
The BeOS file system: an OS geek retrospective - whalesalad
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/06/the-beos-filesystem.ars
======
nailer
BeOS and QNX remain to this day some of my favorite OSs, in terms of being
designed rather than grown (people often say this about BSD, but BSD is based
on Unix, and Unix was grown) and complete (ie, packaging, window management,
all tools implemented with accompanying control panels, etc).

~~~
Perceval
BeOS and QNX both featured work by Dominic Giampaolo. He now works at Apple on
their file system and Spotlight.

~~~
jacobolus
And I’m frustrated every day that several years after he started at Apple,
BeOS still does a much better job w/r/t user-extensible metadata than OS X
does.

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zppx
The history of filesystems produced by Ars in 2008 is a good read:
[http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/03/past-present-
fu...](http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/03/past-present-future-file-
systems.ars)

------
viraptor
> _Even though it was written at a time when systems typically had only 8MB of
> RAM and a mere 9GB of disk storage_

Is that right? I remember upgrading to 8MB with a 120MB disk which cost a
fortune (and using hundreds of floppies for programs... well games :) )

Wasn't something around 2GB a bios-level limit for disk space in those times?

~~~
zppx
In 1997, when the article says BFS was created, I had a Pentium 100 with 8mb
of RAM and a 8gb disk.

EDIT: For comparison, the iMac G3 that I bought a year later had 32mb of RAM
and a 4gb disk

~~~
gloob
The computer my family got in 1996 had 8 MB of memory and (I believe) 512 MB
of disk space. Some IBM beige box running windows 3.1, if I recall correctly.

Edit: I also remember that upgrading it to 16 MB of memory cost us a couple
hundred dollars. Fun times.

~~~
zokier
While we are are looking back, my first computer was 166 MHz K6 (I think), 32
MB of ram and 1.6 GB HDD. Probably wasn't that good of deal even then.

~~~
nailer
Mine was an Atari 520ST. First DOS computer was a 286-12, which we upgraded to
286-16. Yes, 4mhz was an upgrade!

I sometimes wish I was about five years younger (I'm 29) - when I first got
into making stuff on computers the languages were too much effort for even the
tiniest result.

~~~
rbanffy
Mine was a Sinclair ZX-81 clone made by a Brazilian company called Prologica.

I was about to jokingly say "beat that" but someone here must have had a
vanilla ZX and this one came with a whooping 16K.

