

Haiku Project Announces Availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 1 - whughes
http://www.haiku-os.org/news/2009-09-13_haiku_project_announces_availability_haiku_r1alpha_1

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sgrytoyr
Using BeOS was extremely pleasant due to its multitasking prowess, which
really had to be experienced to understand how much better it was than other
operating systems at the time.

Sure, most apps were lightweight and, like allenbrunson said, the pervasive
multi-threading model made it harder to develop sophisticated applications,
but they must have been on to something because the responsiveness was so good
that it felt like you all of a sudden had a computer from the future, where
_real_ multitasking was finally solved. It really was something else.

The quality of the file system and the way its advanced capabilities were
fully utilized throughout the OS was also novel. Here is part of an old
article written by Scot Hacker, who also wrote the BeOS Bible, which explain
some of the advantages:
[http://www.osnews.com/story/421/_I_MacOSX_Week_I_Tales_of_a_...](http://www.osnews.com/story/421/_I_MacOSX_Week_I_Tales_of_a_BeOS_Refugee/page13/)

Much of what the BeOS had going for it is now available in other OSes, in
various shapes or forms, but what made the BeOS such a joy to use was how it
all came together in a unified way. The Tracker, for example, which is the
equivalent to Finder on Mac OS X, treated attributes as first-class citizens,
making it very natural to set up views like the example in the article above,
focusing on Category, Title etc.

Another thing that really stood out was the quality of the icons and the look
of the window manager. The icons are everywhere on the web today, and while
the UI might not be considered sexy by today’s standards, the yellow tabs that
could be dragged along the top of windows were cute as hell. Other little
touches, like the built-in desktop switcher that allowed different resolutions
and color depths for each desktop (excellent for web development), are not
commonly found today, afaik.

It will be interesting to see what the experience is like now, after so many
years with Mac OS X. Will definitely install.

------
whughes
I highly recommend that you try it on real hardware if you're going to try it
at all. It's much, much snappier, even on a Pentium II or III, on a real
machine than in a VM.

~~~
GeneralMaximus
Remember that Haiku is built for i586 systems. Are P2 and P3 i586?

~~~
mbrubeck
Yes. (It was 8086, 80186, 80286, 386, 486, Pentium=586.)

~~~
alexandros
I don't believe there ever was a 80186

~~~
slava_pestov
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80186>

~~~
alexandros
Intresting read.. It seems it never did make it to the PC/AT line though.

"The 80186 would have been a natural successor to the 8086 in personal
computers. However, because its integrated hardware was incompatible with the
hardware used in the original IBM PC, the 80286 was used as the successor
instead in the IBM PC/AT."

------
jcw
It's nice to see people still remember BeOS.

I never had a chance to use it, but it looked like there was something special
about it. Did anyone here own a BeOS system?

~~~
allenbrunson
I actually worked at Be Inc for the last seven months of its existence.

BeOS had a lot of good stuff going for it. A database-like file system, media
frameworks, pervasive multithreading, a way-ahead-of-its-time file typing
system, and so on. But the main reason I chose it over linux was that it was a
lot easier to set up and maintain.

It's gone a bit too far underground for me to keep following it, however.
After I got laid off from Be, I switched to Mac OS X 10.1, which had recently
been released.

~~~
alxm
It's nice to have some insight on BeOS, but now that you use OS X, how does it
stack up against the ahead-of-its-time BeOS features, now that OS X has manage
to implement a lot of them? what's missing? do you like Apple's
implementations?

