
BeOS Demo Video (1998) [video] - NaOH
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsVydyC8ZGQ
======
furyg3
I was lucky enough to have a friend working at BeOS at the very end. This is
when they abandoned all hope of getting bought by Apple (erm... I mean gaining
presence on the desktop) and focused on "Internet Appliances" like eVilla.

BeOS was really amazing at the time, especially in comparison to 'next
generation OSes' like Windows NT, the vaporware that was Copland, Linux (which
was unusable for mortals) or Solaris. It was clear to me that the future was
going to look like BeOS or NeXT, but I could actually easily download and run
BeOS on my mac. It was incredibly useable... I installed it and was able to
use it for months. It just needed apps.

When Apple went with Jobs (and thus NeXT) I thought that made sense. But when
I saw the early releases of Rhapsody I really thought they had made a huge
mistake. BeOS was just so much better.

It's really fun to fantasize about what the world would have been like if BeOS
made it big. There's still a lot of tech there that has not yet made it into
desktop OSes.

~~~
baldfat
There has yet to be a better technology to win in the desktop OS.

Examples 1) CPM was so much better than DOS

2) Amiga was 7 years ahead of its time (Though the OS had a ton of bugs the
first 18 months)

3) BeOS

4) We still deal with a corporate IT that is 90% Window shops for corporate
desktops. (Though Windows has gotten MUCH better)

5) Gnome and GTK+ gained more mind share than KDE :) Okay that one is personal
opinion but :)

~~~
agumonkey
That's the way of the world.

'better' is a fuzzy term, what catches on 'is' the best, in some way, if
that's the metric we observe. Everything that was 'better' failed in some
regards, either came too early, wasn't aligned with mass market of users
(lisp, smalltalk, sml), neglected some detail that wasn't a detail for the
mainstream (why PHP instead of Perl), etc etc.

I spent the last 10 years wondering why so much beautiful things died in the
past while we suffer subpar systems. And everytime there's a stupid indirect
but perfectly valid reason. Less is more, or something of this kind. Nature.

~~~
romaniv
You're forgetting about external factors that have nothing to do with the
product itself. Having better marketing team or deeper connection in the
industry does not make your actual OS any better.

Survival of the fittest doesn't really apply to human artifacts and especially
to art and cutting edge engineering.

------
ab5tract
For anyone who is prone to ignore vertical dynamics, keep in mind that this OS
was competing with Mac OS 8, Windows 98, and GNU/Linux in the Lesstif/GNOME
1.x era. In short, it trumped all the rest in speed, development environment,
multimedia, stability...

But the Wintel cartel was stronger than ever. Microsoft even settled with Be
years afterwards for colluding to keep their OS off of any vendor computers.
But that can't ever commit backwards into history what computing would be like
if the best OS at the time had been given a fair shake.

~~~
antocv
I cant understand why more people dont realize US is not a capitalist or free
market economy.

Or even the EU.

If you look closer at any industry you'll see cartels, monopolies, government
support and skeweing what and who gets the money. Who gets payed and who
doesnt. The best products do not win, the best companies do not win.

It seems the different vs USSR is the scale of the economy.

~~~
coldtea
> _I cant understand why more people dont realize US is not a capitalist or
> free market economy._

Because the presense of "cartels, monopolies, government support and skeweing
what and who gets the money" doesn't preclude it being "capitalist" or "free
market".

There's the abstract "capitalism"/"free market" and there's the concrete
reality, which is that it goes hand in hand with these things and always had.

It's like Christianity -- in theory it's this perfect thing touting peace and
love --, but in reality it's involved in everything from the crusades and the
enslaving on native indians in the Americas to present day right wing bigotry.

~~~
antocv
In reality what EU is and USA today, is economically, financially, not very
different than what USSR or SFRY was.

Planned economy. The distinction private-public doesnt even make sense, with
state subsidized private losses.

Its just a few groups of people controlling systems.

------
carlesfe
I remember installing BeOS a long time ago, when I was fiddling with old linux
distros which were almost impossible to install (what is the model of your
RAMDAC? which is your interrupt controller? manually configure your modem!)

I was absolutely amazed at the ease of install, running the software and the
powerful GUI. I even ran it for some months as my only OS, since it had a web
browser and e-mail client and the dialup config was very straightforward.

After that time, I started missing a lot of software, especially browser
updates, so I tried linux again and found that it had improved a bit, so I
stuck with it.

But I'll never forget how probably the best OS at that time failed into misery
for the lack of software and a bit of promotion.

~~~
ab5tract
Hey carlesfe, see my previous post -- it was not a simple lack of promotion
but a complete lockout from pre-installation for any PC vendor who didn't want
to get royally stomped on by Microsoft.

~~~
carlesfe
Well, same as Linux, but since the later had a big community, it was more
vocal and that lead to a larger userbase in the end.

Yes, pre-installed Windows (and the lack of drivers) used to suck back in the
day, but BeOS was in an awkward middle point between being Microsoft and being
Linux. I guess it was a bad time for that, it would have done better nowadays
with an equivalent product.

~~~
ab5tract
Linux never had a chance with the average consumer at that time. Shall I pull
up some GNOME 1 screenshots to show you? Do you know all of the refresh rates
of your monitor, per resolution?

"If you get this wrong, your monitor may become inoperable or explode"

BeOS was a consumer OS, and was denied any access to consumers. Ignore
vertical dynamics if you want, but the writing is clear as day to me.

