
BeOS almost made Apple a different company (2015) - adamnemecek
https://www.wired.com/2015/05/os-almost-made-apple-entirely-different-company/
======
myrandomcomment
I ran BeOS and NeXTStep on my PC back around this time. BeOS was impressive
and I do not think anyone has come close to it's speed even today. The
filesystem was amazing. That being said, I loved NeXTStep and was happy to see
it live on. I wish the OS X version was more NeXT then Mac, i.e., I want my
menus and shelf like NeXT.

I think however that Steve was a larger key to Apples success then the OS.
Apple would have been dead without him.

~~~
danieldk
_The filesystem was amazing._

Interesting tidbit: Dominic Giampaolo, who was one of the main developers of
BeFS is now engineer on the APFS team [1].

[1] [http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/](http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/)

~~~
amelius
He wrote a book about BeFS. I wonder if he'd be allowed to do the same at
Apple. (Somehow, I doubt it.)

~~~
GuiA
Well, he might not get to write a book, but he gets to design a brand new
filesystem currently used by hundreds of millions, soon to be billions, of
devices. Everything in life has tradeoffs :)

------
GlenTheMachine
Of course, if they bought Be and not NeXT (which is consistently mis-
capitalized), they wouldn't have gotten Jobs back. Apple very nearly went
under before Jobs brought it back from the brink; had BeOS become the next
MacOS, there may not have _been_ a next MacOS.

~~~
CharlesW
> _Of course, if they bought Be and not NeXT […], they wouldn 't have gotten
> Jobs back._

Yep. That's an Apple fan's Darkest Timeline, no doubt.

Having been in Apple developer relations at the time, my perspective is that
the specific OS choice was irrelevant to Apple's future success.

By all accounts, BeOS would've also been a fine technology platform for
Apple's future. Carbon apparently worked fine on it. And Mac OS X was far from
a sure thing, for some time — if early public releases were uninspiring, early
developer releases were actively demoralizing.

And yet somehow, we had to make developers believe. The only way that could
work is if we believed. And Steve Jobs made us believe.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_\(API\))

~~~
JKCalhoun
> By all accounts, BeOS would've also been a fine technology platform for
> Apple's future.

I have heard the opposite. I liked the slick look of BeOS, but have been told
since that there was very little there there. I don't know either way.

~~~
memsom
The BeOS was all smoke and mirrors. It worked really well to the end user,
yes. But it was extremely lean under the hood. I think getting it to do what
the baseline of Mac OS 9 did would have taken significant engineering. The
issue was stuff we take for granted these days, like networking (netserver,
shudder!), printing (severely lacking drivers), USB (barely worked in R5.03,
slightly better if you installed the leaked BETA USB stacks)... stuff like
that. It all "sort of" worked. But it still wasn't completely ready when Be
Inc closed their doors. And this was even after they completely re-wrote the
network stack (aka BONE.)

~~~
badsectoracula
Isn't all that stuff about drivers? If Apple got BeOS they would only need to
implement drivers for their own hardware and ignore anything else.

EDIT: See? This is why comment voting is a bad idea, it was bad on Reddit, is
bad on every Reddit clone being made and of course is bad on Hacker News. What
is the point? You get people downvoting comments without reason, leaving the
original commenter wonder why someone would... disagree? Consider it non-
constructive? Agree but dislike the tone? What? Text explains much better than
a number the intent of someone and me, right now looking at a -1 number near
my post, have no idea what exactly is the issue. Not to mention the fadeout
that happens in downvoted comments in HN, which is extra bad (gives the
impression that this comment is not important before even someone bothers to
read it - thus creating a bias against it regardless of the contents).

No really, why was this comment downvoted? There are so many reasons it could
have been, from misunderstandings to actual issues, that i cannot pinpoint
without someone saying it.

I mean, imagine being in the same room, having a discussion about OSes,
someone saying the above about BeOS and me asking the question above... if you
disagreed with something i said, wouldn't you try to explain what you
disagreed with? Why aren't you doing the same here?

Note that whenever i say something like that (mainly on Reddit, but a couple
of times also here) people upvote the comment after the fact, i suppose to
"right the wrong". But i am not interested in the comment votes as much as
knowing the reasoning. After all i asked a question, my impression from what
memsom said was that this was a driver issue that Apple could mostly avoid -
downvoting/upvoting isn't a response, doesn't answer the question nor affect
the thinking that went on making it.

~~~
memsom
Not really. The underpinnings of the OS were fairly basic.

