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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

#391

Post by forwhomst »

acdha wrote: post #373
forwhomst wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tradeoff was the throughput of your compilation was terrible. BeOS wasn't magic, it just prioritized the UI over all else. That's not advanced, it's just one possible choice. MacOS prior to OS X had the same property: literally nothing else could happen at the same time if the user was moving the mouse, which is why you had to take the ball out of the mouse before burning a CD-R on that operating system.

Oh, sure, it was obviously limiting the other tasks. The point was that this is almost always the right choice for a general purpose operating system: no user wants to have their music skip, UI go unresponsive, file transfers to fail, etc. because the OS devoted resources to a batch process. You’re only partially correct about classic macOS: you could definitely hang the OS by holding down the mouse button but this w…

Well in 1994 a CD-R without a buffer was neither cheap nor low-end. It was the only thing you could get, cost as much as a car, and was bigger than a laser printer.

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

#392

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #378

That's sad Haiku won't get traction. An viable alternative on the desktop PC OS market would be a great thing to have (even on a commercial basis, not necessarily for free). Linux for 1% geeks, MacOS X for Apple hardware owners and Windows for everybody else does not seem like a healthy competition. Android, iOS, Chrome, Facebook - everything is monopolized nowadays. Governments should really consider supporting alte…

Unfortunately the way the PC market is makes it basically impossible for a new desktop OS to show up at this point. The hurdle in drivers alone would be insane, and the easy solution to that is to only target a small set of hardware which effectively makes you a hardware company (kinda like Apple), but that probably won't work either since people are a lot less likely to try out your OS if they need to buy a new computer to do so.

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

#393

Post by Accujack »

anthk wrote: post #272
Accujack wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bear in mind that resolutions back then were much lower than now, and not all computers had 24 bit color frame buffers. Video cards ran one monitor for the most part, with no others attached. Be had well written multi threading and preemptive multitasking implemented on a clean slate - no compatibility hacks required. That meant it worked well and was quick/responsive. There were still limits, and the OS didn't have…

1280x1024, not so far from 1920x1080.

That was more the exception than the rule. Besides, 1080P is about 45% more pixels per frame than 1280, and likely at a higher frame rate. Big difference in hardware load.

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

#394

Post by Accujack »

navjack27 wrote: post #222
Accujack wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bear in mind that resolutions back then were much lower than now, and not all computers had 24 bit color frame buffers. Video cards ran one monitor for the most part, with no others attached. Be had well written multi threading and preemptive multitasking implemented on a clean slate - no compatibility hacks required. That meant it worked well and was quick/responsive. There were still limits, and the OS didn't have…

I mean maybe. I was running 1600x1200 on my monitor back then.

Some people were, but it wasn't too common. Workstations had far higher resolutions long before this, but home PCs running non 3d accelerated hardware were still mostly 1024x768-ish.

The BeBox itself was vastly different hardware than a standard PC as well, so it could break a lot of rules as far as smooth concurrency and multitasking... kinda like the Amiga did.

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

#395

Post by runjake »

pjmlp wrote: post #357
runjake wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AmigaOS was not UNIX-like in the least. Amiga UNIX, which shipped on a couple models, was directly System V UNIX, though.

That was the point I was trying to convey regarding BeOS. Having a shell that looks like UNIX, and a couple of command line utilities similar to the UNIX ones, does not make an OS UNIX.

Ah. I gotcha now.

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

#396

Post by MisterTea »

forwhomst wrote: post #268
acdha wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember circa 2000 being able to simultaneously compile Mozilla, transfer DV video from a camcorder into an editor, check email, and surf the web on a dual Pentium Pro system with no hint of UI stutter or dropped frames in the firewire video transfer. It was at least another decade before SSDs and kernel improvements made that possible on Linux, Windows, or OS X.

The tradeoff was the throughput of your compilation was terrible. BeOS wasn't magic, it just prioritized the UI over all else. That's not advanced, it's just one possible choice. MacOS prior to OS X had the same property: literally nothing else could happen at the same time if the user was moving the mouse, which is why you had to take the ball out of the mouse before burning a CD-R on that operating system.

You can down play it all you want but it was a really nice OS for its time. It's smooth GUI was very competitive to other clunky windowing systems of the time. The advanced part was threading and smp support were woven into the system api making smp development a first class programming concept. Other operating systems felt like threading was bolted on and clunky. And thanks to the smp support prioritizing the GUI made 100% sense. And I believe there were some soft real time abilities of the scheduler so processes with high priority ran reliably.

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

#397

Post by pjmlp »

erickhill wrote: post #306
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.

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.

Which is ironic, given that I am yet to see a GNU/Linux based hardware setup that matches the experience, hence why I went back to macOS/Windows that much a much closer multimedia experience.

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

#398

Post by thu2111 »

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.

I'm curious what sort of issues you have in mind. I was never very familiar with BeOS but from what I understood the issue with it was more that its responsiveness came from very heavy use of multi-threading, but that also made it very hard to write robust apps for it as, in effect, all app code had to be thread safe. App devs found that condition too hard to handle.

Can I assume that the quality issues were somewhat related to that? BeOS devs found it no easier to write thread safe code in C++ than app devs did?

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

#399

Post by jacques_chester »

_8ljf wrote: post #371
kbenson wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I've ever encountered someone so invested in the "great man" theory of history. Jobs was obviously talented, but assuming no matter where he went he would have had the same level of success is discounting a lot of luck in how everything lined up,and who was available to help bring all the things to market jobs is famous for. There's no guarantee the hundreds or thousands of people that were also essentia…

“Those people deserve respect and recognition too.” ORLY? Name them. -- Not “great man”. Great vision . Geeks tend massively to overrate the importance technical aptitude, which is what they’re good at, and underrate everything else—business experience, sales skills, market savvy, and other soft skills—which they’re not. Contrast someone like Jobs, who understood the technical side well enough to be able to surround…

I hear you, I do, but here's another perspective: Jobs without Wozniak wound up being California's third-best Mercedes salesman.

And neither of them would've mattered a jot if they were born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or if they were medieval peasants, or if Jobs hadn't been adopted, or or or ...

Luck is enormously influential. There thousands of Jobsalikes per Jobs. Necessity isn't sufficiency.

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

#400

Post by gok »

rayiner wrote: post #28

Oh man! I first tried BeOS personal edition when it came on a CD with Maximum PC magazine. (Referring to same demo CD, though the poster is not me: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1067159&s... . Also, how crazy is it that Ars Technica’s forums have two decade old posts? In 2000, that would be like seeing forum posts from 1980.) I remember being so happy when we got SDSL, and I could get online from…

> What would a modern BeOS look like?

There's a bit of BeOS in Android. Binder IPC is much like BMessage. And nowadays everyone puts stuff like graphics and media in a separate user space daemons, which was unusual for the time. Pervasive multithreading basically happened in the form of pervasive multiprocessing.

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