
BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X - fogus
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/beos-the-alternate-universes-mac-os-x/
======
mumblemumble
Ah, memories. Used to use BeOS as my primary OS for a year or two. I think
it's the only OS I ever found to be truly intuitive and pleasant to work with.

That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen
Be over NeXT. The elephant in the room is security: NeXTSTEP, being Unix-
based, has some amount of security baked in from the ground up. BeOS didn't;
it was more akin to Windows 95 or classic Mac OS on that front. Consequently,
I doubt it could have made it far into the 21st century. It would have died
unceremoniously in a steaming pile of AYBABTU. Taking Apple with it,
presumably.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Security from what? Do user accounts really provide much benefit in the
personal computing space? Where the median user count is 1?

Neither OS had the kind of security that is really useful today for this
usecase, which is per-application.

~~~
asveikau
But a bunch of the methods we have for securing, say, mobile phones, grew out
of user accounts.

Personally I don't know Android innards deeply, but when I was trying to
backup and restore a rooted phone I did notice that every app's files have a
different owner uid/gid and the apps typically won't launch without that set
up correctly. So it would seem they implemented per-app separation in this
instance by having a uid per app.

Imagine a world where Google had chosen to build on a kernel that had spent
many decades with no filesystem permissions at all. Perhaps they'd have to pay
the same app compatibility costs that Microsoft did going from 9x to NT
kernel, or changing the default filesystem to ACL'd-down NTFS.

~~~
anyfoo
Then you'd maybe get something like iOS, where the POSIX uid practically does
not matter at all, and the strong security and separation is provided by other
mechanisms like entitlements...

Someone else pointed out that BeOS allegedly had "quality and security"
problems in general (I myself have no idea), so that may indeed have led to
problems down the line, whereas BSD was pretty solid. But I agree with the OP
and don't think POSIX security in particular is much of a factor today.

~~~
hhas01
Yeah. Funny enough, if Apple had skipped OS X and gone directly to iOS, BeOS
_would_ have been a superior foundation. No uselessly mismatched security
model or crusty legacy API baggage to clog up the new revolution in single-
user always-online low-powered mobile devices.

Of course, that was in back in the days when an entire platform from hardware
to userland could be exclusively optimized to utterly and comprehensively
smash it in just one very specific and precisely targeted market. Which is, of
course, exactly what the iPhone was.

Just as the first Apple Macintosh a decade earlier eschewed not only multi-
user, multi-process, and even a kernel; every single bit and cycle its being
being exclusive dedicated to delivering a revolutionary consumer UI experience
instead!

In comparison, NeXTSTEP, which ultimately became iOS, is just one great huge
glorious _bodge_. “Worse is Better” indeed!

..

Honesly, poor Be was just really unlucky in timing: a few years too late to
usurp SGI; a few too early to take the vast online rich-content-streaming
world all for its own. Just imagine… a BeOS-based smartphone hitting the
global market in 2000, complete with live streaming AV media and conferencing
from launch! And Oh!, how every Mac OS and Windows neckbeards would’ve
screamed at _that_!:)

------
chipotle_coyote
I was another former Be "power user." And I think that was probably accurate
-- if you weren't in the "BeOS lifestyle" during the admittedly short window
that it was possible, it's hard to understand how much promise it looked like
it had. When I tell people I ran it full-time for over a year, they wonder how
I managed to get anything done, but...

\- Pe was a great GUI text editor, competitive with BBEdit on the Mac

\- GoBe Productive was comparable to AppleWorks, but maybe a little better at
being compatible with Microsoft Office

\- SoundPlay was a great MP3 player that could do crazy things that I still
don't see anything doing 20 years later (it had speed control for files,
including playing backwards, and could _mix_ files that were queued up for
playback; it didn't have any library management, but BeOS's file system let
you expose arbitrary metadata -- like MP3 song/artist/etc. tags! -- right in
file windows)

\- Mail-It was the second-best email client I ever used, behind the now also
sadly-defunct Mailsmith

\- e-Picture was an object-based bitmapped graphics editor similar in spirit
and functionality to Macromedia's Fireworks, and was something I genuinely
missed for years after leaving BeOS

And there were other programs that were amazing, even though I didn't use
them: Adamation's video editor (videoElements? something like that), their
audio editor audioElements, Steinberg's Nuendo, objektSynth, and two programs
which are incredibly still being sold today: Lost Marble's Moho animation
program, now sold by Smith Micro for Mac and PC, and the radio automation
package TuneTracker (incredibly now being sold as a turnkey bundle with
Haiku). Also, for years, there was a professional-grade theatre light/audio
control system, LCS CueStation, that ran on BeOS -- and it actually ran
Broadway and Las Vegas productions. I remember seeing it running at the Cirque
de Soleil permanent installation at Disney World in Orlando.

At the time Apple bought Next rather than Be, I thought they'd made a horrible
mistake. Given Apple's trajectory afterward, of course, it's hard to say that
looking back. It's very possible that if they'd bought Be, they'd have gone
under, although I think that would have less to do with technology than with
the management they'd have ended up with (or more accurately, stayed with).
But it's still an interesting "what if."

~~~
jonny_eh
You may have hinted at it, but I think Apple's subsequent turnaround after
acquiring Next was mainly due to their founder, Steve Jobs, coming back to
Apple.

~~~
jonhendry18
Jobs helped enormously, of course, but if Apple was still trying to sell
classic MacOS in 2005 I'm not sure even Steve Jobs could have kept them afloat
long enough to ship an iPhone.

~~~
jonny_eh
But the choice wasn't Next vs MacOS, it was BeOS vs Next.

