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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

#301

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

rcarmo wrote: post #94

I ran BeOS back in the day (even have the developer book!) and I've been trying Haiku on and off over the years. It's been interesting. The browser isn't quite all there yet but might be considered serviceable, and you can sort of get a working dev environment going on it (not many modern runtimes, though, nor a way to run Linux binaries that would let me do Clojure). It's certainly worth keeping an eye on, although…

> if I were to install it permanently on any machine to tinker with, it would almost certainly be a Pi

The pi is such a great device for this. If I were working on any niche operating system (or building one from scratch), I'd target qemu first, and the pi second. It may not be the nicest hardware out there, but it is a single platform that loads of people have, that allows trivial disk swapping (upside of no onboard flash -> everything on swappable SD card), and is dirt cheap.

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

#302

Post by amatecha »

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?

Check out this video[0], basically an Amiga with an accelerator card potentially makes for the fastest environment to run 68k-based Mac OS (System 7) ...

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph0gxzL3UI

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

#303

Post by amatecha »

reaperducer wrote: post #224
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah yeah I still have my PowerComputing PowerTower Pro! At the time it was a current model, its 512mb of RAM was insane and my friends & classmates were jealous! hahah :)

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

#304

Post by shagie »

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.

NeXTSTEP appears to have first gotten incorporated throughly into the OS X codebase. Browse through the Foundation library for the Mac - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/ . Everything that starts with NS was part of NextStep.

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

#305

Post by eckza »

OakNinja wrote: post #260
eckza wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> negative externalities This is very true. macOS and the iPhone, for me, went from being "obviously the very best of the best" to "the lesser of all evils". When my 2015 rMBP finally gives up the ghost and / or when 10.13 loses compatibility with the applications I use, I have no idea what I'm going to do - probably buy another working 2015 rMBP used and pray that the Linux drivers are livable by then. I know it's r…

You don’t agree on the 16” being the spiritual successor of the mid 2015 15”?

I feel like it's a huge step in the right direction, but for my own personal use:

- I still have mostly USB 2.0 peripherals. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

- I'm still hung up on the MagSafe adapter.

- I love the form factor. The 13" display is the perfect size, for me. I could've switched to a 15" 2015 rMBP with better specs, but I hated how big it was.

- I have no interest in using any version of macOS beyond 10.13, at present.

I'm really glad that they brought the Esc key back, especially as a pretty serious vim user. I don't know, maybe I'm stuck in the past. I'm certain that many, many people are really enjoying the new Macbook Pro 16; I just really, really like this laptop. It's the best computer I've ever owned.

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

#306

Post by erickhill »

morio wrote: post #128
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…

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.

And apparently a couple Amiga gurus made their way to Be (see: Fred Fish).

I’d always heard that after Amiga (and Be) many decided to opt for Linux for philosophical reasons.

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

#307

Post by wutbrodo »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #150
pjmlp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside HN and Reddit talks, most people I know don't even care about FOSS OSes existence, they just want something that they buy at the shopping mall and can use right away.

In fairness, I don't think most people care about the OS at all , FOSS or otherwise; they care that the UI is something they can use, and that their apps work. If you perfected WINE overnight, I'll bet you could sit 80% of the population down at a lightly-skinned FreeBSD box and they'd never know.

I don't even think you'd need that for most of the population: it's been quite some time since the median user cared about desktop software[1]. I switched my parents over to a Linux Mint install a decade ago when I went away to college, and it lowered my over-the-phone tech support burden to zero overnight.

I also had (non-CS but very smart) friends who switched to (ie dual-booted) Linux on their own after seeing how much better my system was than a Windows box. A decade later, one of them is getting her PhD in veterinary pathology and still dual boots, firing Windows up only when she feels like gaming.

[1] My impression is that committed PC gamers aren't a large portion of the desktop user population, but I may be wrong.

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

#308

Post by gurkendoktor »

OakNinja wrote: post #260
eckza wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> negative externalities This is very true. macOS and the iPhone, for me, went from being "obviously the very best of the best" to "the lesser of all evils". When my 2015 rMBP finally gives up the ghost and / or when 10.13 loses compatibility with the applications I use, I have no idea what I'm going to do - probably buy another working 2015 rMBP used and pray that the Linux drivers are livable by then. I know it's r…

You don’t agree on the 16” being the spiritual successor of the mid 2015 15”?

I'm in the same boat as the sibling poster (albeit with a 15" machine) and I'll add this:

- The TouchBar is terrible

I hope they'll bring back a non-TouchBar configuration when they release the "new" keyboard on a 13" MacBook Pro. I could live with both a 13" or 15" laptop, but right now the list of drawbacks is still 1-2 items too long.

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

#309

Post by wutbrodo »

pwthornton wrote: post #192
embeddedpro wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti competitive business practices of Apple make it hard to imagine the world could be worse. Instead of competition, Apple survives off marketing medium quality products at high prices. I'm not sure how that's good for anyone unless they own Apple stock.

You don't get to Apple is (large market cap, high customer satisfaction scores, high reviews in the tech press, etc.) because of marketing. If it were that easy, companies would just copy their marketing or load up on marketing and they would be successful. And a huge part of Apple's current success is based on the tech and expertise they got from NeXT. That work underpins not just laptops and desktops but phones, ta…

I'm as reflexively inclined as many technical people to be dismissive of marketing, but I dont think you're right here. You can't "just copy" marketing in the way you can't "just copy" anything else that a company is world-class in, and good marketing can indeed build market dominance (do you think coca cola is really a vastly superior technical innovation over Pepsi?)

The fact that it isn't a net good for users in most cases doesn't mean that it's trivial to do.

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

#310

Post by TheCondor »

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, networking, multiuser, i10n, print (don’t even begin to underestimate this and quartz and display postscript) beos was an rtos with a neat UI. it was still fun but there was a gigantic pile of work before it could do what system 7 did, let alone what next did.
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