
Whatever Happened to BeOS? - forca
I love to tinker with operating systems -- perhaps too much. I was just thinking about BeOS and the non-Linux replacement, Haiku, which is still in Alpha 4.<p>What went wrong with BeOS? Was it hardware, software? No one cared because of Linux and BSD?<p>BeOS was original, fast, and elegant. In my opinion, it should have been the next OS X instead of the remnants of Next.
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dsr_
When BeOS was becoming interesting, it was competing against MacOS 8 and Linux
(assuming you had already ruled out Windows and you couldn't/wouldn't pay for
a UNIX workstation).

MacOS had commercial apps and a good reputation in certain fields. The
hardware was expensive by PC standards but high quality.

Linux was growing like a weed: adding just a little more RAM to the kind of
desktop a college student could afford let you do everything that the Sun
workstations in the computer lab could do, and you never had to share it.

If BeOS had been free, compatible with less-blessed hardware, and not offended
Apple so much, it might have had a chance.

~~~
dottrap
For Apple, BeOS would have been a disastrous choice and NeXT knew this. BeOS
and its public APIs were built on C++ which is terrible for binary (ABI)
compatibility, which is a critical feature to convince 3rd party commercial
(proprietary) developers to develop for your platform.

You can see that BeOS and later Haiku were stuck on an ancient version of gcc
2 because they could never upgrade without breaking all existing binary
compatibility.

After NeXT did their not-so-secret reverse takeover of Apple, you can see they
solved the binary compatibility problem for the most part by leveraging both C
and Objective-C which both had a predictable/stable ABI, even with all the
tinkering they did to extend the languages and eventually replace the
compilers (Codewarrior->gcc->clang).

~~~
peatmoss
I've heard this story relayed in person in nearly identical language before.
Do I know you? Either that or this was more in the zeitgeist than I think.

~~~
dottrap
I think this information is common among NeXT old-timers and passed onto by
them to early Cocoa developers where I learned it. It used to be a small
community.

I disagree with the original post that implies BeOS was better than NeXT.
There are a lot of really useful, cool things in NeXT that are not appreciated
by the masses and forgotten with time. All the new iOS developers don't know
how much history/heritage their stuff is built on.

For example, fat binaries are so incredibly useful and elegant. While Mac
easily transitioned from PowerPC to Intel, then 32-bit to 64-bit, and now all
all the different ARM architectures on iOS by using fat binaries, all the
other platforms are a mess with just their 32-bit to 64-bit transition partly
because the need to differentiate between two different architectures on the
file system breaks most tool chains. (Not to mention that it confuses the hell
out of users about which version they need to download.)

Linux had their chance with Icculus's FatELF patch and they rejected it. Only
years later after great suffering is some of the Linux community starting to
think maybe FatELF was a good idea after all. Too bad our 64-bit migration is
almost over. But Android still really could benefit from this because that
system is a mess that looks like it will need to deal with multiple
architectures indefinitely.

~~~
peatmoss
This was definitely the story I got from a NeXT old-timer.

I also agree on Be. While I used BeOS (even got to play with it on a BeBox)
and was impressed by it, NeXT was the better system. Oh my, networking was a
mess in BeOS, and I'm not sure they would have ever gotten full multi-user
support.

As a youngster, I pined for NeXT after playing with one at a university lab. I
still marvel that we now carry NeXT workstations around I our pockets.

I really wish the Linux / BSD communities had rallied around GNUStep. Would
have been nice to see how two implementations coevolved.

~~~
dottrap
I remember when Gnome and KDE were first emerging. They were both too slow and
wonky for me. Somebody suggested WindowMaker and I really liked it. At this
time, I had no knowledge of NeXT or GNUStep. It was some years later after OS
X emerged and I started learning Cocoa that I learned of all this history and
discovered that WindowMaker was also connected to this universe and it really
sunk in just how advanced they were for the time.

I'm still saddened that GNUStep never went anywhere. I still find
GTK/Gnome/Qt/KDE wonky for a lot of basic things like copy-and-paste and drag-
and-drop.

My wildest dreams hope to see a re-emergence of something like GNUStep, but
this time be driven by all the new interest in Swift.

