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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

#421

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #410
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

Perhaps one should build their new OS around a compatibility layer to support Windows drivers. I hardly am too much of a system programmer and don't know how much sense would that make but AFAIK this is possible. E.g. I remember using Windows WiFi NIC drivers on Kubuntu a decade ago.

If it were reasonable to do, then Linux or one of the BSDs would have done it ages ago. NDISWrapper was a special case.

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

#422

Post by qwerty456127 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #421
qwerty456127 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps one should build their new OS around a compatibility layer to support Windows drivers. I hardly am too much of a system programmer and don't know how much sense would that make but AFAIK this is possible. E.g. I remember using Windows WiFi NIC drivers on Kubuntu a decade ago.

If it were reasonable to do, then Linux or one of the BSDs would have done it ages ago. NDISWrapper was a special case.

Linux and BSDs hardly care much about desktop stuff and they already have all the drivers for the relevant server stuff.

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

#423

Post by lproven »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #342
_frog wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. That is all those NS... prefix meant.

I always thought that, too.

It's wrong.

Original NeXT classes were prefixed NX_. Then NeXT worked with Sun to make a portable version of the GUI that could run on top of other OSes -- primarily targeting Solaris, of course, but also Windows NT.

That was called OpenStep and it is the source of classes with the prefix NS_ -- standing for Next/Sun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep#History

This is why Sun bought NeXT software vendor Lighthouse, whose CEO Jonathan Schwartz who later became Sun's CEO.

Unfortunately for NeXT (and ultimately for Sun), right after this, Sun changed course and backed Java instead.

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

#424

Post by lproven »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #379
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…

> 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. I love everything I've read about BeOS but to be honest I must mention I couldn't understand how to use Haiku (I've never used the original BeOS) once I've tried - id didn't feel intuitive at all. And I'm not really stupid, I've been using different flavors of Linux as a primar…

> I wish desktop OSes could be more simple, i.e. without multi-user and file access rights.

Have a look into Oberon and its successor A2/Bluebottle.

http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/

https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/46523.html

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

#425

Post by lproven »

int_19h wrote: post #252

I enjoy the regular reminiscing of BeOS, but for all the talk about how fast it was on hardware common at the time, I wonder why nobody remembers an even more impressive "tech demo" of an OS from that same period - QNX 6 desktop? An ISO of evaluation edition of 6.2 was easily downloadable for a while, and it was pretty neat: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/qnx621 (I know that QNX was and still is widely used…

Did you know that Blackberry 10 is QNX?

I had a Passport for a while. A lovely phone, and the OS had an Android runtime so _some_ Android apps worked... but like other OSes that let you run non-native apps, it resulted in BB10 never attaining a critical mass of apps.

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

#426

Post by asveikau »

tralarpa wrote: post #385
Flow wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Why can't you do shared memory message passing with MMU protection? There is no reason an application in a modern memory protected OS can't voluntarily share pages when the use case is appropriate. This happens today. You can mmap the same pages, you can use posix shm, X has the shm extension...

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

#427

Post by lproven »

There is another big reason that Apple didn't buy Be and was right not to -- and I say that although BeOS is my favourite x86 OS ever.

Dev tools.

Remember Steve Ballmer's "Developers! Developers! Developers!" dance? https://youtu.be/I14b-C67EXY?t=10

He was right. Without developers for a new OS, you are dead in the water. Which is my MS has fought so hard to keep compatibility.

Apple had to switch OS. That meant it had to persuade all its devs to switch OS. That meant it had to offer the devs something very special, and that something was NeXTstep and Interface Builder. NeXT's dev tools were the best in the software business and _that_ offered trad Mac devs a good enough reason to come across.

Be had nothing like that.

BeOS was wonderful, but it was not a replacement for NeXTstep as a replacement for MacOS.

But there was another company out there.

BeOS was a natively multiprocessor OS, when that was very rare. One of the reasons is that in fast x86 computers, the x86 chip is one of the most expensive single components in the machine, and it puts out most of the heat.