~~~
allenbrunson
that's a good question, and something i hadn't thought about in a long time.

macosx has mostly surpassed beos. in my opinion it's more pleasant to use
today than beos was in its prime. having said that, there are some things
about beos that will likely _never_ be recreated.

that database-like file system, for instance. that wasn't just a bullet point
feature. the big thing that got me hired at be was that i wrote a usenet
newsreader for their operating system. i made heavy use of bfs indexes. my
program could search through hundreds of thousands of message files in a
microsecond to find the one i wanted. there still isn't such a thing on the
mac today, or any other os. when i ported my newsreader to the mac, i had to
think up workarounds for all the places where i could no longer use bfs
indexes. at least a couple of weeks' work for a substandard implementation,
compared to the beos way.

another one is multi-threading. for beos programming, it wasn't just a
suggestion, it was _mandatory_. every beos window runs in its own thread,
whether you like it or not. so if you came to beos kind of ambivalent about
multi-threading, it sucks to be you, because you were _forced_ to learn it.
i'd say that's the biggest long-term boost to my career i got from beos: i'm
better at multi-threading than any other programmer i've ever worked with.

the macosx threading model is anemic by comparison. you run the user interface
in the main thread, and if you want secondary threads, you launch them
yourself. since it's not used much, nobody learns how. and now they've
introduced this grand central thing, in an effort to make multi-threading
easier. having learned how to do it the "hard" way, grand central doesn't look
like much of an improvement to me. yes, multi-threading is hard, but not
_that_ hard. it just requires more discipline than many programmers possess.

another really great thing about beos was the absence of legacy. i had earlier
spent a lot of time programming for windows, and my god what a mess that is.
there are things in the windows api that are weird and stunted due to
decisions made in 1980. i didn't realize what a giant burden that was until i
was free of it.

to its credit, macosx seems largely free of this. apple has added a ton of
stuff to cocoa over the nine years i've been using it, but it still seems
fresh and approachable. i think a large part of that is that apple is not
afraid to toss stuff out when it gets stale and dated. microsoft, on the other
hand, values backward compatibility above all else, so their apis stink to
high heaven.

~~~
jbellis
> there still isn't such a thing on the mac today

how close does Spotlight get you?

~~~
GeneralMaximus
Two major differences.

One, Spotlight is just a search tool. They run a daemon in the background that
monitors reads to the FS and updates an index [1]. In Haiku, indexing and
querying is a feature built into the filesystem.

Secondly, Spotlight does full-text search and indexing whereas Haiku only
indexes the attributes you attach to files.

Metadata plays a very important role in the Haiku world. You cannot fathom the
extent of their power unless you use the OS. This is not a "feature" that was
tacked onto the OS as an afterthought, the entire OS was built around this
feature.

 _[1] I'm actually working on a tool like Spotlight for Haiku
(<http://code.google.com/p/haiku-beacon/>), though development has been
stalled since my PC went kaput._

EDIT: Read articles 24 and 25 for a sneak peek into BFS's more powerful
features: <http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/>

------
cesare
The VM image works like a charm with VirtualBox. I just had to change the
emulated network adapter to Intel PRO to make networking work.

Boot and shutdown are really really fast.

~~~
algorias
I'm writing this from within the live-CD session, and I have to agree, it
works great (The frequent reads from the CD slow everything down, of course,
but it's not nearly as bad as a live Ubuntu session)

------
miles
dr_dank explained BeOS's awesomeness in a Slashdot post some years ago
[http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66224&cid=60954...](http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66224&cid=6095472)

Here it is, pasted for posterity:

 _So, Be fans, what makes BeOS so special?_

BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving
the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the
GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he
pulled out the showstopper.

He yanked the plug on the box.

Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all
of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing
had happened.

Damn.

~~~
bulanga
> None of the apps skipped a beat.

out of curiosity, how can you tell if the apps skipped a beat? It's hard
enough when you have to focus on 2 audio streams, I can't image how you can
deal with 2 dozen?

Perhaps there was some code monitoring dropped frames and such

------
caffeine
The screenshots don't make it look all that special ... looks sort of like old
Windows. The logo is really cool, though.

Hopefully I'm wrong, and somebody can enlighten me?

~~~
windsurfer
Too many differences to list, I would recommend you try it for a while and see
:)

