What was truly revolutionary for BeOS was the muti-threaded user interface where you could have multiple mice connected to the same machine and they could interact with the UI at the same time. Hardly anyone paid any attention to this. But the possibilities are amazing.
BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
291–300 of 430 posts
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#292I was really taken with beos when it was a live product. However, Nextstep really was a much much better basis for taking Apple into the future compared to beos. As has been proven resoundingly first by the seamless switch from PowerPC to intel, and then the ongoing smoothness and general acceptance of OS X by industry.
I know it’s not universally loved but OSX/nextstep for me is really everything I could have wanted from an operating system.
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#293BeOS 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…
I installed BeOS when it first came out. To me it was a cool tech demo, but it was fairly useless as it didn't have a usable browser (NetPositive was half baked at best), couldn't play a lot of video codecs and couldn't connect to a Windows network share. I feel like if they launched a better experience for existing Windows users, it would have done much better.
- VLC existed for Be
- So was Opera
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work for Be in Menlo Park in a previous life and I can confirm that the code base quality would have made for a very bad outcome for Apple. Security was the least of the numerous serious issues. That said BeOS somewhat still exists in spirit as a lot of folks from Be went to build/contribute to Android.
> a lot of folks from Be went to build/contribute to Android. Does that include the quality and security perspective as well? ;-) j/k Having never crossed paths with a former Be employee before, __thank you so much__ for your contribution. BeOS was so instrumental to my perspective on computing and operating systems (and potentially the conception of my disdain for what Microsoft did to the world of operating systems…
> a lot of folks from Be went to build/contribute to Android.
That's correct, the IPC in AOSP, Binder, is basically borrow from BeOS
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to work for Be in Menlo Park in a previous life and I can confirm that the code base quality would have made for a very bad outcome for Apple. Security was the least of the numerous serious issues. That said BeOS somewhat still exists in spirit as a lot of folks from Be went to build/contribute to Android.
Thanks a lot! I ran BeOS fulltime for a few years (R3/4/5) and I'm looking at a BeOS "the Media OS" poster at my wall here. Fond memories!
Care to share where you got the poster?
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
First rule about downvotes is we don't talk about downvotes.
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#297BeOS was cool and all but I loved the BeBox with the GeekPort.
When I worked at a dot-com 1.0 failed startup in 1999 one of our big wigs was a former exec at Be, and he was like the coolest dude I knew at the time. Still up there.
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#298Ah, 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…
bounced between windows and os/2, never really used beos as an os, mostly just as a toy for fun. the one thing I remember is that I could play a video that for the time looked amazing without issue. I want to say I even played Quake on it, in a window!
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#299Earlier 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…
On a similar note, I've often wondered what Commodore's OS would have turned into. Not out of some misplaced nostalgia, just curiousity about the Could Have Been.
My guess is that by now in 2020, it would have at some point had an OSX moment where Commodore would have had to chuck it out, since both Apple and Microsoft have effectively done exactly that since then. Still, I'd love to peek into Amiga OS 9 descended from continual usage.
Re: BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
#300When I started University in 2000, I had a quad-boot system: Win98, Win2000, BeOS 5 and Slackware Linux (using the BeOS bootload as my primary because it had the prettiest colors). I mostly used Slackware and Win98 (for games), but BeOS was really neat. It had support for the old Booktree video capture cards, could capture video without dropping frames like VirtualDub often did, and it even had support for disabling…
> you pretty much just have Windows, Linux and maybe FreeBSD/OpenBSD [...]
That sounds just as good? Compared to quad-booting Win98/Win2000/BeOS5/Slackware, today you could quad-boot Win10/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Ubuntu. Actually, depending on what you count as different systems and what exact hardware you have, you could have 2 laptops sitting on your desk: a pinebook running your choice of netbsd, openbsd, freebsd, or some linux (https://forum.pine64.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=107), and an x86 laptop multibooting Windows 10, Android, Ubuntu GNU/Linux, Alpine Busybox/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Redox (https://www.redox-os.org/screens/). That's 2 processor families in 2 machines running what I would count as 4 and 8 operating systems each.
I think we're doing fine.