I was a heavy BeOS user. I owned a BeBox. I developed for the OS. There was a
*lot" of stuff under the hood that made the OS very immature. I just didn't
sit here listing them. Highlights:

Messaging was flaky prior to R5.1. The BMessage got copied a lot, and the
Ports used for messaging could get clogged and then messages got dropped.
Quite fatal.

The API was multi threaded - it was a concept that at the time a lot of
developers struggled with. It could be extremely complicated to port apps.

A lot of the code was rough and some of it badly documented. So, the guy who
worked on it knew it worked, but I doubt many other people did outside of
their team. They cut a lot of corners. For example, OpenGL was a disaster. I
was told the original dev left and no one was able to support what he left. It
never really got back up to the level he had it up to prior o the focus shift.

Media Kit ended up getting a rewrite.

There was quite a bit of 3rd party code in the OS. Some was licensed. Some was
GPL. Some of the GPL was a little questionably used, given the license. This
is quite probably one of the reasons the OS was never open sourced.

~~~
badsectoracula
I see, thanks :-). You say that some parts (Media Kit) got rewritten, were the
issues BeOS fixed later? Some (BMessage copying, multithreaded API) sound like
design issues, do you think that they could affect Haiku despite being a from
scratch rewrite?

~~~
memsom
The messaging system got a massive overhaul between R5.03 (R5 was code-named
"Maui") and the leaked R5.1 (aka "Dano".) They did a lot of stuff to improve
it. Dianne Hackbourne wrote a massive post about it on OS News[0] around the
time the OS was leaked.

[0]
[http://www.osnews.com/comments/7057#236889](http://www.osnews.com/comments/7057#236889)

------
rvense
My favourite tech "what if?" is the open-sourcing of all of BeOS in 2000,
which I have heard was talked about internally. The main parts of the GUI, the
file manager and "dock", were actually released under an MIT-like license near
the end of the company.

This would have meant a stable, easy-to-install graphical OS available back
when KDE and GNOME were still at version 1 or 2.

~~~
jacobush
With a significant following of rabid Amiga fans. Not sure about the net gain
of that, though. :-)

------
rodgerd
On a tangent, it's perhaps symptomatic of how unfocused Apple was for much of
the 90s that they already had "the OS of the future" in the form of A/UX 3.
Which was a full SysV Unix implementation with a Mac OS compatibility layer.

You got a *ix implementation of the Finder as your GUI, which could also run
native System 7 binaries as well as Unix applications.

Of course, it was killed for OS 8 (if you worked for Apple or a reseller at
the time you'll know how hopelessly over-optimistic that was - if you didn't,
it was supposed to be a brand new microkernel, running a multi-user OS written
from the ground up as a Mac OS workalike, plus a server for running System 7
apps. There was even talk of being able to run a Windows environment. Needless
to say, the MacOS 8 that actually shipped was not that plan) and
Taligent/Pink.

Then they bought NeXT and got... a BSD Unix running the NeXTStep userland and
an MacOS Classic compatibility later.

~~~
gattilorenz
Yeah, A/UX is incredible, feels like "OS X before OS X". What I love most is
the GUI for (some) terminal programs: [http://toastytech.com/guis/auxcmdo-
ls.png](http://toastytech.com/guis/auxcmdo-ls.png)

~~~
pjmlp
Although it wasn't without its own set of issues.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX)

------
microcolonel
Having played DooM shareware on loop in awe on BeOS as a youngun (well past
the system's prime) in a household with a functioning IBM PC 5150 (won in a
grocery sweepstakes) still being used for practical work in 2004 or
thereabouts, it tickles my mind to think of what it would be like for Apple to
be the BeOS distributor Compaq was never up to being.

It ran, as I would later learn to appreciate, _really_ well on a Pentium II
(at 400MHz?). BeOS on a P2 beat the pants off Windows XP on a 2GHz Athlon 64.

------
feelin_googley
Trivia: And what open source OS was the Sidekick?

I am one of those idiots who still believe Apple is a hardware company and as
with all hardware companies, software is an afterthought.

When they ditched OS9 for BSD this reinforced my belief.

I honestly believe without BSD there would be no
NeXTSTEP/OSX/iOS/macOS/watchOS/tvOS, etc. This article suggests they could
have used BeOS. But, they did not.

My hope has always been that Apple would _optionally_ sell hardware without a
pre-installed BSD/Mach-derived OS, allowing users to install their own choice
of OS.

For example, a fully open source BSD with a BSD kernel. That would be my
choice but other users might choose differently.

I am not interested so much in the graphics capabilities of Apple HW. I am
after the form factor.