------
statico
One of my favorite anecdotes about BeOS was that it had a CPU usage meter[1],
and on the CPU meter there were on/off switches for each core. If you had two
cores and turned one off, your computer would run at half speed. If you turned
both off, your computer would crash. Someone once told me that this was filed
as a bug against the OS and the response was "Works As Intended" and that it
was the expected behavior.

(These are fuzzy memories from ~25 years ago. It would be nice if someone
could confirm this story or tell me if it's just my imagination.)

[1]:
[http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/8way/8way-1.jpg](http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/8way/8way-1.jpg)

~~~
MisterTea
The CPU monitor program was called Pulse and early versions allowed you to
turn all the processors off and crash the machine. I think it was fixed in
3.something or 4.0.

The 8-way PIII Xeon was a Compaq someone tested BeOS on before it went into
production. I Remember it being posted on some BeOS news site. There should be
another screenshot or two with 25 avi files playing and a crap load of CPU
hungry programs running at once. Impressive feat circa 2000. Edit: browse the
screenshot directory for the other two. Amazing they survived time, internet,
bit rot and my memory:
[http://birdhouse.org/beos/8way/](http://birdhouse.org/beos/8way/)

The BeOS scheduler prioritized the GUI and media programs so you could load
the machine down to 100% and the GUI never stuttered and windows could be
smoothly moved, maximized and minimized at 100% CPU. Rather, your programs
would stutter. And everything was given a fair chance at CPU time.

Very nice design and the OS was built from the ground up for multimedia and
threading for SMP. It was a real nice attempt at building a next generation
desktop OS. Had no security even though it had basic POSIX compatibility and a
bash shell. Security bits meant nothing.

~~~
acdha
I remember circa 2000 being able to simultaneously compile Mozilla, transfer
DV video from a camcorder into an editor, check email, and surf the web on a
dual Pentium Pro system with no hint of UI stutter or dropped frames in the
firewire video transfer. It was at least another decade before SSDs and kernel
improvements made that possible on Linux, Windows, or OS X.

~~~
forwhomst
The tradeoff was the throughput of your compilation was terrible. BeOS wasn't
magic, it just prioritized the UI over all else. That's not advanced, it's
just one possible choice.

MacOS prior to OS X had the same property: literally nothing else could happen
at the same time if the user was moving the mouse, which is why you had to
take the ball out of the mouse before burning a CD-R on that operating system.

~~~
acdha
Oh, sure, it was obviously limiting the other tasks. The point was that this
is almost always the right choice for a general purpose operating system: no
user wants to have their music skip, UI go unresponsive, file transfers to
fail, etc. because the OS devoted resources to a batch process.

You’re only partially correct about classic macOS: you could definitely hang
the OS by holding down the mouse button but this wasn’t a problem for playing
music, burning CD-Rs, etc. in normal usage unless you had the cheapest of low-
end setups because a small buffer would usually suffice. I worked with a bunch
of graphic designers back then and they didn’t get coasters at a significant
rate or more than their Windows-using counterparts, and they burned a lot of
them since our clients couldn’t get large files over a network connection
faster than weeks.

------
djsumdog
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.

~~~
bitL
I think BeOS was the only OS that allowed smooth playback of videos and work
at the same time, something Windows was capable 5 and Linux 10 years later :D

~~~
anthk
Linux could do that in 2001 just fine, and without crashing like Windows. XV
was amazing. So was MPlayer.

~~~
danieldk
High definition playback is still not as smooth as it could be in browsers on
Linux (or if your CPU is fast enough, it will drain your battery more
quickly), because most browsers only have experimental support for video
acceleration.

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_accelera...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_acceleration#Application_support)

~~~
ac29
Pretty much any CPU released in the past decade should be capable of decoding
1080P video as well as a GPU (though yes, will use slightly more power). The
only exceptions I can think of are early generation Atom processors, which
were terribly slow.

~~~
danieldk
_Pretty much any CPU released in the past decade should be capable of decoding
1080P video as well as a GPU (though yes, will use slightly more power)._

The point is that modern GPUs have hardware decoding for common codecs, and
will use _far less power_ than CPU decoding. But the major browsers on Linux
(Firefox and Chrome) disable hardware decoding on Linux, because $PROBLEMS.

So, you end up with battery draining CPU-based 1080p decoding. And even more
battery draining or choppy 4k decoding.

------
rayiner
Oh man! I first tried BeOS personal edition when it came on a CD with Maximum
PC magazine. (Referring to same demo CD, though the poster is not me:
[https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1067159&s...](https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1067159&start=40).
Also, how crazy is it that Ars Technica’s forums have two decade old posts? In
2000, that would be like seeing forum posts from 1980.) I remember being so
happy when we got SDSL, and I could get online from BeOS. (Before that, my
computer had a winmodem.)

BeOS was always a very tasteful design. And well documented! I learned so much
about low level programming from the Be Newsletters: [https://www.haiku-
os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/index.html](https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-
docs/benewsletter/index.html). The BONE article is a great introduction to how
a network stack works: [https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-
docs/benewsletter/Issue5-5.h...](https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-
docs/benewsletter/Issue5-5.html#Engineering5-5). I still have a copy of
Dominic Giampalo’s BeFS book somewhere.

BeOS was very much a product of its time. (Microkernel, use of C++, etc.) What
would a modern BeOS look like? My thought: use of a memory and thread safe
language like Rust for the main app-level APIs. (Thread safety in BeOS
applications, where every window ran in its own thread, was not trivial.)
Probably more exokernel than microkernel, with direct access to GPUs and NICs
and maybe even storage facilitated by hardware multiplexing. What else?

