'Be' is nice, end of story • Hacker News Board

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#51

Post by dominicm » Tue, Nov 15, 2022, 5:29 AM UTC

I worked on Haiku this summer as part of Google summer of code, and it just made me wish their attitude towards user experience was more prevalent in mainstream OSs.

It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger or processes being grouped by application. There's sensible UX that doesn't expect me to be a wizard to understand what's going on or how to dig deeper.

Obviously it has rough edges (as, well, honestly all operating systems do), but the things that do work work really well.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#52

Post by pdntspa » Tue, Nov 15, 2022, 5:47 AM UTC

randall wrote: post #3

Beos had serato in 1999. http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/ab...

Wow! And Serato is still my preferred DVS. In many ways I think it carries on the spirit of Be, in that it does what it does extremely well and extremely reliably. In my 15-some-odd years of messing/performing with it, it's only crashed on me once for a reason that I couldn't attribute to something else. (and luckily that was during a practice session)

Sadly, now I use it to drive a Pioneer XDJ console. And they made me pay extra for DVS support without the Serato box :( But it's a pretty fly 4-deck system!

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#53

Post by classichasclass » Tue, Nov 15, 2022, 6:00 AM UTC

helf wrote: post #36

classichasclass wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly no, but still get a lot of wear out of R5. I have it on this BeBox and on a 6500/275 that I'm trying to figure out sound issues on.

I wonder if they will ever target such an old ISA. What are your sound problems? I only briefly used BeOS on an actual mac and it, amazingly enough, worked without a hitch.

Something with the AWACS driver (need to run off an instrumented build and boot the kernel in debug mode to see what's up, just gotta get a round tuit). The 6500 is technically Unsupported but Compatible in Be's support matrix. Some people report the sound works, some people report it doesn't. Ditto for the TAM, which is basically a 6500 in a cool suit with an LCD.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#54

Post by classichasclass » Tue, Nov 15, 2022, 6:02 AM UTC

sedatk wrote: post #50

I remember trying out BeOS on my PC in the late 90's. I was astonished that it supported my ASUS V3000 AGP video card out of the box. Windows NT couldn't do that; you had to install drivers. Everything worked just right with BeOS. Even its web browser (Netwatch?) was on par with Internet Explorer of the era. I was very impressed to say the least.

NetPositive. Surprisingly capable for the time, very fast. They basically wrote it from scratch. For PowerPC BeOS, it was your only choice (x86 BeOS got Mozilla and Opera, and maybe a couple others).

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#55

Post by classichasclass » Tue, Nov 15, 2022, 6:04 AM UTC

helf wrote: post #35

a-dub wrote: post #32

this was nicely written. it's amusing to see the name of the blog, a popular column in pc magazine in the '90s bore the same name. i forget who wrote it, but it was one of the really well known computer journalists of the time, if i recall correctly. a notable absence is mention of the cpu utilization lights. to show off all that work they did to build a truly multiprocessor system, they had two strips of leds that r…

They did. The initial CPU target for BeOS was the AT&T H0BB1T DSP. The alpha copies were called Shark. I actually have system images for the hobbit builds still floating around somewhere. I never did get my hands on a prototype hobbit bebox, sadly. I almost bought one off a guy in France but the deal fell apart. Be produced a regular PowerPC version that could be installed on Macs (I think it may have required PCI ma…

Correct, no NuBus support. It also doesn't support New World Macs and some of the later higher-speed 604s. Essentially it's that slice of beige four-digit Power Macs from the mid 1990s.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#56

Post by ako » Tue, Nov 15, 2022, 6:16 AM UTC

erisian wrote: post #49

Cool story I heard about Be once: the engineers could override their managers and had final say.

We all know how that ended. /s

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#57

Post by erwincoumans » Tue, Nov 15, 2022, 6:33 AM UTC

BeOS was fun. I recall attending BeGeistert and showing my Blender port (as a Not a Number/NaN employee) running on its software OpenGL driver (eventually I also beta-tested OpenGL hardware on BeOS). Be had a close knit community, with a similar passion as the earlier Commodore 64 'demo parties'. Official BeOS C++ API's included 'is_computer_on()' and 'is_computer_on_fire()': a sign that Be creators enjoyed working on their BeOS!

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#58

Post by gattilorenz » Tue, Nov 15, 2022, 6:45 AM UTC

dominicm wrote: post #51

I worked on Haiku this summer as part of Google summer of code, and it just made me wish their attitude towards user experience was more prevalent in mainstream OSs. It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger or processes being grouped by application. There's sensible UX that doesn't expect me to be a wizard to understand what's going on or how to dig deeper. Obviously it…

> It's little things like errors automatically prompting you to open a graphical debugger or processes being grouped by application.

I think after Windows 7 the processes are grouped per application in Task Manager. We’re all grumpy about the redesigns of things we are familiar with, but little UX improvements happen all the time.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#59

Post by jedberg » Tue, Nov 15, 2022, 6:53 AM UTC

The thing I loved most about BeOs is that it assumed you were a competent operator. They didn't hide "dangerous" settings from the user.

For example, in the settings you could choose to turn each CPU in the machine on and off. But it didn't stop you from turning all of them off. And if you turned the last one off, the system halted, just as you'd expect. No warnings, nothing that stopped you. If you thought turning off all the CPUs was the right thing to do, then by golly you go ahead and do it!

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#60

Post by amatecha » Tue, Nov 15, 2022, 7:00 AM UTC

helf wrote: post #27

BeFS was amazing. I miss BeOS, TBH. I ran a heavily customized BeOS R5.05 install that had upgraded bits from OpenBeOS (later, HaikuOS), ZetaOS etc. I ran it as a daily driver on a Dell GX1 SFF that I swear was designed for BeOS: Max RAM the BeOS kernel supported without hackery was 768MB - The GX maxed out at 768MB; The GX1 had a Rage GPU that BeOS natively supported (Including 3D Acceleration!) which was a very sho…

You daily-drove a NeXTstation until 2008?! That's badass! kudos. I always appreciate people using stuff for as long as possible, especially when it's something awesome like a NeXT system, haha :)

Dude.. just found the "for ebay" album on your Flickr profile... omg :(

(Oooh also SGI Onyx2.. nice. I search the term "sgi" on Craigslist every day. All I have is a pair of O2's)