~~~
cat199
> I am one of those idiots who still believe Apple is a hardware company and
> as with all hardware companies, software is an afterthought.

Perhaps at one time.. now I think they are an 'ecosystem lock in' company, and
use hardware and software to achieve that means..

~~~
coldtea
> _Perhaps at one time.. now I think they are an 'ecosystem lock in' company,
> and use hardware and software to achieve that means.._

I keep hearing this, and I find it as ridiculous as ever if not more.

Music for today's people means basically streaming -- you move to Windows or
wherever and you get from Apple Music to Spotify (or even keep using Apple
Music). No lock in. Music geeks who hoard mp3s/flacs are not locked-in either.
And the minority who "carefully curates" their playlists and adds annotations
to their music files (which might not port easily) is insignificant.

Ditto for movies. Besides, Neflix, Amazon video, etc dominate there too.

Ditto for apps. Most apps exists on both platforms. And those that do not and
you can't live without (e.g. Sketch for some, or Things for others, etc), are
a genuine advantage, not a "lock-in". Most are not even Apple's anyway.

And it's not like you suffer any great loss if you give up your iOS (or
Android for that matter) app purchases to go to the other side. The majority
of people have just 10-20 apps they've bought from some survey's I've seen.
Besides, millions of people move from Android to iOS and vice versa all the
time, and their old apps doesn't stop them.

Mail -- you have IMAP. You can use whatever client on whatever platform.

The same goes for other things. Heck, most apps a "normal" person uses are
through the web these days, and play equally well.

If Apple locks-in anybody with something, it's convenience and end-to-end
product line. Not some nefarious scheme.

------
eesmith
I borrowed someone's BeBox for a couple of days to write my one and only BeOS
program. It was fun.

Why is NeXT written "NeXt" in this piece? I don't think I've ever seen it
written that way.

Other OSes that "almost made Apple an entirely different company" were
Taligent and Copland, for varying levels of "almost".

~~~
dheera
> Why is NeXT written "NeXt" in this piece?

It's hard to remember this kind of weird random capitalization.

When I read "iPhone", I remember "i, phone, two words with only the second
word capitalized".

When I read "mRNA", I remember "mrna, all caps except for the first letter".

When I read it I read "NeXT", I read, "next with random capitalization".

Now when I write back, the first 2 are deterministic; the third is
probabilistic.

~~~
copperx
Whenever you capitalize a company or product name "properly," you're bending
the knee to their marketing department. That weird capitalization may be
aesthetically pleasing for their logo but has no place in English. Writing
"Apple's Iphone and Ios" may look weird, but it's technically correct. Proper
nouns have only their first letter capitalized.

~~~
whyenot
> Proper nouns have only their first letter capitalized.

Are you familiar with McIntosh apples? ;)

~~~
ghaff
Mc and Mac prefixes are mostly outliers :-) At least in the case of the apples
they're named for a person.

The computer industry really jumped into case sensitive naming with both feet.
I'm sure NeXT wasn't the first such example but they were one of the earlier
ones when it started to become the norm.

~~~
eesmith
The comment was to point out that copperx's blanket statement was
insufficiently nuanced for even daily use of written English - a lot of people
got to McDonald's for food, and the signs are nearly ubiquitous.

I don't know how to judge "when it started to become the norm." It seems too
easy to set the line semi-arbitrarily to the time you want.

A Mac users in the 1980s, before NeXT, would know about MacPaint and other
Mac* software. The Mac 2D graphics used QuickDraw, which in turn was "was
grounded in the Apple Lisa's LisaGraf" (quoting Wikipedia).

MicroPro International Corporation developed WordStar staring in June 1979.
Again quoting Wikipedia, "By May 1983 BYTE magazine called WordStar "without a
doubt the best-known and probably the most widely used personal computer word-
processing program"."

There's AutoCAD.

And in the 1970s and 1980s ComputerLand was a large retail computer store,
with "about 800 stores by 1985." (Microsoft, btw, was originally "Micro-
Soft".)

While it may have been popular in the computer industry, I don't know enough
about other fields. I pointed out in another thread the DryIce Corporation
started in the 1920s, producing frozen carbon dioxide.