~~~
anon9001
> In 2000, that would be like seeing forum posts from 1980.

That's the premise of Jason Scott's project launched in 1998 :)
[http://textfiles.com/](http://textfiles.com/)

~~~
cbm-vic-20
He also livestreams on Twitch; recently he's been streaming the archival of
Apple II floppies.

[https://www.twitch.tv/textfilesdotcom](https://www.twitch.tv/textfilesdotcom)

------
eb0la
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](https://youtu.be/BsVydyC8ZGQ?t=1074)

~~~
cptnapalm
By all the stars in heaven, that was an impressive demo.

~~~
tialaramex
It's about making a virtue of a necessity.

When Be wrote that demo the situation is that the other operating systems you
might plausibly choose all have working video acceleration. Even Linux has
basic capabilities in this area by that point. BeOS doesn't have that and
doesn't have a road map to get it soon.

So, any of the other platforms can play full resolution video captured from a
DVD for example, a use case actual people have, on a fairly cheap machine and
BeOS won't be able to do that without a beast of a CPU because it doesn't have
even have hardware colour transform acceleration or chromakey.

But - 1990s hardware video acceleration can only play one video at a time,
because "I want to play three videos" isn't a top ask from actual users. So,
Be's demo deliberately shows several different postage stamp videos instead of
one higher resolution video, as the acceleration is no help to competitors
there.

And then since you're doing it all in software, not rendering to a rectangle
in hardware, the transform to have this low res video render as one side of a
cube or textured onto a surface makes it only very slightly slower, rather
than being impossible.

Audiences come away remembering they saw BeOS render videos on a 3D surface,
and not conscious that it can't do full resolution video on the cheap hardware
everybody has. Mission success.

~~~
smallstepforman
BeOS R4.5 did have hardware accelerated OpenGL for 3dfx Voodoo cards. I played
Quake 2 in 1999 with HW OpenGL acceleration. For R5 BeInc wanted to redo their
OpenGL stack, and the initial prototypes seeded to testers actually had more
FPS on BeOS than under Windows.

------
killion
One of the last lines threw me off...

"Would Tim Berners-Lee have used a BeBox to run the world’s first web server
instead?"

The BeBox didn't ship until 1995. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first version of
the web in 1991. So nope, that wouldn't have happened.

~~~
gfiorav
He used a NeXT computer for that IIRC

------
jsjohnst
> What’s left for us now is to wonder, how different would the desktop
> computer ecosystem look today if all those years ago, back in 1997, Apple
> decided to buy Be Inc. instead of NeXT? Would Tim Berners-Lee have used a
> BeBox to run the world’s first web server instead?

For this hypothetical scenario to ever had been possible, BeOS would’ve had to
time travel, as TBL wrote _WorldWideWeb_ on a NeXT machine in 1990[0]. BeOS
was initially developed in 1991 per Wikipedia[1] and the initial release of
BeOS to the public wasn’t until 1995.

[0] [https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-
Lee/FAQ.html#browser](https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS)

------
Quequau
I used BeOS for most of the 2nd half of the '90s and I guess in my mind at
least the regrettable, messy, and unethical end of BeOS in 2001-2002 is
emblematic of the Dot Com collapse.

Crushed by Microsoft's anti-competitive business practices and sold for scrap
to a failing company who was unable to actually do anything with parts they
wound up with but who never the less made damn sure that no one else could
either.

~~~
codefreakxff
PSA: nevertheless is written as a single word

------
rvz
BeOS was really something of what the future 'could' have almost been. Too bad
that it was killed by better competitors. But again I think its fair to
compare with the lessons learned from its successor 'Haiku' that can be
learned by many other OSes:

From what I can see from using Haiku for a bit, it has the bazar community
element from the open-source culture with its package management and ports
system from Linux and BSD whilst being conservative with its design from its
apps, UI, and SDK like macOS. Although I have tired it and its surprisingly
"useable", the driver story is still a bit lacking. But from a GUI usability
point of view compared with many Linux distros, it feels very consistent
unlike the countless confusing interfaces coming from those distros.

Perhaps BeOS lives on in the Haiku project, but whats more interesting is that
the real contender who learned from its failure is the OS that has its kernel
named 'Zircon'.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> the driver story is still a bit lacking

That's a hell of an understatement right there. It still doesn't have any
capability for accelerated video, does it?

Unfortunately that's the story for any OS these days that isn't already firmly
established. Which is a huge shame since they all suck in their own ways.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
> Unfortunately that's the story for any OS these days that isn't already
> firmly established.

Maybe because we're coming at this from the wrong perspective?

I love the theoretical idea that I could build a generic x86 box that can boot
into any OS I feel like using, but has that ever truly been the case? We
certainly don't pick software this way—if you're running Linux, you're not
going to buy a copy of Final Cut and expect it to work.

Well-established software will of course work almost everywhere, but niche
projects don't have the ability. Unless you use something based on Java or
Electron, which is equivalent to using Virtualbox (or ESXi) in this
comparison.

It's long been said that one of Apple's major advantages with macOS is they
don't need to support any hardware under the sun. Non-coincidentally, the
recommended way to make a Hackintosh is to custom build a PC and explicitly
select Mac-compatible hardware.

Now, if an OS doesn't for instance have support for _any_ model GPUs at all,
cherry picking hardware won't help. But perhaps this is where projects like
BeOS need to focus their resources.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> The "correct" way to go about things is to choose the OS first, and then
> select compatible hardware.

Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if we weren't constrained by real world
requirements? If I were to write an OS today, the hardware I'm targeting may
become quite rare and/or expensive tomorrow. Or it may just go out of fashion.
Regardless, very few people are going to buy new hardware just to try out an
OS they're not even sure they want to use yet.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
> very few people are going to buy new hardware just to try out an OS

We do have VM's and emulators, but yes, the cost of switching OS's is huge.
That's true with or without broad hardware compatibility.

My point is this: I don't think the idea of OS-agnostic hardware ever really
existed. The fact that most Windows PC's can also run Linux is an exceptional
accomplishment, and not something other projects can be expected to replicate.
You might get other OS's to boot, but not with full functionality.

------
perardi
In my hazy recollection, there was another, rather pedestrian reason Apple
didn't go for BeOS: it had almost no infrastructure for printing. The Mac's
niche was prepress and desktop publishing (remember that phrase?), and BeOS
could barely print and had no color management.

(Though I could be totally wrong on this, and welcome a correction.)

~~~
smallstepforman
I also read a story about how BeOS DPx (developer previews) lacked decent
printing support and this was another reason why Apple chose NeXT. The irony
is that Apple had to redo the NeXT printing stack anyhow, as did BeOS in R4,
and they both ended up using CUPS. Also another reason was lack of x86
support, which forced BeInc to quickly rush out a x86 port in R3.0. Intel were
so impressed by the x86 performance, that they ended up investing $4M into
BeInc.

------
localhost
Before I first saw BeOS running on a colleague's machine back in the ~mid-late
90s (same guy who introduced me to Python) I used an SGI Onyx Reality Engine
machine [1] (roughly $250K computer back in the day) for molecular mechanics
simulations and BeOS ran circles around it on perceived responsiveness. I
really wish we have OS's that prioritize input/output latency over all else.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Onyx)

~~~
JBReefer
Don’t mobile OS’ prioritize perceived latency above all other resources
(besides battery)?

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Considering how often I hit a button more than once because it took so long to
do anything about the first one, that seems unlikely.

~~~
lostgame
I was drinking water when I read this and ended up snorting it out I laughed
so hard when I read this. It’s so, so true.

I am a mobile dev and use a plethora of iOS and Android devices all the time,
often on many different software versions.

It’s not unique to any platform, and seems to be most often affecting the
keyboard input, but occasionally seems to affect the rest of the UI as well.

Software updates will oscillate between breaking and fixing these things on
and off between different devices.

I’ve been doing app development since iOS 3 and the first version of the App
Store and used an ADP1. There’s no method to the madness I can see. Especially
with the keyboard input.

Lord help you if you happen to be using a 4S or 5 or iPad 2/3\. I often wait
for up to 10-15 seconds for text input to catch up to itself, only to catch up
to itself _all at once_ \- I can type whole sentences knowing by the time I
wait for them to finish it’ll be the same 10-15 seconds to wait as if I’ve
typed a single character.

------
rwmj
Haiku is really good. Would recommend anyone to try it out in a VM (I had it
running on my actual laptop for a short time, but unfortunately my job pretty
much requires me to run Linux so it couldn't stay). Haiku has a really
responsive UI with a 90s look so you can actually tell what is a button.

~~~
amatecha
Oh man, I really do miss the days of actual coherent UI that is clearly
"readable". The trend of flat UI drives me crazy. So much wasted cognitive
effort just to make sense of something on-screen.

~~~
rafaelvasco
Feel the same. Clean UI doesn't have to be flat. That said , "semi-flat"
interfaces can look really good.

------
pjmlp
In this alternative universe, Objective-C would have died, Swift would never
happened, and C++ would rule across desktop and mobile OSes (thinking only of
Windows, BeOS X, Symbian, Windows CE and what might have been BeOS based iOS).

Also POSIX would be even less relevant, and very few would be buying BeOS X
for doing Linux coding.

~~~
beefhash
> Also POSIX would be even less relevant, and very few would be buying BeOS X
> for doing Linux coding.

I don't think I'd enjoy a GNU userland/glibc/Linux monoculture, quite
honestly. I'm glad POSIX exists to have a slightly less moving target.

~~~
caspper69
Well, the last major revision to the Single Unix Specification was released in
2008. Ever since then, Linux has basically become the defacto POSIX standard.
So while glibc may not rule the roost, most POSIX OSes bend to the will of the
GNU userland and the Linux monoculture in many ways. It's not really like the
old days with Sun, IBM, DEC and even Microsoft with Xenix. POSIX is being
washed away a little more every day.

~~~
pjmlp
Proof being that other POSIX and Windows, now go with Linux kernel ABI
compatibility instead of POSIX.

And it isn't at all relevant on mobile OSes.

------
Eric_WVGG
I feel like the biggest missed opportunity of the “mobile revolution” ten
years ago was BeOS.

It seemed clear to me that Android would be a bust for smartphone
manufacturers (nobody has really made money off of Android except for Google
and Samsung, the latter of whom accomplished this by dominating that market).

If Sony, for example, had gotten ahold of BeOS and tried to vertically
integrate in a manner similar to Apple, they could have been a contender.

Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning Was the Command Line has quite a lot of
interesting observations about BeOS during its prime.
[http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html](http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html)

~~~
rvz
Well there's your reason why Google has the expertise to build Fuchsia. Most
of the BeOS guys were hired there to work on Android and now they are doing it
again with Fuchsia.

We will all come back to this comment in 10 years to find ourselves running
Fuchsia on our phones, tablets and our new Pixelbooks.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
Huh! I thought it was the Danger Sidekick crew

------
stiGGG
Some trivia: There was an unofficial successor of BeOS called ZETA from a
german company yellowTAB (later magnussoft). I remember this because they
tried selling it via a homeshopping channel in german TV which was completely
hilarious.

I found a (very bad) recording of this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQW-q2vp6W4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQW-q2vp6W4)

~~~
SyneRyder
For some weird reason I still have two (?) copies of yellowTAB Zeta on my
bookshelf, next to my boxed copy of Red Hat Linux 7.3. Amazingly Zeta got more
use than Linux, because it was much easier to get everything working on my
machine.

