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'Be' is nice, end of story

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Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#141

Post by jandrese »

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…

That said it had some issues. Their network stack was just weird enough to make porting Internet applications difficult, especially web browsers. When Be first arrived this was no big deal, but it quickly grew as a sticking point for user adoption. When you can download a native FreeBSD version of Netscape, but no Be version exists and the only alternative is an older hacked up version of Mosaic you have a problem.

They did eventually fix this, but it was too little too late.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#142

Post by yamtaddle »

tartoran wrote: post #15

Im itching for a simple OS that is user friendly and just simple, something that would instant boot and would be functional offline. Linux is great and all but sometimes it feels too bloated for a simple limited purpose machine..

Aside from maybe three years in the late '00s when Ubuntu was basically just Debian with much better defaults and that turned out to be a very good thing, I've always kinda disliked Linux unless I start from something very minimal and build it up, carefully curating everything. It doesn't feel bloated if you do that. It still breaks in weird and/or stupid ways but at least you know how everything fits together so you can fix it. But, it's also a ton of work, so I just run macOS these days.

If you want a near-instant-boot appliance with Linux, try Librelec. I think it's made for Kodi but you can use it for other things. Lakka (Retroarch) uses it and gets me to a GUI, ready to interact with, rendering under DRM (so, no X or Wayland) in like 3 seconds flat on a Raspberry Pi. Or, FreeDOS isn't a crazy option for appliance-type machines, depending on what you want to run.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#143

Post by jandrese »

mkl wrote: post #64
a-dub wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it can play MULTIPLE VIDEOS AT THE SAME TIME (!)

That kind of multitasking was one of the most impressive things about it. I could play four MPEG videos at once smoothly (with the interface and other windows still responsive) while Windows struggled to play one on the same hardware. That and it booted in 30 seconds including detecting and loading built-in drivers for all my hardware (Windows took 1-2 minutes and needed drivers manually installed). I never used BeOS…

It's easy to boot quickly when you have very little supported hardware to look for. I remember compiling custom FreeBSD kernels with only the hardware on my box and racing my roommate's BeBox to login prompt. Then he would start playing a bunch of movies at once and I'd open up Netscape.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#144

Post by bluedino »

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…

BeOS was a niche of a niche but I fell in love with the GUI. It has a Mac OS 8 feel to it.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#145

Post by memsom »

classichasclass wrote: post #33
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 remember correctly: the 603 was never intended for multiprocessing. It was amazing it worked as well as it did on the BeBox, but AFAIK it was the only 603-based computer ever to try. The G3, the 603's more-or-less direct follow-on, doesn't support it either. From the BeBox FAQ: "We use the Motorola 105 'Eagle' support chip, which allows for either one processor and an L2 cache or two processors without L2 caches.…

The 604[e] did have the necessary hardware.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#146

Post by ThinkBeat »

Be was amazing when it came out.

I was introduced to it when the company came out to do a demo of it for the computer science department of the uni I was at.

The multimedia abilities they demoed were amazing. Coming from Atari ST and TT this seemed like the next generation. I loved the BeFS.

I could not afford a BeBox at the time and the uni. decided against buying any.

We did have quite a few NeXTstations in the department which were nice. but I would have preferred Be.

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#148

Post by _chu1 »

tialaramex wrote: post #84
naikrovek wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

multiple comments about BeFS and none describe why it is so good.

BeFS has file attributes (so you can say this file is an email I received, add from="Bob Smith ", received="2022-11-15") and it can optionally but by default index all these attributes using an on-disk BTree. Many modern systems do have file attributes, although they're not always as capable as the ones in BeFS, and none of them to my knowledge chose to add all these BTrees because keeping them up-to-date is expensiv…

hey that's me! hope you received that email

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#149

Post by _chu1 »

tartoran wrote: post #15

Im itching for a simple OS that is user friendly and just simple, something that would instant boot and would be functional offline. Linux is great and all but sometimes it feels too bloated for a simple limited purpose machine..

Haiku OS

Re: 'Be' is nice, end of story

#150

Post by sedatk »

classichasclass wrote: post #54
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).

Yes, it had easily surpassed Netscape which was supposed to be the veteran of the era.
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