Edit: I realized I do know of earlier naming schemes which used mixed-
capitalization. Before Micro-Soft was "Traf-O-Data", which followed a mid-20th
century practice that includes Bridge-O-Rama
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge-O-
Rama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge-O-Rama) ) Bowl-O-Rama
([http://www.bctv.org/opinion/bowl-o-rama-was-more-than-a-
bowl...](http://www.bctv.org/opinion/bowl-o-rama-was-more-than-a-bowling-
alley-it/article_40e79484-250b-11e7-8e1e-373158834e18.html) ), etc.

~~~
ghaff
Fair enough. Straight "CamelCase" has a pretty long history. Semi-random
capitalization like NeXT would seem to be less common as you go back in time
but it's fairly common in tech today.

Just anecdotally, it would seem publications tend to respect camel case but
may or may not when there are other capitalization oddities including
lowercase first letters.

~~~
eesmith
I came up with a few non-tech names with CamelCase pre-NeXT. Quotes are almost
all from Wikipedia. The oddest was "McMoRan Oil and Gas Company."

CiCi's pizza - "Joe Croce and Mike Cole founded Cicis in 1985". (That was also
the year NeXT was founded.)

"In 1971, Nebraska Consolidated Mills changed its name to "ConAgra""

"CryoLife, Inc. incorporated in 1984 in Florida, was the first biomedical
company to specialize in the ultra-low temperature preservation of human heart
valves used for cardiac reconstruction, primarily in children born with heart
defects."

Freeport-McMoRan - "In 1981, Freeport Minerals Company merged with the McMoRan
Oil and Gas Company. The McMoRan Oil and Gas Company was founded in 1967 by
three partners, William Kennon McWilliams Jr. ("Mc"), James Robert (Jim Bob)
Moffett ("Mo"), who were both petroleum geologists, and Byron McLean Rankin,
Jr. ("Ran"), ..."

BankAmericard - founded in 1958; became Visa. "In June 1970, Bank of America
gave up control of the BankAmericard program. The various BankAmericard issuer
banks took control of the program, creating National BankAmericard Inc. (NBI),
an independent Delaware corporation which would be in charge of managing,
promoting and developing the BankAmericard system within the United States."

"In 1965, the Pepsi-Cola Company merged with Frito-Lay, Inc. to become
PepsiCo, Inc"

"Initially held as a private partnership, SeaWorld offered its stock publicly
in 1968 enabling them to expand and open additional parks." (Elsewhere, "After
temporarily going public in 1968 a mere four years after its founding,
SeaWorld was bought by the Anheuser Busch Companies, Inc. and became its
entertainment subsidiary.")

"In 1981, the company [Calgary Power] changed its name to its current name of
TransAlta Corporation."

TransCanada - The company was founded in 1951 but I don't know if it was
written "TransCanada" from the beginning. I did find
[https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&dat=19770728&id=...](https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1946&dat=19770728&id=iYIuAAAAIBAJ&sjid=aaEFAAAAIBAJ&pg=964,2618640&hl=en)
from 1977 saying "TransCanada", which is good enough to show it was pre-NeXT.

------
95014_refugee
"But it's hard not to wonder what the past couple decades of tech history
would have looked like if Apple had gone the other way."

No, it's not.

Plus, working for Sakoman? No thanks.

------
_pmf_
Recommended reading on BeOS: [https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-
docs/benewsletter/index.html](https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-
docs/benewsletter/index.html)

Archived newsletters for BeOS developers.

------
wmil
It would have been interesting to see what Apple would have done with BeOS's
ABI problem.

Be used GCC's 2.9x C++ ABI, which wasn't stable and was changed in 3.0. Would
Apple have forked GCC? Or re-worked the design of Be avoid the issue?

~~~
memsom
BeOS for PowerPC didn't use GCC. It used the Metrowerks Compilers (mwcc etc).
One of the reasons is because the BeOS used PEF exe format. As Apple wouldn't
open that up, hardly any comilers support that format - which kills gcc on the
BeOS PPC platform. This is why you're unlikely to ever see Haiku on a BeBox or
any Haiku support for legacy BeOS PPC apps.

I hacked together a MWOB decompiler back in the day and re-implemented it as a
fun little project last year. It's on my GitHub [1] is anyone cares. I will
some day get an assembler working and outputting MWOB files. Probably.

There's some other BeOS stuff kicking about, including an input driver for
using gesture based writing [2]. I was writing this for BeIA, as at the time I
has one of the Dt300 web pads running BeIA 1.0. There was a crappy UI toolkit
wrapper we were using for Free Pascal too [3]. The latter included "fdb",
which was a cool little BMessage based debugger tool. I wrote is as a throw
away, bit some one once told me it was their daily driver at one point for
debugging apps on end user machines.

[1] [https://github.com/memsom/mwobdec](https://github.com/memsom/mwobdec) [2]
[https://github.com/memsom/ratcowsoftopensource/tree/master/B...](https://github.com/memsom/ratcowsoftopensource/tree/master/BeOS/strokeit_src)
[3]
[https://github.com/memsom/ratcowsoftopensource/tree/master/d...](https://github.com/memsom/ratcowsoftopensource/tree/master/delphi/begui)

