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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

#311

Post by crtlaltdel »

qubex wrote: post #73
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #47

Earlier 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.

“Security” is a bit of a misnomer in this context: I think what you actually meant was “multi-user architecture” which, as remarked elsewhere, undergirds the whole notion of keeping processes from promiscuously sharing any and all resources.

yeah i think of it more as multi tenet safety

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

#312

Post by angrygoat »

We had one of the two-processor BeBoxes at my uni computer club – it was a really cool machine to play around on, and at the time I was using it (1999) one of our few graphical terminals with a web browser, so in quite a bit of demand.

We also had a NeXT tower, three SGI machines running IRIX, a Mac upon which someone had installed Mac OS X Server 1.0 (NeXT innards, UI looked like classic MacOS).

I kind of miss the diversity of systems we had back then. In many ways we've gone forward – tinkering is much easier now with the preponderance of cheap, fast dev boards and systems like the Raspberry Pi, but it does feel like actual user-facing stuff is now largely locked down, without as much innovation and competition.

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

#313

Post by projektfu »

asveikau wrote: post #270
projektfu wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed, it probably killed SGI.

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

#314

Post by statico »

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…

Thanks for this. I remember being at MacWorld and watching a movie play while holding down menu items. On Classic Mac, which I was used to, this would block the entire OS (almost). BeOS seemed space-age.

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

#315

Post by Eric_WVGG »

rvz wrote: post #188
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #60

I feel like the biggest missed opportunity of the “mobile revolution” ten years ago was BeOS. It seemed clear to me that Android would be a bust for smartphone manufacturers (nobody has really made money off of Android except for Google and Samsung, the latter of whom accomplished this by dominating that market). If Sony, for example, had gotten ahold of BeOS and tried to vertically integrate in a manner similar to A…

Well there's your reason why Google has the expertise to build Fuchsia. Most of the BeOS guys were hired there to work on Android and now they are doing it again with Fuchsia. We will all come back to this comment in 10 years to find ourselves running Fuchsia on our phones, tablets and our new Pixelbooks.

Huh! I thought it was the Danger Sidekick crew

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

#316

Post by arpa »

jamesfmilne wrote: post #6

I've been wasting a bit of time lately trying to get BeOS 5.0 Professional running on my PowerMac 8500/180. Had to order a USB CD/DVD burner off of Amazon to write the ISO to a CD as I didn't actually own any hardware with a CD/DVD burner anymore :D

Hey, consider yourself lucky you did not need a boot floppy :D

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

#317

Post by arpa »

pjmlp wrote: post #243
hinkley wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Apple had failed, I wonder what Steve would have done after Pixar. Start a new computer company? Could he (or perhaps a better question: would he) have swooped in with Mac compatibility mode? The real win was a mobile future sans Microsoft. I doubt smart phones would be what they are today if not for the iPhone, and the iPhone required huge resources and a maniac cracking the whip. Would Jony Ive leave a failing A…

Nokia is still around, and working from the offices I used to visit regularly in Espoo.

I wouldn't call that what's left after elopcalypse "alive" and "around"

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

#318

Post by schwank »

I was a paid BeOS customer and still have copies of multiple versions in the original branded shipper envelopes. I have fond memories of using it back during my college CS days. Really loved the interface, that was quite the time when I used NT4, Solaris, Irix, and BeOS all at the same time.

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

#320

Post by forwhomst »

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…

Not to disagree much but when Be was going around the country doing their "demo days" on the bebox nobody had a DVD player in their computer. DVD wasn't even on the market until after Be had ported BeOS to x86. People thought that playing the VHS-quality music videos that were included in Windows 95 was a hot demo (on a PC).
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