BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by _frog » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 7:38 AM UTC

shagie wrote: post #304

jimbokun wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My understanding was always that NeXTSTEP served as the foundation of OS X, and while it certainly got a new desktop environment and compatibility with MacOS's legacy Carbon APIs, it was essentially still NeXTSTEP under the hood.

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

#332

Post by cable2600 » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 7:40 AM UTC

The BEOS software needs to be preserved in an archive for the free, PD, open source, software.

Mike Crawford RIP: Wrote spellswell: https://github.com/ErisBlastar/spellswell

and word services: https://github.com/ErisBlastar/wordservices

It was taken from one of his old sites before he lost control of it.

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

#333

Post by rusk » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 7:41 AM UTC

anthk wrote: post #269

rusk wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I grew up with it too ... I disagree with your categorical boundaries. The distinctions you draw are purely technical.

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

#334

Post by fit2rule » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 7:44 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #246

somesortofsystm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple began to re-kick ass when they made an amazing laptop (tiBook). This was the first truly viable Unix laptop, with promise to be a cut above the competition (there was none) in terms of style and usability. tiBook was bonkers. Suddenly, I didn't really need to sit in the room, surrounded by boxes, but rather could go to the park and access the room from under a tree. If Be had managed to capture that, I think it…

Toshiba was selling Solaris laptops.

Yeah, but were they as sexy as the tiBook?

Like the OP, for me the tiBook was a defining moment. A unix laptop, and it also looked good? Easy, immediate purchase.

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

#335

Post by rusk » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 7:46 AM UTC

forthac wrote: post #279

rusk wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doom was a 2D space that looked like a 3D space due to rendering tricks. You could never move along the Z-axis though because the engine doesn't represent, calculate, or store one. That's why you can't jump, and there are no overlapping areas of the maps.

Regardless of the “technicalities”. My point was that this, and other 3D games were something that Amiga could not do well - whether 3D, or “simulated 3D”.

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

#336

Post by sedatk » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 8:25 AM UTC

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #129

I was another former Be "power user." And I think that was probably accurate -- if you weren't in the "BeOS lifestyle" during the admittedly short window that it was possible, it's hard to understand how much promise it looked like it had. When I tell people I ran it full-time for over a year, they wonder how I managed to get anything done, but... - Pe was a great GUI text editor, competitive with BBEdit on the Mac -…

NetPositive was much better in Internet Explorer compatibility than Netscape when it used to matter.

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

#337

Post by rcarmo » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 8:30 AM UTC

waddlesplash wrote: post #276

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…

Doesn't Clojure run on the JVM? Haiku has OpenJDK, you know...

Last time I tried Java was two years ago. A few months back I installed it on KVM to check out the state of WebPositive, but didn’t actually get to try coding anything since the browser couldn’t load my webmail.

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

#338

Post by sedatk » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 8:36 AM UTC

localhost wrote: post #27

Before I first saw BeOS running on a colleague's machine back in the ~mid-late 90s (same guy who introduced me to Python) I used an SGI Onyx Reality Engine machine [1] (roughly $250K computer back in the day) for molecular mechanics simulations and BeOS ran circles around it on perceived responsiveness. I really wish we have OS's that prioritize input/output latency over all else. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SG…

Windows does that. Balance Set Manager boosts the priorities of threads that receive I/O. That’s why mouse movement is so smooth since Windows NT. (Not so much on Win9x).

MacOS probably does a similar thing too.

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

#339

Post by colinstrickland » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 9:11 AM UTC

That's a coincidence this surfacing right now. There must be something in the air. I was an enthusiastic BeOS user back when it was a thing (ironically, I switched to it because I thought NEXTSTEP didn't have much of a future left), and I used it for a few years, quite happily. It left me with a legacy of several BeBoxes, and over the holiday period, I was vaguely inspired to dust them off and wonder about what to do with them. I got one of them booting perfectly, here's a link I posted to reddit showing it's first POST

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/eku19u/du...

(first POST should have gone to slashdot really, ah well.)

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

#340

Post by ngcc_hk » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 9:12 AM UTC

It is not the OS, not even the software ... Apple would still be a failure if it is all desktop OS. And the first thing he did is to do sos to Microsoft and ask for office license for 5% Apple share for a reason. That is done.

Of course you lost in a battle or even a campaign does not mean you just lost the war.

The world is better with Steve, Microsoft with competition ...

Now we even have Microsoft having GitHub and linux running on windows.

Not if it is BeOS.