~~~
memsom
Clarification: BeOS PPC uses PEF (because that was the main format MW
supported, there was a lot of Apple knowledge in the building and there wasn't
a better exe format for PowerPC at the time.) The offshoot of this is that
some of the software from PR will run on R5.03. (preview release, for some
reason the first 2 public releases were called PR(1) and PR2, with AA
(advanced access) being almost PR1, but not quite baked.) One of the things I
managed to get working was the MW Java - it was horribly out of date, but it
was pretty cool to mess about with.

Intel used PE for R3, then ELF from R4 onwards. So R3 Intel software is not
compatible with any other release.

No idea what the Hobbit BeBoxen used.

BeIA used ELF or CELF, the latter being a customised ELF exe format with
compression of symbols and stuff like that to reduce on disk size.

------
win_ini
To this day - many API calls on iOS reference "NS" as a prefix. That's from
"NextStep"

Acronyms take on their own life sometimes.

~~~
bonaldi
The original NeXTSTEP prefix was "NX"; NS came about after OpenStep, the joint
project with Sun — hence Next/Sun as the prefix.

[http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/cocoa/136618-what-
does-n...](http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/cocoa/136618-what-does-ns-
means.html)

------
_Codemonkeyism
I run NeXTStep on a color cube (in the end) and BeOS on a developer BeBox.
Although I did love NeXTStep - especially compared to all the other unix
systems we were running, including some SGIs - I always loved BeOS more. It
was responsive and the file system was magic back then.

And the two LED strips for the two processors showed off :-)

------
molestrangler
I built a Dual CPU Pentium PC PC to run BeOS, I still have the original SKU
box and polo-shirt somewhere. An excellent experiment in building a new OS
from scratch.

BeFS was a wonderful experience, it showed what could be achieved if you were
not held back by legacy code.

Back in the real world, Apple made the correct choice in not buying BeOS.

~~~
appleflaxen
> Back in the real world, Apple made the correct choice in not buying BeOS.

how come, given the positive review you are giving it?

------
k__
I wonder how it became Zeta OS, which was sold over some shady TV channels
here in Germany.

~~~
memsom
How? Wikipedia tells the story [0]. But here is my take. After Be Inc stopped
making BeOS[1], some guy (no names, google yT, he was the CEO) tried to
license the Personal version of R5.03 to allow it to be repackaged.

After Be Inc folded, this guy tried to get his "yellow Tab" company going for
a while. It would stop and start. No one believed it would happen.

Then they released a product based on the BETA R5.1 release. Everyone was a
bit confused. Was it legal? This went on for some years. They made about 4 or
5 betas, then a 1.0 release, then a 1.1 and 1.2. There was a BETA for 1.5
too.All along, people were shouting "this is not legal." They made a load of
changes that implied they had source code access. A few notable community
developers were involved. At least one ex-Be employee was also involved.

So, 2007, the proverbial brown stuff hit the fan. Firstly, ACCESS come out and
say "we do not believe YellowTab has a legitimate license. Moreover, we have
been trying to give them notice of this for many years"[2]. Then, JLG (former
CEO of Be Inc) basically comes out in public saying "we never licensed
anything to yellowtab". There was a complete breakdown of the timeline of
events on OS News[4]. It was like getting a big box of popcorn and watching
the biggest BeOS conspiracy theory since the Focus Shift unravel. It was
compelling.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnussoft_ZETA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnussoft_ZETA)

[1] Focust shift. They stopped the desktop in favour of Internet Appliances.

[2]
[http://www.osnews.com/story/17623/Access_Completely_Unaware_...](http://www.osnews.com/story/17623/Access_Completely_Unaware_of_Legitimate_Zeta_License)

[3]
[http://www.osnews.com/story/17664/JLG_No_Agreement_Between_Y...](http://www.osnews.com/story/17664/JLG_No_Agreement_Between_YellowTAB_Palmsource)

[4]
[http://www.osnews.com/story/17628/Timeline_of_Zeta_Developme...](http://www.osnews.com/story/17628/Timeline_of_Zeta_Developments)

~~~
k__
Hey, thanks :)

I didn't know this came crashing down so hard. To me it was just another
strange TV-shopping software product that nobody wanted and so it didn't sell.
I was 16 and Windows was all I knew at that time.