I just checked the discs and it's the same "Deluxe Edition RC2" as in that
home shopping video. I think my copies were bought as special advance preview
builds for third-party Zeta developers, though. And I don't think I paid as
much as 100EUR...

------
denimboy
The way BeOS used filesystem attributes like a database was way ahead of the
curve and it still might be.

This book was a great read back in the day of what goes into a "modern"
filesystem design

    
    
       https://archive.org/details/practical-file-system-design
    

"Practical File System Design" was technical but also readable. Straight from
the man who designed BFS which makes it more of an accomplishment IMO.

------
int_19h
I enjoy the regular reminiscing of BeOS, but for all the talk about how fast
it was on hardware common at the time, I wonder why nobody remembers an even
more impressive "tech demo" of an OS from that same period - QNX 6 desktop? An
ISO of evaluation edition of 6.2 was easily downloadable for a while, and it
was pretty neat:

[https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/qnx621](https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/qnx621)

(I know that QNX was and still is widely used - the "tech demo" bit refers to
its use as a primary desktop OS, not the usual embedding scenarios.)

~~~
lproven
Did you know that Blackberry 10 is QNX?

I had a Passport for a while. A lovely phone, and the OS had an Android
runtime so _some_ Android apps worked... but like other OSes that let you run
non-native apps, it resulted in BB10 never attaining a critical mass of apps.

------
jamesfmilne
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

~~~
arpa
Hey, consider yourself lucky you did not need a boot floppy :D

------
ttul
I remember seeing a BeBox under someone's desk at the video game company I was
interning at in 1997. I nearly lost my shit. When Be released an Intel-
compatible build while I was at Santa Clara in 1998, I installed it onto one
of the lab computers. Sorry about that, IT team.

------
rcarmo
I ran BeOS back in the day (even have the developer book!) and I've been
trying Haiku on and off over the years.

It's been interesting. The browser isn't quite all there yet but might be
considered serviceable, and you can sort of get a working dev environment
going on it (not many modern runtimes, though, nor a way to run Linux binaries
that would let me do Clojure).

It's certainly worth keeping an eye on, although there were some weird
decisions - for instance, I remember a thread on ARM support where whomever
was tackling that was completely dissing the Raspberry Pi, and yet today, if I
were to install it permanently on any machine to tinker with, it would almost
certainly be a Pi...

~~~
waddlesplash
Doesn't Clojure run on the JVM? Haiku has OpenJDK, you know...

~~~
rcarmo
Last time I tried Java was two years ago. A few months back I installed it on
KVM to check out the state of WebPositive, but didn’t actually get to try
coding anything since the browser couldn’t load my webmail.

------
gnu8
We didn’t get to have this because Microsoft strangled it in the crib. I am
never forgiving them for that.

~~~
asjw
The money wasted on the BeBox killed BeOS

~~~
somesortofsystm
Apple began to re-kick ass when they made an amazing laptop (tiBook). This was
the first truly viable Unix laptop, with promise to be a cut above the
competition (there was none) in terms of style and usability.

tiBook was bonkers. Suddenly, I didn't really need to sit in the room,
surrounded by boxes, but rather could go to the park and access the room from
under a tree.

If Be had managed to capture that, I think it would have been an amazing time.
Imagine if SGI had pulled off the first titanium, unibody laptop, designed
specifically for 3D. Would Alien-ware?

If there had been a BeLaptop, things might have been a lot different in
2000/2001, when things started to look very, very interesting.

I mean, the fact that Apple shipped a Unix laptop when all the other 'super-'
vendors were unable to pull it off.,,

~~~
pjmlp
Toshiba was selling Solaris laptops.

~~~
fit2rule
Yeah, but were they as sexy as the tiBook?

Like the OP, for me the tiBook was a defining moment. A unix laptop, and it
also looked good? Easy, immediate purchase.

~~~
pjmlp
Not as colorful,

[http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/work/0012.html](http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/work/0012.html)

[https://books.google.de/books?id=wDlUmfY9nQsC&pg=PT11&lpg=PT...](https://books.google.de/books?id=wDlUmfY9nQsC&pg=PT11&lpg=PT11&dq=toshiba+sparc+laptop&source=bl&ots=PG3j4xNxI8&sig=ACfU3U0Sp5vaopJ3b3lOOZvHu__6ehm4oA&hl=de&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjX39Wh3_jmAhWRmIsKHVh7AR8Q6AEwBHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=toshiba%20sparc%20laptop&f=false)

Additionally there were UNIX laptops from NatureTech

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dios0v0n9eY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dios0v0n9eY)

and Tadpole

[http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/32324/Tadpole-
SPARCbo...](http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/32324/Tadpole-SPARCbook-3/)

[https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/04/01/sparcbook-3000st-the-
co...](https://blog.adafruit.com/2019/04/01/sparcbook-3000st-the-
coolest-90s-laptop-sparc-vintagecomputing-retrocomputing-eckmeister/)

So no, "I mean, the fact that Apple shipped a Unix laptop when all the other
'super-' vendors were unable to pull it off.,, " isn't how history went.

Other vendors were already at it, while Apple was trying to make Copland work
and not being so successful with A/UX.

