One of my favorite anecdotes about BeOS was that it had a CPU usage meter[1], and on the CPU meter there were on/off switches for each core. If you had two cores and turned one off, your computer would run at half speed. If you turned both off, your computer would crash. Someone once told me that this was filed as a bug against the OS and the response was "Works As Intended" and that it was the expected behavior. (Th…
Apple began to re-kick ass when they made an amazing laptop (tiBook). This was the first truly viable Unix laptop, with promise to be a cut above the competition (there was none) in terms of style and usability. tiBook was bonkers. Suddenly, I didn't really need to sit in the room, surrounded by boxes, but rather could go to the park and access the room from under a tree. If Be had managed to capture that, I think it…
In this alternative universe, Objective-C would have died, Swift would never happened, and C++ would rule across desktop and mobile OSes (thinking only of Windows, BeOS X, Symbian, Windows CE and what might have been BeOS based iOS). Also POSIX would be even less relevant, and very few would be buying BeOS X for doing Linux coding.
> Also POSIX would be even less relevant, and very few would be buying BeOS X for doing Linux coding. I don't think I'd enjoy a GNU userland/glibc/Linux monoculture, quite honestly. I'm glad POSIX exists to have a slightly less moving target.
Well, the last major revision to the Single Unix Specification was released in 2008. Ever since then, Linux has basically become the defacto POSIX standard. So while glibc may not rule the roost, most POSIX OSes bend to the will of the GNU userland and the Linux monoculture in many ways. It's not really like the old days with Sun, IBM, DEC and even Microsoft with Xenix. POSIX is being washed away a little more every day.
Now I had read somewhere that Apple would have purchased BeOS but JLG was pushing for too much money. JLG fucked up the deal basically. I dont have a source... was years ago I read it.
Had JLG not fucked up the deal, they would have picked up BeOS and not NeXT.
BeOS was as UNIX like, as Amiga was. Surely it had a cli, UNIX like directory navigation and a couple of UNIX command like utilities. But good luck porting UNIX CLI software expecting a full POSIX environment. If I am not mistaken, Haiku has done most of the work regarding POSIX support.
AmigaOS was not UNIX-like in the least. Amiga UNIX, which shipped on a couple models, was directly System V UNIX, though.
That was the point I was trying to convey regarding BeOS.
Having a shell that looks like UNIX, and a couple of command line utilities similar to the UNIX ones, does not make an OS UNIX.
You have to have the right laptop. At the time I had a Thinkpad (X1 IIRC?) which fairly much worked out of the box, but I'm fairly sure it won't work on $random laptop. For best results and the lowest barrier to entry try it first in a VM.
Actually these days, Haiku will probably at least boot on $random laptop, and if you have a WiFi chip that FreeBSD also supports (we reuse their network drivers), you can probably even connect wirelessly. I run Haiku on my ThinkPad E550 (2015), I know some of the other devs run on Dell XPS 13, HPs, etc. And the same is true in towers (Ryzen is becoming a popular pick.) GPU acceleration drivers are the one real kind o…
Thanks for correcting me, and good to know that Haiku is easier to use than ever.
Yeah Wifi on Linux sucked in those days. For me that was the biggest pain point about desktop Linux. In fact I seem to recall having fewer issues with WiFi on FreeBSD than I did on Linux -- that's pure anecdata of course. I remember the first time I managed to get this one laptop's WiFi working without an external dongle and to do that I had to run Windows drivers on Linux via some wrapper-tool (not WINE). To this da…
> I remember the first time I managed to get this one laptop's WiFi working without an external dongle and to do that I had to run Windows drivers on Linux via some wrapper-tool (not WINE). To this day I have no idea how that ever worked. ndiswrapper. It's almost a shibboleth among people who were using Linux on laptops Way Back When. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDISwrapper > NDISwrapper is a free software driver w…
Yeah I know what ndiswrapper is (though admittedly I had forgotten it's name). I should have been clearer in that I meant I was constantly amazed that such a tool existed in the first place and doubly amazed that it was reliable enough for day to day use.