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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

#141

Post by hinkley »

bluedino wrote: post #39

The founder of Be wrote a bunch of articles about Be's life, and demise https://mondaynote.com/tagged/beos

This part seemed like the punchline:

> Apple’s decision to go with NeXT and Jobs was doubly perilous for us. Not only would we not be the next MacOS, Jobs immediately walked third party Mac hardware makers to their graves. No more Mac clones for BeOS. With tepid BeBox sales and no future on the Mac, Valley VCs weren’t keen for another round of funding — and the 1995 round was running out.

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

#142

Post by amatecha »

rwmj wrote: post #52

Haiku is really good. Would recommend anyone to try it out in a VM (I had it running on my actual laptop for a short time, but unfortunately my job pretty much requires me to run Linux so it couldn't stay). Haiku has a really responsive UI with a 90s look so you can actually tell what is a button.

Oh man, I really do miss the days of actual coherent UI that is clearly "readable". The trend of flat UI drives me crazy. So much wasted cognitive effort just to make sense of something on-screen.

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

#143

Post by hinkley »

GeekyBear wrote: post #38
djsumdog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. OEMs were not allowed to sell dual-boot systems if they wanted to keep buying cheap MS licenses. I think they lost that lawsuit, but it was long after BeOS closed up their commercial operations.

Didn't Be publicly offer up a free Be OS license to the first OEM willing to ship a duel boot system? When there were no takers for a free way to have your hardware stand out from the pack, it was hard to imagine a reason for every single OEM in a very crowded field to back away that didn't involve antitrust shenanigans.

Now that you mention it, I recall this as well.

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

#144

Post by tclancy »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #47
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…

Security from what? Do user accounts really provide much benefit in the personal computing space? Where the median user count is 1? Neither OS had the kind of security that is really useful today for this usecase, which is per-application.

Wouldn't the median need to be over 1? I get your point but am feeling pedantic today.

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

#145

Post by icedchai »

danans wrote: post #68
_red wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the the familial relations of MacOS and Linux made it possible to share code fairly seamlessly between both (providing not talking about hardware integration). In a world where we there was 3 separate universes: Windows, BeOS, and Linux it's possible Linux would've become more isolated.

BeOS had a regular Unix like (even posix IIRC) dev environment. I was able to do most of the CS course work projects normally done on my University's Sun workstations on BeOS instead. Most of these of courses were data structures, algorithms, compilers, etc projects in C, and not things that required platform specific APIs. But arguably, BeOS' overall model - a single user desktop OS built on top of but hiding its mo…

The Amiga had preemptive multitasking in the 80's. (No memory protection though.)

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

#146

Post by tialaramex »

cptnapalm wrote: post #4
eb0la wrote: post #2

I installed BeOS a long time ago on a PC. It was something ahead of the times. I still remember how incredible it was the rotating cube demo where you coud drag and drop images and videos on the cube faces... it worked without a glitch on my pentium. Just found out the demo video shows the application with a GL wave surface playing a video over it: https://youtu.be/BsVydyC8ZGQ?t=1074

By all the stars in heaven, that was an impressive demo.

It's about making a virtue of a necessity.

When Be wrote that demo the situation is that the other operating systems you might plausibly choose all have working video acceleration. Even Linux has basic capabilities in this area by that point. BeOS doesn't have that and doesn't have a road map to get it soon.

So, any of the other platforms can play full resolution video captured from a DVD for example, a use case actual people have, on a fairly cheap machine and BeOS won't be able to do that without a beast of a CPU because it doesn't have even have hardware colour transform acceleration or chromakey.

But - 1990s hardware video acceleration can only play one video at a time, because "I want to play three videos" isn't a top ask from actual users. So, Be's demo deliberately shows several different postage stamp videos instead of one higher resolution video, as the acceleration is no help to competitors there.

And then since you're doing it all in software, not rendering to a rectangle in hardware, the transform to have this low res video render as one side of a cube or textured onto a surface makes it only very slightly slower, rather than being impossible.

Audiences come away remembering they saw BeOS render videos on a 3D surface, and not conscious that it can't do full resolution video on the cheap hardware everybody has. Mission success.

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

#147

Post by hinkley »

dilap wrote: post #11
dwmcqueen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, you didn't get it because Jean-Louis asked too much when Apple inquired.

We still wouldn't have it; no way Apple w/o Steve Jobs but w/ BeOS survives.

If Apple had failed, I wonder what Steve would have done after Pixar. Start a new computer company? Could he (or perhaps a better question: would he) have swooped in with Mac compatibility mode?

The real win was a mobile future sans Microsoft. I doubt smart phones would be what they are today if not for the iPhone, and the iPhone required huge resources and a maniac cracking the whip. Would Jony Ive leave a failing Apple and work with Steve? If not, would we even have the iPod let alone the iPhone?

On the plus side, Nokia might have still been around.

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

#148

Post by city41 »

0xDEEPFAC wrote: post #42
rvz wrote: post #36

BeOS was really something of what the future 'could' have almost been. Too bad that it was killed by better competitors. But again I think its fair to compare with the lessons learned from its successor 'Haiku' that can be learned by many other OSes: From what I can see from using Haiku for a bit, it has the bazar community element from the open-source culture with its package management and ports system from Linux a…

Well it wasn't as simple as "killed off by better competitors". It was actually both much better than Windows 98 and Mac OS at the time. But ultimately the deathblow came from Apple which, after struggling with low sales and poor quality software, almost chose to buy BeInc's tech but dropped it so they could bring in Steve Jobs. So it was more like vendor lock-in (Windows) and corporate deals (Apple) as well as faili…

Yeah, I feel saying "better competitors" really does Be a disservice. They largely failed due to an unfair playing field and very shady practices.

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

#149

Post by linza »

tclancy wrote: post #144
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security from what? Do user accounts really provide much benefit in the personal computing space? Where the median user count is 1? Neither OS had the kind of security that is really useful today for this usecase, which is per-application.

Wouldn't the median need to be over 1? I get your point but am feeling pedantic today.

If more than (or equal to) half of computers are used by only one person, then the median user count is 1, no?

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

#150

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

pjmlp wrote: post #91
hugi wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Most people I talk with these days seem to agree that the proprietary OS is a liability.

Outside HN and Reddit talks, most people I know don't even care about FOSS OSes existence, they just want something that they buy at the shopping mall and can use right away.

In fairness, I don't think most people care about the OS at all, FOSS or otherwise; they care that the UI is something they can use, and that their apps work. If you perfected WINE overnight, I'll bet you could sit 80% of the population down at a lightly-skinned FreeBSD box and they'd never know.
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