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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

#231

Post by _8ljf »

jimbokun wrote: post #190
_8ljf wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

True, but a technology is only a means to an end, not an end itself. What sells is product.

You may have the finest tech on the planet—and that means precisely squat. What counts is putting bums on seats. Your seats. And keeping them there. Limps of tech are just a vehicle for that; to be used, abused, chewed up, and/or discarded on the road(s) to that end.

Apple could have done better; they certainly did plenty worse (Copland, Taligent, the first Mac OS).

As it turned out, NeXTSTEP proved it was indeed “good enough” to fit a pressing need at the time; and the rest was just hammering till it looked lickable enough for consumers to bite. All it was needed was a salesman to shift it—and Steve 2.0 proved to be one of the greatest salesman in modern marketing history.

That’s what made the difference between selling a tech to a million dyed-in-the-wirewool nerds, and selling tech to a billion everyday consumers. And then up-selling all of those customers to completely new worlds of products and services invented just for the purpose.

..

Want to created a whole new device? Hire Steve Wozniak.

Want to create a whole new world? Oh, but that is the real trick.

And Steve Jobs gave us the masterclass.

..

Had Steve started Be and Jean-Louis built NeXT, we would still be in the exact same situation today, and the only difference would be chunks of BeOS as the iPhone’s bones instead. Funny old world, eh? :)

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

#232

Post by [deleted] »

anthk wrote: post #196
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without crashing like Windows That depended _very_ heavily on your graphics card at the time. In 2001, I could get X to crash on my work computer if I shook my mouse too fast. At home on my matrox card, yes, it was rock stable.

Nvidia TNT2/Geforce2 MX later. EDIT: Also, Slackware was rock solid and it crashed far less than SuSE/Mandrake.

[deleted]

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

#233

Post by smallstepforman »

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…

BeOS R4.5 did have hardware accelerated OpenGL for 3dfx Voodoo cards. I played Quake 2 in 1999 with HW OpenGL acceleration. For R5 BeInc wanted to redo their OpenGL stack, and the initial prototypes seeded to testers actually had more FPS on BeOS than under Windows.

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

#234

Post by denimboy »

The way BeOS used filesystem attributes like a database was way ahead of the curve and it still might be.

This book was a great read back in the day of what goes into a "modern" filesystem design

   https://archive.org/details/practical-file-system-design
"Practical File System Design" was technical but also readable. Straight from the man who designed BFS which makes it more of an accomplishment IMO.

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

#235

Post by smallstepforman »

perardi wrote: post #56

In my hazy recollection, there was another, rather pedestrian reason Apple didn't go for BeOS: it had almost no infrastructure for printing. The Mac's niche was prepress and desktop publishing (remember that phrase?), and BeOS could barely print and had no color management. (Though I could be totally wrong on this, and welcome a correction.)

I also read a story about how BeOS DPx (developer previews) lacked decent printing support and this was another reason why Apple chose NeXT. The irony is that Apple had to redo the NeXT printing stack anyhow, as did BeOS in R4, and they both ended up using CUPS. Also another reason was lack of x86 support, which forced BeInc to quickly rush out a x86 port in R3.0. Intel were so impressed by the x86 performance, that they ended up investing $4M into BeInc.

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

#236

Post by blihp »

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.

They couldn't afford to compete with Intel on processors... they just didn't have the volumes and every generation kept getting more expensive. For Intel, it was getting relatively cheaper thanks to economies of scale since their unit volumes were exploding throughout the 90's. Also, Intel's dominance in manufacturing process kept leapfrogging their progress on the CPU architecture front.

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

#237

Post by loeg »

ulfw wrote: post #61
beagle3 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft, the incumbent, offered OEMs cheaper Windows licenses as long as there was no dual boot, or a windows license was paid for every machine sold regardless of what it ran. Under these terms, it was suicide for OEMs to offer anything except “only Windows”. I was actually working for another company whose software was killed by Microsoft by a similar “or else” threat from Microsoft at the time. Microsoft was a b…

And what would have stopped OEMs to offer the same device with a different SKU with BeOS AND Windows for say x USD more? (kind of like Dell does with their Linux lappies)

More SKUs cost more in manufacturing, QA; choice paralysis may drive away customers. All for a relatively niche offering that might piss off their big product. Little upside. It's even a bit surprising Dell sells Linux laptops, considering.

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

#238

Post by cr0sh »

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 don't know if it's true or not, but I've long blamed Microsoft for killing SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc).

MS worked with SGI on a project known as Fahrenheit - to unify Direct3D and OpenGL:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_(graphics_API)

...well, we all know what happened - but I've often thought that Microsoft hastened their demise.

Somewhere in there, of course, was also the whole SGI moving away from IRIX (SGI's unix variant) to Windows NT (IIRC, this was on the Octane platform) - there being some upset over it by the SGI community. Maybe that was part of the "last gasp"? I'm sure some here have better info about those times; I merely watched from the sidelines, because I certainly didn't have any access to SGI hardware, nor any means to purchase some myself - waaaaay out of my price range then and now.

Of course - had SGI not gone belly up, I'm not sure we'd have NVidia today...? So maybe there's a silver lining there at least?

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

#239

Post by smallstepforman »

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++.

Unlike Erlang which copies messages, and Pony which uses reference capabilities, BeAPI used a pragmatic approach where BMessages shared a kernel memory pool. Add the ability to filter messages and dynamically retarget messages, and you get a PRACTICAL (vs academic) Actor model. I wouldn't say it was half-hearted and primitive, on the contrary.

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

#240

Post by bitL »

navjack27 wrote: post #222
Accujack wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

2048x1536 was already a thing as well.
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