------
disordinary
I still have a BeOS 4.5 disk lying around somewhere. Was a great OS at the
time.

~~~
KernelPanic0
Somewhere on the Internet Archive is a series of BeOS ISO images, but I refuse
to link to it.

HaikuOS is a good OS to try and use BeOS API calls to make it work like BeOS.

~~~
adamnemecek
Do you know how to get it running on vmware/virtualbox? I spent like two
afternoons once trying to get them run but could get past the booting stage
and just kinda gave up.

~~~
sien
This may have been in the past but it's straightforward now. I tried it out
maybe 6 months ago and had no issues.

Just followed whatever guide I could find online.

------
wazoox
In some sort of late private joke about crossing self-references, apparently
the new iPhone 8 "gesture button" sort of copy the Palm Pré interface...

------
hoodoof
QNX would have been a better choice than BeOS.

~~~
fractallyte
Ah, the good ol' days - when there was actually some _diversity_ in operating
systems and platforms!

~~~
pjmlp
Now with Windows re-introduction of a UNIX like personality, it seems we are
heading into an UNIX mono-culture.

Which I find quite bad, as it hinders OS research, specially in regards to
safer OS architectures.

------
jlebrech
what BeOS was missing is one killer-app (video/audio production) for users of
windows to dual boot into.

------
hoodoof
I was really taken with BeOS at the time but NextStep was a _much_ better
operating system given that it was built on top of Unix and in addition was
just beautifully engineered. The evidence of the excellence of its
architecture is how easily it converted between CPUs and how easily it was
changed to become iOS.

~~~
haberman
I disagree. BeOS was also "built on top of Unix", to the extent that it ran
bash and a standard UNIX-like command-line environment. Most Linux programs
compiled fine for it (with the notable exception of mmap() which was not
implemented yet).

In my opinion BeOS was technically superior in the sense that it was far more
pervasively multithreaded, which meant UIs never locked up just because they
were waiting on some slow computation or network resource. I still believe
it's the case that BeOS on circa-2000 hardware was more responsive than any UI
I ever used before or since, including MacOS X on 2017 hardware. Even just
resizing a Finder window in 2017 on my MacBook lags the cursor in a way that
_never_ happened on BeOS.

~~~
zokula
> In my opinion BeOS was technically superior in the sense that it was far
> more pervasively multithreaded, which meant UIs never locked up just because
> they were waiting on some slow computation or network resource. I still
> believe it's the case that BeOS on circa-2000 hardware was more responsive
> than any UI I ever used before or since, including MacOS X on 2017 hardware.

Not true at all, the BeOS ui locked up plenty when using any real apps that
is. GoBE office suite would slow BeOS and its ui to a crawl, Mozilla would
too, a few IDEs that were around did too. Trying to do anything beyond dail-up
networking was a joke. There are a few other apps that did slow BeOS as well
but they escape me as I haven't really used BeOS in 15 years.

BeOS was no more than a toy OS, I lost interest in it because Windows 2000,
FreeBSD and Linux were more stable and just as fast on 2000-2004 era hardware.

~~~
acdha
> Not true at all, the BeOS ui locked up plenty when using any real apps that
> is. GoBE office suite would slow BeOS and its ui to a crawl, Mozilla would
> too, a few IDEs that were around did too.

That certainly doesn't match my experience: some apps like Mozilla could block
their own window contents (but not window manager operations like moving or
resizing) but the overall UI never blocked for anything except a video driver
crash – and then only for a couple seconds as the kernel restarted that
process.

As an example, on a dual P-90 I could simultaneously stream video to disk from
a FireWire camcorder (which was actually a real-time challenge on that
minimally-buffered hardware which Win98 & OS/2 couldn't meet except with a
completely idle system), compile Mozilla (which, IIRC, took about an hour),
and not even notice the impact on my email and web browsing activity.
Aggregate disk transfer performance would be slower but a good real-time
scheduler meant that you didn't have huge lags while reading every small file.

Windows and macOS still fail that test unless run with SSDs, and then only
when e.g. Windows Update or the Xcode updates aren't running in the
background.