~~~
somesortofsystm
At that time, Linux on laptops was an absolutely great choice.

None of your vendors were considered viable - far, far too expensive. However,
Linux on x86 laptops at the time was amazing - portable Linux.

So when Apple joined that party, and made the hardware neat, it was an easy
switch. Portable, PPC-based, Unix. This was a delightful moment.

Of course, I still have a Linux laptop around, and 20 years later .. I
consider moving back to it, 100%. The ride has been good with Apple, but the
horizon doesn't look too great ..

~~~
pjmlp
At that time no one sane was putting GNU/Linux in production to replace battle
tested UNIX systems, if they loved their job.

What Linux laptops? It hardly worked properly in most desktops.

The first laptop I managed to get Linux working at all was a Toshiba in 1999,
while these systems were being sold since 1992.

~~~
somesortofsystm
Linux has always worked great if you choose your hardware wisely, and for a
long time in the 90's it was perfectly viable to put a Linux machine against
an SGI, Sun or DEC system as a workstation. Really, Linux had traction even
before the 21st century cloud and 'droid reality came along.

For most of the 90's I was using Linux in some capacity, professionally as
well as personally.

I also had a Linux laptop (Winbook, Sony, and then Sceptre..) on which I did a
lot of development and for which my carefully selected hardware did in fact
work, just fine - it was certainly viable as a dev platform, and for us Unix
programmers at the time, a small and light Linux laptop was far more
preferable to the pizzaboxes that had to be carried in the trunk .. or more,
bigger iron that you would stay at the office to use, instead of having at
home.

The point is Linux really did okay in the 90's, in terms of providing Unix
devs a way of working away from the computer room. I think this is an
underappreciated mechanism behind Linux' success over the years .. you could
carry Linux with you pretty easily, but this was not the case for Solaris,
Irix, etc.

------
harikb
I remember the Palm acquisition. At that time Palm had invested heavily in
webOS [1] which wasn't as performant. When they acquired BeOS, I thought it
was going to be a turn around. But that didn't happen either.

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

~~~
bsharitt
First of all Be was purchased by Palm several years before webOS ever came
out. WebOS didn't even exist in the same company. After Palm split into
palmSource(software) and palmOne(hardware), the BeOs stuff(along side the old
PalmOS stuff) went with palmSource. Later palmOne bought the rights to the
full Palm name from palmSource and became Palm again and that Palm came out
with webOS.

~~~
harikb
Thanks for the correction. Clearly, my recollection was wrong.

------
nickbauman
What was truly revolutionary for BeOS was the muti-threaded _user interface_
where you could have multiple mice connected to the same machine and they
could interact with the UI at the same time. Hardly anyone paid any attention
to this. But the possibilities are amazing.

------
angrygoat
We had one of the two-processor BeBoxes at my uni computer club – it was a
really cool machine to play around on, and at the time I was using it (1999)
one of our few graphical terminals with a web browser, so in quite a bit of
demand.

We also had a NeXT tower, three SGI machines running IRIX, a Mac upon which
someone had installed Mac OS X Server 1.0 (NeXT innards, UI looked like
classic MacOS).

I kind of miss the diversity of systems we had back then. In many ways we've
gone forward – tinkering is much easier now with the preponderance of cheap,
fast dev boards and systems like the Raspberry Pi, but it does feel like
actual user-facing stuff is now largely locked down, without as much
innovation and competition.

------
qwerty456127
That's sad Haiku won't get traction. An viable alternative on the desktop PC
OS market would be a great thing to have (even on a commercial basis, not
necessarily for free). Linux for 1% geeks, MacOS X for Apple hardware owners
and Windows for everybody else does not seem like a healthy competition.

Android, iOS, Chrome, Facebook - everything is monopolized nowadays.
Governments should really consider supporting alternative OSes, browsers and
social networks for sake of national security as the monopolies enjoy too much
power over the whole humanity nowadays.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Unfortunately the way the PC market is makes it basically impossible for a new
desktop OS to show up at this point. The hurdle in drivers alone would be
insane, and the easy solution to that is to only target a small set of
hardware which effectively makes you a hardware company (kinda like Apple),
but that probably won't work either since people are a lot less likely to try
out your OS if they need to buy a new computer to do so.

~~~
qwerty456127
Perhaps one should build their new OS around a compatibility layer to support
Windows drivers. I hardly am too much of a system programmer and don't know
how much sense would that make but AFAIK this is possible. E.g. I remember
using Windows WiFi NIC drivers on Kubuntu a decade ago.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
If it were reasonable to do, then Linux or one of the BSDs would have done it
ages ago. NDISWrapper was a special case.

~~~
qwerty456127
Linux and BSDs hardly care much about desktop stuff and they already have all
the drivers for the relevant server stuff.

