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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

#201

Post by statico »

One of my favorite anecdotes about BeOS was that it had a CPU usage meter[1], and on the CPU meter there were on/off switches for each core. If you had two cores and turned one off, your computer would run at half speed. If you turned both off, your computer would crash. Someone once told me that this was filed as a bug against the OS and the response was "Works As Intended" and that it was the expected behavior.

(These are fuzzy memories from ~25 years ago. It would be nice if someone could confirm this story or tell me if it's just my imagination.)

[1]: http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/8way/8way-1.jpg

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

#202

Post by seabrookmx »

fartcannon wrote: post #70
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…

I think Microsoft made quite a lot off Android.

Yup. Mostly around patents.

Ironically the only good (IMO, obviously) Outlook client is Android.

Really curious how the Surface Duo turns out. Weird form factor aside, Microsoft embracing Android on a branded device is interesting.

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

#203

Post by anthk »

tialaramex wrote: post #146
cptnapalm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By all the stars in heaven, that was an impressive demo.

It's about making a virtue of a necessity. When Be wrote that demo the situation is that the other operating systems you might plausibly choose all have working video acceleration. Even Linux has basic capabilities in this area by that point. BeOS doesn't have that and doesn't have a road map to get it soon. So, any of the other platforms can play full resolution video captured from a DVD for example, a use case actu…

Eh, multithreading decoding could help a lot. And by the population of DVD video in computers (and the PS2), most people had a Pentium3 450MHZ at homes, which was more than enough for DVD video with an ASM optimized video player such as MPlayer and a good 2D video card.

2D acceleration was more than enough.

http://rudolfs-place.nl/BeOS/NVdriver/3dnews.html

On Linux you didn't need OpenGL, just Xv.

Source: I was there, with an Athlon. Playing DVD's.

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

#204

Post by stiGGG »

Some trivia: There was an unofficial successor of BeOS called ZETA from a german company yellowTAB (later magnussoft). I remember this because they tried selling it via a homeshopping channel in german TV which was completely hilarious.

I found a (very bad) recording of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQW-q2vp6W4

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

#205

Post by disordinary »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #47
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…

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.

Under the hood though there's multiple accounts which different applications use, the user might only log in with one but applications are isolated from each other and the system because of it.

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

#207

Post by hbbio »

asjw wrote: post #116
hbbio wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They thought they would have their chance with hardware+software combo. Indeed, the BeBox should have looked like this to succeed: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Ap... That computer made Apple cool again, and paved the way for their recovery way before the iPhone skyrocket.

Before the eMac, the iPod made Apple cool again, AFAIK

Sorry, I meant the iMac (G3) in 1998 - maybe it's not the best pic then since it's an eMac that came later...

The iPod was 2001, 3 years after the first iMac.

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

#208

Post by bergie »

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.

I think there was some token POSIX compatibility in Windows NT back then. Probably for some government contracts.

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

#210

Post by core-questions »

asveikau wrote: post #90
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.

But a bunch of the methods we have for securing, say, mobile phones, grew out of user accounts. Personally I don't know Android innards deeply, but when I was trying to backup and restore a rooted phone I did notice that every app's files have a different owner uid/gid and the apps typically won't launch without that set up correctly. So it would seem they implemented per-app separation in this instance by having a u…

Or just take a Docker-like approach, where each app thinks it is the only user and intra-app communication is where you put the security functionality
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