BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

#1

Post by fogus » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 3:41 PM UTC

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

#2

Post by eb0la » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 3:53 PM UTC

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

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

#3

Post by christkv » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:04 PM UTC

I remember using one at NTH in Trondheim in 1995-96 and it was awesome compared to the silicon graphics stations or pcs. It just felt insanely smooth and quick compared to the clunkiness of the other machines. I wish it had taken off, it would probably have gotten us faster to multi core machines.

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

#4

Post by cptnapalm » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

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.

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

#5

Post by gnu8 » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

We didn’t get to have this because Microsoft strangled it in the crib. I am never forgiving them for that.

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

#6

Post by jamesfmilne » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

I've been wasting a bit of time lately trying to get BeOS 5.0 Professional running on my PowerMac 8500/180.

Had to order a USB CD/DVD burner off of Amazon to write the ISO to a CD as I didn't actually own any hardware with a CD/DVD burner anymore :D

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

#7

Post by dwmcqueen » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:14 PM UTC

gnu8 wrote: post #5

We didn’t get to have this because Microsoft strangled it in the crib. I am never forgiving them for that.

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

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

#8

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:15 PM UTC

[deleted]

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

#9

Post by slipheen » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

dwmcqueen wrote: post #7

gnu8 wrote: post #5

We didn’t get to have this because Microsoft strangled it in the crib. I am never forgiving them for that.

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

The way I see it, the two are related- Microsoft stopped it from having much of a chance as an independent OS.. This stopped us from getting it outside of a major vendor like Apple acquiring it.

Apple saw this, so didn't want to pay as much as they might have if it were selling well on it's own.

So Apple ended up going with NeXT "instead of plan Be" as it were.

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

#10

Post by djsumdog » Thu, Jan 09, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

When I started University in 2000, I had a quad-boot system: Win98, Win2000, BeOS 5 and Slackware Linux (using the BeOS bootload as my primary because it had the prettiest colors). I mostly used Slackware and Win98 (for games), but BeOS was really neat. It had support for the old Booktree video capture cards, could capture video without dropping frames like VirtualDub often did, and it even had support for disabling a CPU on multicpu systems (I only saw videos of this; never ran BeOS on a SMP system).

I wish we had more options today. On modern x86 hardware, you pretty much just have Windows, Linux and maybe FreeBSD/OpenBSD if you replace your Wi-Fi card with an older one (or MacOS if you're feeling Hackintoshy .. or just buy Apple hardware). I guess three is kinda the limit you're going to hit when it comes to broad support.