------
bluedino
The founder of Be wrote a bunch of articles about Be's life, and demise

[https://mondaynote.com/tagged/beos](https://mondaynote.com/tagged/beos)

~~~
hinkley
This part seemed like the punchline:

> Apple’s decision to go with NeXT and Jobs was doubly perilous for us. Not
> only would we not be the next MacOS, Jobs immediately walked third party Mac
> hardware makers to their graves. No more Mac clones for BeOS. With tepid
> BeBox sales and no future on the Mac, Valley VCs weren’t keen for another
> round of funding — and the 1995 round was running out.

------
kresten
I was really taken with beos when it was a live product. However, Nextstep
really was a much much better basis for taking Apple into the future compared
to beos. As has been proven resoundingly first by the seamless switch from
PowerPC to intel, and then the ongoing smoothness and general acceptance of OS
X by industry.

I know it’s not universally loved but OSX/nextstep for me is really everything
I could have wanted from an operating system.

------
gwbas1c
When I went to college in 1999, a kid down the hall from me pushed me really
hard to install Be. It looked really cool when he showed it to me...

... But no programs that I wanted ran on it! As cool as BeOS was, without
programs, it was little more than a demo or a hobby.

Within a year I tried Windows NT and Windows 2000, and then forgot all about
BeOS. Windows 2000 did everything that BeOS did for me, didn't crash, and ran
all the programs I wanted to.

------
colinstrickland
That's a coincidence this surfacing right now. There must be something in the
air. I was an enthusiastic BeOS user back when it was a thing (ironically, I
switched to it because I thought NEXTSTEP didn't have much of a future left),
and I used it for a few years, quite happily. It left me with a legacy of
several BeBoxes, and over the holiday period, I was vaguely inspired to dust
them off and wonder about what to do with them. I got one of them booting
perfectly, here's a link I posted to reddit showing it's first POST

[https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/eku19u/du...](https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/eku19u/dusted_off_one_of_my_old_beboxes/)

(first POST should have gone to slashdot really, ah well.)

------
christkv
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.

------
lproven
There is another big reason that Apple didn't buy Be and was right not to --
and I say that although BeOS is my favourite x86 OS ever.

Dev tools.

Remember Steve Ballmer's "Developers! Developers! Developers!" dance?
[https://youtu.be/I14b-C67EXY?t=10](https://youtu.be/I14b-C67EXY?t=10)

He was right. Without developers for a new OS, you are dead in the water.
Which is my MS has fought so hard to keep compatibility.

Apple had to switch OS. That meant it had to persuade all its devs to switch
OS. _That_ meant it had to offer the devs something very special, and that
something was NeXTstep and Interface Builder. NeXT's dev tools were the best
in the software business and _that_ offered trad Mac devs a good enough reason
to come across.

Be had nothing like that.

BeOS was wonderful, but it was not a replacement for NeXTstep as a replacement
for MacOS.

But there was another company out there.

BeOS was a natively multiprocessor OS, when that was very rare. One of the
reasons is that in fast x86 computers, the x86 chip is one of the most
expensive single components in the machine, and it puts out most of the heat.

Especially at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, the era of big fat Slot 2
Pentium IIIs and worse still Pentium 4s.

But there was one company making powerful desktops with the cheapest, coolest-
running CPUs in the world, where making a dual-processor machine _in 1998_ was
barely more expensive than making a uniprocessor one.

That company's CPUs are the best-selling CPUs ever designed and outsell all
x86 chips put together (Intel + AMD + Via etc.) by well over 10 to 1.

And it needed a lightweight, SMP-capable OS very badly, right at the time Be
was porting BeOS from PowerPC to x86...

[https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/55562.html](https://liam-on-
linux.livejournal.com/55562.html)

------
jjrh
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#Products_using_BeOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#Products_using_BeOS)

Pretty cool BeOS still lives on in the audio/video/broadcasting industry.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
That was actually a fairly awesome OS (for its day). Many folks thought Apple
would buy it. When they purchased NeXT, instead, a lot of us were
disappointed.

However, all these years later, I'm very glad that BeOS wasn't selected.

~~~
deepaksurti
I have never used BeOS, can you explain why you are glad now that it wasn't
selected?

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
Mostly because of the UNIX subsystem. Having all that horsepower under the
hood has been awesome.

Also, NeXTStep became Cocoa, which knocked PowerPlant into a cocked hat. That
may not be as compelling an argument. I heard that the BeOS framework was damn
nice (never tried it, myself).

~~~
danieldk
Besides that, it is also very likely that Apple would have remained stagnant
(or worse) if Steve Jobs had not been brought into the fold. I am not into
persona worshipping, but Jobs brought some well-needed focus to a sea of
overpriced beige boxes.

------
dang
Many previous threads for the curious:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22BeOS%22%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=haiku%20-beos%20-yc%20comments%3E10&sort=byDate&type=story)

------
disordinary
I was going through boxes of old CDs and DVDs the other day and throwing out a
lot of crap, I found my old BeOS5 disk. Didn't throw out that one. I really
enjoyed using that OS back in 2000.

------
cable2600
The BEOS software needs to be preserved in an archive for the free, PD, open
source, software.

Mike Crawford RIP: Wrote spellswell:
[https://github.com/ErisBlastar/spellswell](https://github.com/ErisBlastar/spellswell)

and word services:
[https://github.com/ErisBlastar/wordservices](https://github.com/ErisBlastar/wordservices)

It was taken from one of his old sites before he lost control of it.

------
pjeide
I remember attending MacWorld Boston in '97, at the age of 12, and seeing a
BeOS demo. I was blown away by a demonstration that consisted of a video file
playing on the page of a rendered book.

If you clicked the page of the book and dragged it around, it simulated the
page turning and the video deforming, without skipping a frame.

I may've only been 12, but that demo has stuck with me since.

Edit: I would love to lay eyes on that demo again if anyone has an idea of
where video of it may still exist.

------
prirun
"The features it introduced that were brand new at the time are now ubiquitous
— things such as preemptive multitasking"

Without taking anything away from actual new things introduced in BeOS,
preemptive multitasking and dual CPUs were not "brand new". Computer system
had been doing these for a long time before 1995, or even 1991 when BeOS was
initially developed. Heck, minicomputers were doing this stuff in the 80's!

------
ngcc_hk
It is not the OS, not even the software ... Apple would still be a failure if
it is all desktop OS. And the first thing he did is to do sos to Microsoft and
ask for office license for 5% Apple share for a reason. That is done.

Of course you lost in a battle or even a campaign does not mean you just lost
the war.

The world is better with Steve, Microsoft with competition ...

Now we even have Microsoft having GitHub and linux running on windows.

Not if it is BeOS.

------
bish4p
If you are interested there is a way to make linux look like BeOs [0].

[0]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/d8e54k/window_mak...](https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/d8e54k/window_maker_classic_90s_beos_look_powersimplicity/)

------
notadoc
Try it yourself today [https://www.haiku-os.org](https://www.haiku-os.org)

------
schwank
I was a paid BeOS customer and still have copies of multiple versions in the
original branded shipper envelopes. I have fond memories of using it back
during my college CS days. Really loved the interface, that was quite the time
when I used NT4, Solaris, Irix, and BeOS all at the same time.

------
ardenpm
Crazy timing, just this week I pulled my BeBox put of storage and fired it up.
Still impresses me even now, loads of nice touches. Also got a bit of a shock
when I played a MIDI file and perfectly serviceable sound was produced by the
little built in speaker.

------
jedberg
My favorite part of BeOS was that in the control panel you could turn
individual processors on and off. And it happily let you shoot yourself in the
foot and turn off the last processor with no warning whatsoever.

I appreciated that the OS didn't coddle you.

------
firecall
Now I had read somewhere that Apple would have purchased BeOS but JLG was
pushing for too much money. JLG fucked up the deal basically. I dont have a
source... was years ago I read it.

Had JLG not fucked up the deal, they would have picked up BeOS and not NeXT.

------
VectorLock
BeOS was cool and all but I loved the BeBox with the GeekPort.

When I worked at a dot-com 1.0 failed startup in 1999 one of our big wigs was
a former exec at Be, and he was like the coolest dude I knew at the time.
Still up there.

------
Wowfunhappy
As someone who's interested in platform/OS interface and UX design, is using
modern Haiku (in a VM) a decent parallel for what using BeOS was like, or
would I need to get ahold of the real thing?

