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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

#261

Post by masswerk »

icedchai wrote: post #145
danans wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Amiga had preemptive multitasking in the 80's. (No memory protection though.)

So did the Lisa even earlier (and Xenix, which was a derivat of Unix Vers. 7, anecdotally also seen on the Lisa).

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

#262

Post by msla »

laumars wrote: post #248
msla wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I admit I was unclear on the time I was talking about, and probably inadvertently mangled a few things. As for Linux in the XP era, I was using it, yes, but I wouldn't recommend it to others back then because it still had pretty hard sticking points with regards to what hardware it…

Yeah Wifi on Linux sucked in those days. For me that was the biggest pain point about desktop Linux. In fact I seem to recall having fewer issues with WiFi on FreeBSD than I did on Linux -- that's pure anecdata of course. I remember the first time I managed to get this one laptop's WiFi working without an external dongle and to do that I had to run Windows drivers on Linux via some wrapper-tool (not WINE). To this da…

> I remember the first time I managed to get this one laptop's WiFi working without an external dongle and to do that I had to run Windows drivers on Linux via some wrapper-tool (not WINE). To this day I have no idea how that ever worked.

ndiswrapper. It's almost a shibboleth among people who were using Linux on laptops Way Back When.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDISwrapper

> NDISwrapper is a free software driver wrapper that enables the use of Windows XP network device drivers (for devices such as PCI cards, USB modems, and routers) on Linux operating systems. NDISwrapper works by implementing the Windows kernel and NDIS APIs and dynamically linking Windows network drivers to this implementation. As a result, it only works on systems based on the instruction set architectures supported by Windows, namely IA-32 and x86-64.

[snip]

> When a Linux application calls a device which is registered on Linux as an NDISwrapper device, the NDISwrapper determines which Windows driver is targeted. It then converts the Linux query into Windows parlance, it calls the Windows driver, waits for the result and translates it into Linux parlance then sends the result back to the Linux application. It's possible from a Linux driver (NDISwrapper is a Linux driver) to call a Windows driver because they both execute in the same address space (the same as the Linux kernel). If the Windows driver is composed of layered drivers (for example one for Ethernet above one for USB) it's the upper layer driver which is called, and this upper layer will create new calls (IRP in Windows parlance) by calling the "mini ntoskrnl". So the "mini ntoskrnl" must know there are other drivers, it must have registered them in its internal database a priori by reading the Windows ".inf" files.

It's kind of amazing it worked as well as it did. It wasn't exactly fun setting it up, but I never had any actual problems with it as I recall.

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

#263

Post by lmm »

bergie wrote: post #208
asveikau wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It actually worked pretty nicely - if anything better back in those days when software expected to run on different unixes, before the linux monoculture of today.

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

#264

Post by waddlesplash »

rwmj wrote: post #242
kungtotte wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have to have the right laptop. At the time I had a Thinkpad (X1 IIRC?) which fairly much worked out of the box, but I'm fairly sure it won't work on $random laptop. For best results and the lowest barrier to entry try it first in a VM.

Actually these days, Haiku will probably at least boot on $random laptop, and if you have a WiFi chip that FreeBSD also supports (we reuse their network drivers), you can probably even connect wirelessly.

I run Haiku on my ThinkPad E550 (2015), I know some of the other devs run on Dell XPS 13, HPs, etc. And the same is true in towers (Ryzen is becoming a popular pick.)

GPU acceleration drivers are the one real kind of driver we lack at this point.

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

#265

Post by lmm »

rusk wrote: post #178
tialaramex wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

The famous "fast inverse square root" was in Quake 3.

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

#266

Post by waddlesplash »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #54
rvz wrote: post #36

BeOS was really something of what the future 'could' have almost been. Too bad that it was killed by better competitors. But again I think its fair to compare with the lessons learned from its successor 'Haiku' that can be learned by many other OSes: From what I can see from using Haiku for a bit, it has the bazar community element from the open-source culture with its package management and ports system from Linux a…

> 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.

> That's a hell of an understatement right there. It still doesn't have any capability for accelerated video, does it?

We do not. But that (and proper power management) basically all that's missing at this point; the rest are "just bugs".

That is to say: WiFi, ethernet, USB, SSDs, EFI, etc. should all work on the majority of hardware, both current and past.

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

#267

Post by jsjohnst »

deniska wrote: post #87
colejohnson66 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do like that you have to “sudo” a program to allow it to access certain files. Even if I am the only user, it stops malicious programs from modifying certain files without me noticing.

Obligatory related xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1200/

Posting links to XKCD like this is generally considered to be a low quality post, hence the downvotes. I’m not one of the downvoters, but thought I’d share the reason as nobody else did.

Edit: gotta love HN! I try to be helpful to someone else that was downvoted to heck with an explanation of why that was the case (based on past replies I’ve seen) and now my post is the own with a negative score. Cheers y’all!

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

#268

Post by forwhomst »

acdha wrote: post #221
MisterTea wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The tradeoff was the throughput of your compilation was terrible. BeOS wasn't magic, it just prioritized the UI over all else. That's not advanced, it's just one possible choice.

MacOS prior to OS X had the same property: literally nothing else could happen at the same time if the user was moving the mouse, which is why you had to take the ball out of the mouse before burning a CD-R on that operating system.

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

#269

Post by anthk »

rusk wrote: post #225
anthk wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You coudn't look up and down, neither you could do with DN3D.

I am not confused, the opposite. I grew up with that.

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

#270

Post by asveikau »

projektfu wrote: post #163
asveikau wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps Digital UNIX and HP/UX but HP/Compaq was a collaborator on IA-64. I don't think I heard of SUN or IBM saying that.

Sgi is another prominent example cited elsewhere in the thread.
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