Is it just me, or are haikus getting hyped and hyped and hyped even more?
Haiku
21–30 of 30 posts
Re: Haiku
#22Be, while an innovative OS in its day for sure, is more interesting to me as a business story. Most people don't realize how close BeOS came to becoming Mac OS X. They had the inside track on the deal, and their OS was technically superior to Next's. But Gassée's determination to hold out for more money combined with the famous Steve Jobs reality distortion field to consign Be to the dustbin of history and cleared th…
There were definitely some egos involved. According to some accounts I've read, Gassee was forced out of Apple due to disagreements with Sculley. I worked at Be and spoke with Gassee, so I know he's kind of, um, "volatile," let's say. He probably felt ill-treated at Apple and this was his chance to right a previous wrong.
BUT. I used and developed for BeOS for many years. And now I've used and developed for MacOSX for many years. And I think Apple made the right decision, both technically and politically.
At the time, NextStep was far more mature. Next was a lot better funded than Be was. And Apple's original DNA was formed in Jobs' image, so he was far better prepared to run the place.
Re: Haiku
#23Be, while an innovative OS in its day for sure, is more interesting to me as a business story. Most people don't realize how close BeOS came to becoming Mac OS X. They had the inside track on the deal, and their OS was technically superior to Next's. But Gassée's determination to hold out for more money combined with the famous Steve Jobs reality distortion field to consign Be to the dustbin of history and cleared th…
IIRC, Be was not technically superior. It was a one-user no-security pre-internet OS which had been highly polished in for one task: concurrent multimedia. It would have require a lot of work to bring up to scratch as a graphical design platform to rival NeXT (which was always about ultra-precision, and even used PostScript to draw its GUI).
Re: Haiku
#24Be, while an innovative OS in its day for sure, is more interesting to me as a business story. Most people don't realize how close BeOS came to becoming Mac OS X. They had the inside track on the deal, and their OS was technically superior to Next's. But Gassée's determination to hold out for more money combined with the famous Steve Jobs reality distortion field to consign Be to the dustbin of history and cleared th…
I think things would've been very different if Be Inc. had just kept being a desktop OS company. They didn't need Apple to succeed -- they could've just accepted that uptake of the OS would be slow, and just kept at it.
Guess that wasn't good enough for management though. They had to go out in a blaze of "Internet Appliance" glory.
Re: Haiku
#25I remember installing BeOS back in the day. I was very impressed. Glad to see continued interest. Anyone running with AmigaOS ?
Re: Haiku
#26Geez. All this Be nostalgia lately has had _me_ pining for it, and I've never used it. Gonna try out R5 on my old pentium II. Hopefully it'll replace XP. It seems fitting, as that computer is nothing more than a toy for making art.
Re: Haiku
#27Be, while an innovative OS in its day for sure, is more interesting to me as a business story. Most people don't realize how close BeOS came to becoming Mac OS X. They had the inside track on the deal, and their OS was technically superior to Next's. But Gassée's determination to hold out for more money combined with the famous Steve Jobs reality distortion field to consign Be to the dustbin of history and cleared th…
IIRC, Be was not technically superior. It was a one-user no-security pre-internet OS which had been highly polished in for one task: concurrent multimedia. It would have require a lot of work to bring up to scratch as a graphical design platform to rival NeXT (which was always about ultra-precision, and even used PostScript to draw its GUI).
This is very true. I like to think that, in a lot of ways, Be was what Mac OS 8 (the original Mac OS 8) should have been: a massive, massive improvement on the design of System 7, while retaining the general feel of the operating system. NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP were always more about being a vast improvement on Unix. Yes, Be had some POSIX emulation, but there's a huge difference between that, and actually integrating properly with a complex multiuser Unix network with shared directories, site-wide logins, and so on--something that NEXTSTEP had had time to hone to perfection due to its heavy use in academia and government.
BeOS is still interesting to me, but mostly in a historical sense. I have to agree that purchasing NeXT was a vastly wiser decision.
EDIT: As a quick addendum to my post: although this has changed in the intervening years, the one thing that Be definitely did have going for it back then was that its kernel was technically superior, delivering mostly the same benefits of a true microkernel design, but with vastly superior performance to Mach. I have no idea what the current state of things would be on that front; between Apple merging BSD into the kernel space and replacing DriverKit (Objective-C) with IOKit (eC++), the differences are probably minimal.
Re: Haiku
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
except they've been doing all of their development in virtual machines, so the actual real hardware support is quite thin.
I don't really care about the BeOS / Haiku kernel. We could use Linux for all the h/w support there is. BeOS was impressive but I guess Linux can be made to play a dozen videos at the same time, too. And I usually stick with only one. But the user space and the user interface are brilliant! I would trade Gnome, KDE, Windows, OS X, or $NAMEIT for the BeOS userland any day, both as an end-user (wrt. UI) and as a develo…
There was a project called BlueOS to do exactly that, but it appears dead now.
Re: Haiku
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC, Be was not technically superior. It was a one-user no-security pre-internet OS which had been highly polished in for one task: concurrent multimedia. It would have require a lot of work to bring up to scratch as a graphical design platform to rival NeXT (which was always about ultra-precision, and even used PostScript to draw its GUI).
This is very true. I like to think that, in a lot of ways, Be was what Mac OS 8 (the original Mac OS 8) should have been: a massive, massive improvement on the design of System 7, while retaining the general feel of the operating system. NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP were always more about being a vast improvement on Unix . Yes, Be had some POSIX emulation, but there's a huge difference between that, and actually integrating…
BeOS delivered no benefits of microkernel design; in fact its userspace network stack was clearly worse than competing kernel network stacks.
Re: Haiku
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
except they've been doing all of their development in virtual machines, so the actual real hardware support is quite thin.
I don't really care about the BeOS / Haiku kernel. We could use Linux for all the h/w support there is. BeOS was impressive but I guess Linux can be made to play a dozen videos at the same time, too. And I usually stick with only one. But the user space and the user interface are brilliant! I would trade Gnome, KDE, Windows, OS X, or $NAMEIT for the BeOS userland any day, both as an end-user (wrt. UI) and as a develo…
How about this: install Debian, 'apt-get install kvm' (okay, you'll probably have to run that through module-assistant, but still, it's only a few more presses of 'Enter' away), then run 'qemu-system-x86_64 haiku.img -m 2048'. Voila! Linux as hardware abstraction layer and virtualization engine, with Haiku running on top.