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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

#381

Post by machinecoffee »

bitL wrote: post #43
djsumdog wrote: post #10

When 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…

I think BeOS was the only OS that allowed smooth playback of videos and work at the same time, something Windows was capable 5 and Linux 10 years later :D

The thing also booted up faster than you could blink.

Of course that might have changed if they added more system services, but from POST screen to a usable desktop was easily under 15 seconds.

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

#382

Post by MisterTea »

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…

Oops, probably too late but the memorial day videos were included with BeOS. It was a bunch of the Be employees tossing a few broken monitors off the roof of their office building. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=beos+memorial+d...

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

#383

Post by rogihee »

bantunes wrote: post #295
rogihee wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It was not in the box. Back then, it was still quite difficult to get a hold on an actual R3 box here in Europe. There was 1 official reseller here in the Netherlands and I actually bought their official demo machine: the famous first dual processor Abit BP6 with 2x 400Mhz Celeron processors. When picking it up in their office I spotted the poster and asked if I may have it. Still got a T-Shirt and a hat too ;-).

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

#384

Post by pjmlp »

somesortofsystm wrote: post #364
pjmlp wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as colorful, http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/work/0012.html https://books.google.de/books?id=wDlUmfY9nQsC&pg=PT11&lpg=PT... Additionally there were UNIX laptops from NatureTech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dios0v0n9eY and Tadpole http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/32324/Tadpole-SPARCbo... https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/04/01/sparcbook-3000st-the-co... So no, "I mean, the fact that Apple shipped a Unix…

At that time, Linux on laptops was an absolutely great choice. None of your vendors were considered viable - far, far too expensive. However, Linux on x86 laptops at the time was amazing - portable Linux. So when Apple joined that party, and made the hardware neat, it was an easy switch. Portable, PPC-based, Unix. This was a delightful moment. Of course, I still have a Linux laptop around, and 20 years later .. I con…

At that time no one sane was putting GNU/Linux in production to replace battle tested UNIX systems, if they loved their job.

What Linux laptops? It hardly worked properly in most desktops.

The first laptop I managed to get Linux working at all was a Toshiba in 1999, while these systems were being sold since 1992.

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

#385

Post by tralarpa »

Flow wrote: post #363
jerf wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

I think AmigaOS 3 could be a nice kernel as it is. And to make it more Unix-y memory protection could be introduced but only for a new userland process with more traditional syscalls. It's a bit how DragonflyBSD is slowly converging to.

Amiga OS 9 would have looked very different from the Amiga OS that we know (I am talking from a developer's point of view, not about the GUI).

Since inter-process communication in Amiga OS was based on message passing with memory-sharing, it was impossible to add MMU-based memory protection later. As far as I know, even Amiga OS 4 (which runs on PowerPC platforms) is not able to provide full memory protection.

There was also only minimal support for resource tracking (although it was originally planned for the user interface). If a process crashed, its windows etc. would stay open. And nobody prevented a process to pass pointers to allocated system resources (e.g. a window) to other processes.

The API was incomplete and tied to the hardware, especially for everything concerning graphics. This encouraged programmers to directly access the hardware and the internal data structures of the OS. This situation was greatly improved in Amiga OS 3, of course far too late. Amiga OS 3 was basically two or three years too late. As far as I know, Apple provided much cleaner APIs, which greatly simplified later the evolution of their OS without breaking all existing programs.

Finally, the entire OS was designed for single-core CPUs. At several places in the OS, it is assumed that only one process can run at a time. This doesn't sound like a big issue (could be fixed, right?) but so far nobody has managed to port Amiga OS to multi-core CPUs (Amiga OS4 runs on multi-core CPUs, but it can only use one core).

I have been the owner of an Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200, but to be brutally honest, I see Amiga as a one-hit wonder. After the initial design in the mid-1980s, development of the OS and the hardware basically stopped.

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

#386

Post by Wowfunhappy »

amatecha wrote: post #302
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Whoa, the Amiga is faster even though it's running in a VM!

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

#388

Post by bartvanH »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #387

As someone who's interested in platform/OS interface and UX design, is using modern Haiku (in a VM) a decent parallel for what using BeOS was like, or would I need to get ahold of the real thing?

I've played with both BeOS and Haiku, and I would say Haiku is practically the same UX wise. They have built more tooling etc on Haiku, like a package manager where as far as i remember BeOS was More windows like (download file, install)

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

#389

Post by gfiorav »

killion wrote: post #89

One of the last lines threw me off... "Would Tim Berners-Lee have used a BeBox to run the world’s first web server instead?" The BeBox didn't ship until 1995. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first version of the web in 1991. So nope, that wouldn't have happened.

He used a NeXT computer for that IIRC

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

#390

Post by allenbrunson »

diskzero wrote: post #283
morio wrote: post #128

Earlier 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.

I too used to work at Be (Hi!) as well as developed applications for BeOS. I also worked at Apple on various releases of OS X. NextStep was far ahead of BeOS on multiple fronts. BeOS was a lot of fun to work on, but only scratched the surface of what was needed for a truly commercial general purpose OS. If Apple would have acquired Be instead of Next, who knows what the world would be like today. Apple ended up with…

I can never let a thread about BeOS go by without adding my two cents, because I also worked at Be in Menlo Park, back in the day. (I went down with the ship and got laid off as they went out of business.)

I was sore about it at the time, but I agree that Apple made the right decision by choosing NextStep over BeOS. If for no other reason, because that's what brought Jobs back. It's hard to imagine Apple making their stunning comeback without him.

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