~~~
bartvanH
I've played with both BeOS and Haiku, and I would say Haiku is practically the
same UX wise. They have built more tooling etc on Haiku, like a package
manager where as far as i remember BeOS was More windows like (download file,
install)

------
aazaa
> In 1990, Jean-Louis Gassée, who replaced Jobs in Apple as the head of
> Macintosh development, was also fired from the company. He then also formed
> his own computer company with the help of another ex-Apple employee, Steve
> Sakoman. They called it Be Inc, and their goal was to create a more modern
> operating system from scratch based on the object-oriented design of C++,
> using proprietary hardware that could allow for greater media capabilities
> unseen in personal computers at the time.

Even IBM with OS/2 couldn't surmount the juggernaut network effect of Windows.
By 1990, this was apparent to many. It's odd that Gassée and company thought
they could succeed where IBM had failed.

~~~
hbbio
They thought they would have their chance with hardware+software combo.

Indeed, the BeBox should have looked like this to succeed:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Ap...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Apple-
eMac-FL.jpg/600px-Apple-eMac-FL.jpg)

That computer made Apple cool again, and paved the way for their recovery way
before the iPhone skyrocket.

~~~
asjw
Before the eMac, the iPod made Apple cool again, AFAIK

~~~
hbbio
Sorry, I meant the iMac (G3) in 1998 - maybe it's not the best pic then since
it's an eMac that came later...

The iPod was 2001, 3 years after the first iMac.

------
agumonkey
beos demos never fail to make me weep
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggCODBIfWKY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggCODBIfWKY)

~~~
donatj
Oh man the theme song to this brings me back! I have it in my iTunes to this
day. It's Virtual(Void) by Baron Arnold.

I spoke to him years ago. If I recall he worked for Be before moving to
Sidekick…

------
rafaelvasco
I feel like modern OS's are in some(several?) ways, worse than these classic
OS's... They just assume too much, impose too much, hide too much etc...

------
bjornsing
I actually bet a little bit of money on that alternative universe. I used to
jokingly recount the lesson learned: “Never bet against Steve Jobs.”

------
meerita
I know Microsoft was really big back then, but why BeOS and OS/2 Warp never
get into and GNU/Linux did?

------
vkaku
I'm waiting for Haiku stable. I just hope it's worth it :) Could use a change
from current ones.

------
teinac
it's one Microsoft's greatest business achievements to have won against the
OS/2 and BeOS competition and it's one of Microsoft's biggest business
failures to have not won against Google's Android.

------
frankzen
I almost thought we were talking comeback when I saw the headline!

------
adamnemecek
BeOS was the way it was thanks to the async API. I think that a Rust port of
BeOS would be amazing due to Rusts first class support of async.

~~~
dnautics
BeOS did not use async, it used a "half-hearted, primitive, bug-ridden"
implementation of actor model in C++.

~~~
adamnemecek
...which is async.

~~~
rvz
...which also a Rust port does exist for Haiku at least after a quick search.
[0]

[0] [https://depot.haiku-
os.org/#!/pkg/rust_bin/haikuports/1/36/0...](https://depot.haiku-
os.org/#!/pkg/rust_bin/haikuports/1/36/0/-/1/x86_64?bcguid=bc2-WTLR)

~~~
adamnemecek
I know. I'm not sure I understand.

------
florin0x01
How does Haiku compare to Beos?

------
ossworkerrights
Ah the memories! Had no idea Haiku was an open source implementation of BeOS.
Port Electron to it, and I commit to writing tools for this OS in my spare
time!