~~~
forca
Funny you should mention GNUStep/WindowMaker... absolutely my favourite WM. I
agree most of the rest are bloated and wonky. Gnome has removed almost all of
its menus and bells and whistles and it's largely unusable now. KDE is the
kitchen sink inside the kitchen sink. It's overly complicated for a DE. Sadly,
there is no real focus on WM now, although last year, Window Maker Live, a
Debian-based live ISO was released. It hasn't gained a real foothold among
aficionados.

There was an attempt to get Window Maker back in the limelight last year. Not
sure where this has gone...

~~~
peatmoss
Yeah, I ran a poor-man's NeXT for a long time (WindowMaker on NetBSD in my
case). The Etoile project seemed like they were going to try to make a full
GNUStep-based desktop environment, but I fear they are suffering from too few
coder hours: [http://etoileos.com](http://etoileos.com)

------
wmf
Partly they just didn't have enough money to build an OS, so every time they
pivoted it put them further behind. And they pivoted a lot of times.

I think they made a lot of design decisions that were overfitted for 1995, so
if they had survived they would have quite a bit of legacy cruft by now. And
the brittleness of C++ may have made the cruft worse.

In some cases their idealism seems to have held back practical adoption. Their
"pervasive multithreading" made it very difficult to port Java and Mozilla.
(The idea of "only native apps, no ports" made perfect sense in the siloed PC
market of 1993. By 1997, not so much.) Treating all developers equally meant
that professional developers may have gotten shortchanged.

------
morganvachon
I was a heavy BeOS user during its last days, and from what I remember,
Microsoft put some serious pressure on certain OEMs to not sell BeOS on their
computers. Compaq was one of those; they were told in no uncertain terms that
if Compaq sold even one computer with BeOS on it, they'd never sell another
computer with Windows, period.

That's certainly not the only reason the company went under, but it was a
major factor.

------
CyberFonic
Like most companies of that era, they built their own hardware (BeBox) which
was very expensive (compared to the PCs of the time). Later they moved to
Apple hardware and Apple did try to buy them but they held out for more money.

Linux took hold because you could pull any old PC out of the junk pile and
load it up and go. BSD, at the time, was fracturing into multiple versions and
having legal troubles.

Haiku alpha 4 is awesome. But there are too many other projects out there so
there aren't enough resources to make faster progress.

The wikipedia page
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS) has a
lot of more good information.

------
api
I think the problem was the same as that faced by languages like D competing
with C++11:

It wasn't "better enough" than the alternatives.

It was better than NeXT (what would become OSX), but not enough to be
revolutionary. It was better than Windows, Mac Classic, and Linux, but also
not enough to be revolutionary.

The existing closed incumbents won out by market share and inertia, and Linux
won out by being free, open, and by basically going viral.

If BeOS had been open and free I think it would have given Linux a run for its
money, but it wasn't.

------
0x0
My bet: a lack of a killer app, plus no compatibility with killer apps on
other platforms.

OS/2 was slightly more compatible with existing apps and therefore had
slightly more success for a while.

~~~
morganvachon
That was a thorn in the side of many a BeOS user; while GoBe Productive was an
amazing office suite, Microsoft Office had a stranglehold and if you didn't
have Word and Excel, you didn't have a computer in many people's minds.

The world has changed in the past 13 years; we've had OpenOffice and
LibreOffice for many years, and Google Docs/Drive has forced Microsoft to
focus on cloud-based productivity apps. Back when BeOS was alive, it was just
as common to have a dial up modem as it was DSL or cable, and sometimes
broadband simply wasn't available in certain areas. Cloud computing as we know
it now was still over the horizon.

In today's cloud-centric Internet, Haiku could easily thrive if it got enough
momentum. Unfortunately the only people who seem to even know about it are old
BeOS hats like myself.

