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'Be' is nice, end of story

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Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#131

Post by electroly »

dominicm wrote: post #109
gattilorenz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. You're right; I was mostly thinking about problems with Linux since thats my daily driver. It would have been better to say that Haiku gives developers the same UX affordances for interacting with their system as non-t…

FWIW, as with the Task Manager thing, the thing about launching the graphical debugger on crashes was added to Windows eons ago. Even Windows 9x had it, contemporaneously with BeOS. If you had a debugger installed, a "Debug" button would appear between "Close" and "Details". Debug assertion failures will pop up a dialog from the C runtime allowing you to break into the debugger there, too.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#132

Post by Someone »

macintux wrote: post #11
throw_m239339 wrote: post #10

> From there, things only got worse for Be. The company lingered around until 2001 when it sold its copyrights to Palm for $11 million USD. In 2002, Be brought litigation against Microsoft for anticompetitive practices, but the suit was settled out of court for $23.25 million. After purchasing BeOS, Palm promptly discontinued the OS. Palm itself later had some problems, split, and sold. The rights to BeOS are now in…

Apple had a long history and corresponding fan base, which helped, and of course Steve Jobs. Microsoft invested some money in Apple to help alleviate anti-trust issues, but from my reading the more substantive assistance was a commitment to ship Office for Mac. https://medium.com/the-techlife/why-did-microsoft-invest-150...

I don’t think anti-trust was the reason for that deal with Apple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company:

“Later testimony in the United States v. Microsoft Corp. case revealed that, at the time, Apple was threatening Microsoft with a multibillion-dollar lawsuit over the allegedly stolen code, and in return Bill Gates was threatening the cancellation of Microsoft Office for Mac. In August 1997, Apple and Microsoft announced a settlement deal. Apple would drop all current lawsuits, including all lingering issues from the "Look & Feel" lawsuit and the "QuickTime source code" lawsuit, and agree to make Internet Explorer for Mac the default browser on the Macintosh unless the user explicitly chose the bundled Netscape browser. In return, Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office, Internet Explorer, and various developer tools and software for the Mac for the next 5 years, and purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock. The companies also agreed to mutual collaboration on Java technologies, and to cross-license all existing patents, and patents obtained during the five-year deal, with one another”

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#133

Post by rbanffy »

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…

I played a bit with BeOS on an x86 box back then, and it always felt extremely responsive. The only machine that came close to that was the SGI that ended up on my secondary desk.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#134

Post by WillAdams »

iseanstevens wrote: post #44

It was a really beautiful, functional, svelte & fast OS. IMHO, Apple made the right decision with Next because of Jobs. I’d sure like to see the results of the alternate timeline! I still feel like Be could be great for phones/mobile, maybe VR. (Just as it was so foundationally low latency) (Note I am aware of Haiku, etc. I’m using “Be” to mean something from its linage) Side note - Jean-Louis Gassée, founder(?) of B…

No multi-user support --- it was a non-starter.

I'm much happier w/ Quartz (née Display PDF) than the typical image model division which BeOS had.

That said, I really wish someone would get it (and Tron) running on a Raspberry Pi.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#135

Post by memsom »

tialaramex wrote: post #119
anentropic wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naive question... if your email client would have to do that anyway, in exchange for a bunch of your disk space and CPU, does moving that responsibility to the OS make a net difference? Is it that BeFS was indexing everything and not just the folders that needed to be indexed? macos spotlight is also routinely indexing the file system, doesn't seem so different to me, naively

I believe Spotlight has a full text search, which is a pretty major improvement, at of course a considerable price. Feels like a reasonable choice for My Novel/ and not a sane choice for Movie Downloads/ (unless maybe Spotlight can read subtitles???) Also, an actual email client can specialise. BeFS is very general, the attributes can be typed but there's only one string type (other types include 32-bit and 64-bit in…

Dominic Giampaolo worked on Spotlight at Apple, and was the BFS guy at Be... he (along with another engineer) wrote BFS pretty much from scratch for the PR1 release.

Before BFS, was OFS which was an actual database and was horribly buggy, requiring the BTree to be regenerated often enough that it was a "BIOS" level boot menu option on the BeBox running that version's Boot ROM.

A lot of the wonder at BFS stems from the marketing of OFS. BFS only retained the bare minimum features that OFS had, to make the database stuff still exist.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#136

Post by layer8 »

erwincoumans wrote: post #57

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 o…

> 'is_computer_on()' and 'is_computer_on_fire()'

Someone should make a programming language where those are the keywords for true and false.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#137

Post by wazoox »

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…

I also notice the SGI 320, with its friggin' 3.3V PCI slots from hell :)

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#138

Post by wazoox »

BirAdam wrote: post #123
pjmlp wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is indeed incredbible, my graduation thesis was porting my supervisors' particle engine from Objective-C/OpenGL into C++/OpenGL/MFC, because his NeXT Cube was going to be decommissioned. This was still during the 1990's.

I have a non-working Indigo 2 10k that I keep meaning to refurbish, but finding a monitor that supports sync on green that still works is exceedingly difficult.

IIRC many Samsung, EIZO screens from recent past support SOG.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#139

Post by nyanpasu64 »

BirAdam wrote: post #123
pjmlp wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is indeed incredbible, my graduation thesis was porting my supervisors' particle engine from Objective-C/OpenGL into C++/OpenGL/MFC, because his NeXT Cube was going to be decommissioned. This was still during the 1990's.

I have a non-working Indigo 2 10k that I keep meaning to refurbish, but finding a monitor that supports sync on green that still works is exceedingly difficult.

I wonder if you can convince a dirt-cheap GBS8200 with GBS-Control mod, to convert sync-on-green to VGA. I'm not sure what options are available for pure sync extraction, since the GBS-Control also does color conversion, deinterlacing, rescaling frames to more or less lines, simulated scanlines on LCD displays, etc.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#140

Post by BirAdam »

allenbrunson wrote: post #129
BirAdam wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind if I add these to my article?

hey, go right ahead! that's not even all my stuff. i have a couple of beos coffee cups, several boxed copies of beos, and several books. one thing, though: i am pretty sure that the haiku error messages were only in netpositive, the web browser, and not in any other beos apps.

thanks m8! updated the article with images and a little different wording about the haiku error messages.
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