jandrese » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 8:03 PM UTC

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…

IIRC the Unix compatibility layer had some pretty grotty warts. Porting Unix applications virtually always required fiddling to get them working, especially the network code.

Unfortunately this meant BeOS was perpetually behind the curve on stuff like the World Wide Web. I had a native FreeBSD build of Netscape long before Be managed to get a decent browser.

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

#182

Post by zokula » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 8:09 PM UTC

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…

BeOS did not use a microkernel, it was a straight-up up boring monolithic kernel.

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

#183

Post by Wowfunhappy » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 8:10 PM UTC

wokkel wrote: post #152

amatecha wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A non-Apple computer? Was "Hackintosh" (presumably under a different name) a thing back then?

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

#184

Post by adamnemecek » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 8:21 PM UTC

rvz wrote: post #179

adamnemecek wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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...

I know. I'm not sure I understand.

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

#185

Post by mulmen » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 8:22 PM UTC

linza wrote: post #149

tclancy wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If more than (or equal to) half of computers are used by only one person, then the median user count is 1, no?

If you have 3 PCs in the world, one with 0 users, one with 1 user and one with 23 users the median is 1.

Median is literally the middle, like a highway.

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

#186

Post by kungtotte » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 8:26 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #52

Haiku is really good. Would recommend anyone to try it out in a VM (I had it running on my actual laptop for a short time, but unfortunately my job pretty much requires me to run Linux so it couldn't stay). Haiku has a really responsive UI with a 90s look so you can actually tell what is a button.

How painful was it to get it running on a laptop? I've been interested in Haiku for a long time now, but I don't really have a place to play with it except on my laptop.

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

#187

Post by anoncake » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 8:26 PM UTC

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?

Network/lock-in effects and negative externalities can easily have that result.

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

#188

Post by rvz » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 8:26 PM UTC

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #60

I feel like the biggest missed opportunity of the “mobile revolution” ten years ago was BeOS. It seemed clear to me that Android would be a bust for smartphone manufacturers (nobody has really made money off of Android except for Google and Samsung, the latter of whom accomplished this by dominating that market). If Sony, for example, had gotten ahold of BeOS and tried to vertically integrate in a manner similar to A…

Well there's your reason why Google has the expertise to build Fuchsia. Most of the BeOS guys were hired there to work on Android and now they are doing it again with Fuchsia.

We will all come back to this comment in 10 years to find ourselves running Fuchsia on our phones, tablets and our new Pixelbooks.

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

#189

Post by laumars » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 8:26 PM UTC

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…

OS X was around in the days of XP and Linux was perfectly usable on the desktop.

A few years earlier things were a little more bleak.

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

#190

Post by jimbokun » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 8:33 PM UTC

_8ljf wrote: post #169

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 .

NeXTSTEP pretty directly evolved into iOS, though, so it was certainly a significant asset in the acquisition, too.