
Haiku - asdlfj2sd33
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/09/hands-on-with-haiku-back-to-the-future-of-beos.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
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sutro
Be, while an innovative OS in its day for sure, is more interesting to me as a
business story. Most people don't realize how close BeOS came to becoming Mac
OS X. They had the inside track on the deal, and their OS was technically
superior to Next's. But Gassée's determination to hold out for more money
combined with the famous Steve Jobs reality distortion field to consign Be to
the dustbin of history and cleared the way for Jobs's second coming at Apple.
How different the tech world would be today if Gassée had said yes to Apple's
initial acquisition offer. I wonder how often he thinks about the breakdown of
that deal, lo these many years later.

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dcurtis
If Apple bought Be, it wouldn't have gotten Steve Jobs.

It is possible that Apple would have died, and Be would have suffered the same
fate either way.

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sutro
That is possible. It is also possible that Apple would have thrived in
different ways. There would likely be no iPod and no iPhone. Jobs would likely
not be the legend that he is today, though of course he would still be in the
history books. What is certain, though, is that Be, as both a business and a
technology, and Gassée as an individual, are exponentially less successful now
(by standard business metrics, not necessarily in a deeper sense) than they
would have been had Gassée said yes. I wonder if that still haunts him, or if
he has made peace with it.

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tfh

      > There would likely be no iPod and no iPhone.
    

Why there would be no iPod? AFAIK it's not Steve Jobs who came with the idea.

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sutro
No, Jobs didn't invent digital audio players, nor did anyone else at Apple.
But Jobs decided to pursue it as a business. The story -- apocryphal or no --
is that Jobs named Apple Computer after the Beatles' label, Apple Records. He
has always been a music fanatic. It is unlikely that with anyone else at the
helm Apple would have driven as hard or as far into the music business.

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idm
Just like TFA I booted Haiku in VirtualBox... Several years ago I ran the BeOS
R5 livedisk, and while this is reminiscent, since I'm running in a virtual
environment it falls short.

Running BeOS on the metal was amazing - setting a thread to realtime would
make it really snappy, and it's just not the same when it's virtualized...

Either that or Haiku has some way to go yet - I can't tell...

EDIT: you know what? actually, this is still really impressive... it DOES
behave a lot like BeOS, and it's alpha... I crashed firefox, and gdb popped
right up. I dropped into a shell (bash) and there was a GNU style environment
right there. That's actually really cool!

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inc
Long ago, I was a beta tester and ran BeOS on a dual ppro 180, for a time, and
it was lots of fun, turning processors on and off and bouncing balls between
windows. I wish more companies would be as visionary and innovative as Be was,
and give us some new, different computing platforms.

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apowell
I remember installing BeOS when it came out. It was impressive and beautiful,
and I really wanted it to catch on. I think I'll give Haiku a spin. With
VMware, it'll be much easier this time around.

~~~
there
except they've been doing all of their development in virtual machines, so the
actual real hardware support is quite thin.

~~~
warfangle
What if host systems evolved to become little more than virtual machine
managers, dealing with hardware drivers and so forth - while the user-space
operating system is freed from having to worry about the actual hardware being
used unless it really wants to?

~~~
rglullis
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel>

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URSpider94
Man, I remember how badly I wanted a BeBox when they first came out, partly
because the hardware was a hobbyist's paradise (a Geek Port, for chrissake),
and partly because the UI was so pretty.

But, Linux and MacOS have come pretty far in the intervening 12 years, and
without any special hardware to go with it, I just can't muster the excitement
to mess around with Haiku.

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thejay
It sure is an impressive piece of software. I hope it catches on, or find
itself a niche market.

I wonder if they're doing anything for developers to easily leverage pervasive
multithreading, the bare bones fine-grained threading can be a pain to deal
with.

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jcw
Geez. All this Be nostalgia lately has had _me_ pining for it, and I've never
used it. Gonna try out R5 on my old pentium II. Hopefully it'll replace XP. It
seems fitting, as that computer is nothing more than a toy for making art.

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datums
I remember installing BeOS back in the day. I was very impressed. Glad to see
continued interest. Anyone running with AmigaOS ?

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access_denied
And no furries! Ahh, I love every OSS project that spares me another furry on
my app launcher.

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tetha
Is it just me, or are haikus getting hyped and hyped and hyped even more?