Especially at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, the era of big fat Slot 2 Pentium IIIs and worse still Pentium 4s.

But there was one company making powerful desktops with the cheapest, coolest-running CPUs in the world, where making a dual-processor machine _in 1998_ was barely more expensive than making a uniprocessor one.

That company's CPUs are the best-selling CPUs ever designed and outsell all x86 chips put together (Intel + AMD + Via etc.) by well over 10 to 1.

And it needed a lightweight, SMP-capable OS very badly, right at the time Be was porting BeOS from PowerPC to x86...

https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/55562.html

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

#428

Post by ianamartin »

_8ljf wrote: post #231
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.

True, but a technology is only a means to an end, not an end itself. What sells is product. You may have the finest tech on the planet—and that means precisely squat. What counts is putting bums on seats. Your seats. And keeping them there. Limps of tech are just a vehicle for that; to be used, abused, chewed up, and/or discarded on the road(s) to that end. Apple could have done better; they certainly did plenty wors…

I think Steve Jobs The Marketing and Sales Genius is an incorrect myth.

Jobs was an outstanding product manager who sweated all the details for his products. And in contrast to Tim Cook, Jobs was a passionate user of actual desktop and laptop computers. He sweated the details of the iPhone too, but his daily driver was a mac, not an iPad. Cook is less into the product aspect, and it really really shows. Cook is a numbers and logistics guy, but not really into the product.

That's a thing I think Apple has fixed recently with some reshuffling and putting a product person (Jeff Williams) in the COO role. The COO role is also a signal that he'll be the next CEO when Tim Cook retires.

To be clear, I don't disagree that Jobs was a great marketer. But that stemmed from his own personal involvement with the product design of the mac--and later the iOS devices--rather than some weirdly prodigious knack for marketing.

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

#429

Post by microtonal »

ac29 wrote: post #408
microtonal wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High definition playback is still not as smooth as it could be in browsers on Linux (or if your CPU is fast enough, it will drain your battery more quickly), because most browsers only have experimental support for video acceleration. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_accelera...

Pretty much any CPU released in the past decade should be capable of decoding 1080P video as well as a GPU (though yes, will use slightly more power). The only exceptions I can think of are early generation Atom processors, which were terribly slow.

Pretty much any CPU released in the past decade should be capable of decoding 1080P video as well as a GPU (though yes, will use slightly more power).

The point is that modern GPUs have hardware decoding for common codecs, and will use far less power than CPU decoding. But the major browsers on Linux (Firefox and Chrome) disable hardware decoding on Linux, because $PROBLEMS.

So, you end up with battery draining CPU-based 1080p decoding. And even more battery draining or choppy 4k decoding.

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

#430

Post by masswerk »

icedchai wrote: post #289
masswerk wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So did the Lisa even earlier (and Xenix, which was a derivat of Unix Vers. 7, anecdotally also seen on the Lisa).

Is that true? I see contradictory information about Lisa OS. Some posts claim it was cooperative, like the original Mac System. Example: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/lisa-os-2-and-3

(A bit of research later:) It's actually a bit of a mixed bag. The "Operating System Reference Manual for the Lisa" [0] reads on pp. 1-3/1-4:

> Several processes can exist at one time, and they appear to run simultaneously because the CPU is multiplexed among them. The scheduler decides what process should use the CPU at any one time. It uses a generally non-preemptive scheduling algorithm. This means that a process wlll not lose the CPU unless it blocks. (…)

> A process can lose the CPU when one of the following happens:

> • The process calls an Operating System procedure or function.

> • The process references one of its code segments that is not currently in memory.

> If neither of these occur, the process will not lose the CPU.

In other words, non-preemptive, unless the OS becomes the foreground process, in which case it may block the active process in favor of another one currently in ready or blocked state.

[0] https://lisa.sunder.net/LOS_Reference.pdf

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