Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

hackaday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 430 posts

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

#221

Post by acdha »

MisterTea wrote: post #211
statico wrote: post #201

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. (Th…

The CPU monitor program was called Pulse and early versions allowed you to turn all the processors off and crash the machine. I think it was fixed in 3.something or 4.0. The 8-way PIII Xeon was a Compaq someone tested BeOS on before it went into production. I Remember it being posted on some BeOS news site. There should be another screenshot or two with 25 avi files playing and a crap load of CPU hungry programs runn…

I remember circa 2000 being able to simultaneously compile Mozilla, transfer DV video from a camcorder into an editor, check email, and surf the web on a dual Pentium Pro system with no hint of UI stutter or dropped frames in the firewire video transfer. It was at least another decade before SSDs and kernel improvements made that possible on Linux, Windows, or OS X.

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

#222

Post by navjack27 »

Accujack wrote: post #138
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?

Bear in mind that resolutions back then were much lower than now, and not all computers had 24 bit color frame buffers. Video cards ran one monitor for the most part, with no others attached. Be had well written multi threading and preemptive multitasking implemented on a clean slate - no compatibility hacks required. That meant it worked well and was quick/responsive. There were still limits, and the OS didn't have…

I mean maybe. I was running 1600x1200 on my monitor back then.

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

#223

Post by acdha »

anthk wrote: post #55
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

Linux could do that in 2001 just fine, and without crashing like Windows. XV was amazing. So was MPlayer.

Linux could do that only if your system was lightly loaded. Once you started to have I/O contention, none of the available kernel schedulers could reliably avoid stuttering.

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

#224

Post by reaperducer »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #183
wokkel wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You didn't need to build a Hackintosh. You could buy legal, officially-licensed Mac clones back then.

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

#225

Post by rusk »

anthk wrote: post #214
rusk wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doom didnt use polygons but it very much was 3D in any practical sense of the term.

No, it was "distorted" 2D, like cardboards put in perspective. Not 3D.

You are still getting confused by polygons. It was a 3D space that you could move around in. The matter of how it was rendered is an implementation detail.

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

#226

Post by acdha »

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?

Other people mentioned the real preemptive scheduling — and the general overall better worst-case latency — but another factor was the clean design. The other operating systems tended to be okay in the absence of I/O content but once you hit the capacity of your hard drive you would find out that e.g. clicking a menu in your X11 app did a bunch of small file I/O in the background which would normally be cached but had been pushed out, etc. A common mitigation factor in that era was having separate drives for the operating system, home directory, and data so you could at least avoid contention for the few hundred IOPs a drive could sustain.

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

#227

Post by donatj »

agumonkey wrote: post #117

beos demos never fail to make me weep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggCODBIfWKY

Oh man the theme song to this brings me back! I have it in my iTunes to this day. It's Virtual(Void) by Baron Arnold.

I spoke to him years ago. If I recall he worked for Be before moving to Sidekick…

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

#228

Post by SyneRyder »

stiGGG wrote: post #204

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

For some weird reason I still have two (?) copies of yellowTAB Zeta on my bookshelf, next to my boxed copy of Red Hat Linux 7.3. Amazingly Zeta got more use than Linux, because it was much easier to get everything working on my machine.

I just checked the discs and it's the same "Deluxe Edition RC2" as in that home shopping video. I think my copies were bought as special advance preview builds for third-party Zeta developers, though. And I don't think I paid as much as 100EUR...

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

#229

Post by blihp »

anthk wrote: post #55
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

Linux could do that in 2001 just fine, and without crashing like Windows. XV was amazing. So was MPlayer.

Don't forget about xanim

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

#230

Post by [deleted] »

slim wrote: post #217
microtonal wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High definition playback is still not as smooth as it could be in browsers on Linux (or if your CPU is fast enough, it will drain your battery more quickly), because most browsers only have experimental support for video acceleration. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_accelera...

I found Wayland more capable than xwindows in this regard

[deleted]
Post reply on HN