~~~
pjmlp
You at least had GNOME 1 already.

When I looked into GNU/Linux for the first time, my options were twm, fvwm and
OpenLook.

~~~
Zardoz84
SuSE Linux 5.3 -> fvwm95, twm, KDE 1.x, and I remember playing with GNOME 1.
Also was weird times, I remember that I manage to run GNOME using KDE as
window manager.

------
jeffbush
In early 2008, having graduated from college the year before, I was living in
the midwest working at a company making warehouse management software. I
decided I _really_ wanted to work at Be. I sent them my resume for a position
that was posted (I think I actually snail mailed it). I called the recruiter
and she politely informed me that I wasn't qualified for it. Shortly after, I
saw another position posted and applied again. Over the next 7 months, I
continued to bug the recruiter regularly until someone finally broke down and
gave me an interview. I bought a new suit just for it. When I showed up to
interview, an engineer walked in with long hair and ripped up jeans.

I ended up getting the job and worked there through the end of 2000. Even
though it ended up imploding, it was a great experience. I learned an
incredible amount and I'm still friends with a bunch of people I met there.
Many of the people from Be ended up at Android.

~~~
dang
I think you must mean 1998, not 2008?

This is a good story. I'd be curious to hear about things you learned that are
related to unusual aspects of what Be was doing.

~~~
jeffbush
Oops, yeah, 1998.

I became very comfortable with multithreaded synchronization, since BeOS was
"pervasively" multithreaded to try to scale to multiprocessor machines.
Multithreaded programming is more common now. All synchronization in BeOS was
based on counting semaphores (which could acquire with a count > 1), which I
think are still not super common.

There was a philosophy of simplicity that still resonates with me. For
example, the scheduler algorithm used a simple exponential priority scheme
that was easy to reason about intuitively. It was straightforward to get
glitch free media playback. Many years later, I was trying to debug a glitch
with audio playback on Linux. Each time it would glitch and someone would say
"oh yeah, this other heuristic is kicking in, make these changes to the
config." We'd do that, another glitch would happen, and they'd say "oh, these
other two heuristics are interacting badly," this went on for like a month. I
don't mean to bash Linux, because it is far more sophisticated now than BeOS
was and handles far more use cases, but I miss the elegance and simplicity of
BeOS.

The thing that I found most interesting was the chance to interact closely
with experts from so many different domains. When I started there, all of
engineering fit on one floor (I think there were around 50 engineers). For
better or worse, almost everything was built in-house. There were people who
worked on graphics, the windowing system, 3D, kernel internals, device
drivers, filesystems, application frameworks, etc. Everything was in one
source tree, so you could check it out, type make, and have a full OS image in
a few hours.

I worked at Apple later, but there are thousands of engineers who work on
MacOS, and you only get a chance to meet a small subset of them. There are
hundreds of individual projects in their own source trees that are built
individually and get pulled together by a complex mastering system. It seems
almost impossible for one person to wrap their head around it.

The fact that so much was built from scratch might be part of the reason that
BeOS felt so snappy: it hadn't accumulated much cruft.

~~~
wowtip
Tested OpenBeOS / Haiku, any opinion on the project?

~~~
jeffbush
Yeah, I've seen it, although I haven't used it or looked too closely at it
recently.

When Be did the focus shift, we were in the midst of the next major revision
of the desktop OS (which consequently was never released). Part of that was an
overhaul of the user interface, which looked more sleek and modern, and was
themable. The squarish tabs were replaced with a slightly inset title bar area
with rounded edges. I don't know if any screenshots of that have survived.

There were many other things that we were exploring and talking about at the
time, like putting transparency and animations in the interface, but the
hardware at the time wasn't up to the task yet (there weren't real GPUs with
shaders like we have today; the best acceleration we could get were opaque
bit-blits, which weren't supported on all cards). Had Be been able to stick
around longer, the interface would have been much different.

So, personally, I don't really get cloning the original interface. A lot has
happened in UI world the 20+ years since BeOS was originally written. I guess
I'm not that sentimental.

That said the work the Haiku team has done is impressive. It's a cool project
and I don't want to sound critical of it.

~~~
tbe
I guess the next OS revision you mention would be "Dano", which according to
the Wikipedia article[0] was leaked on the day the company closed down. In
that case, there should be quite a number of screenshots floating around, such
as [1]. YellowTAB Zeta[2] was also based on Dano.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS_R5.1d0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS_R5.1d0)

[1]
[http://qube.ru/files/images/beos_r51d0_on_amd_athlon_xp_1600...](http://qube.ru/files/images/beos_r51d0_on_amd_athlon_xp_1600_2.png)

[2] [http://www.osnews.com/story/3692](http://www.osnews.com/story/3692)

~~~
jeffbush
The tabs look different than I remember, but yeah, that's it.

------
sudioStudio64
I found my BeOS install CD and floppy the other day.

I never really had hardware that could really use something like BeOS back
then.

If you liked this then you should consider supporting the Haiku project. They
are keeping BeOS alive.

[https://www.haiku-os.org/](https://www.haiku-os.org/)

I'm wondering though if anyone here can speak to how much C++ was used in
writing the kernel? I've heard multiple stories...some say that all of it was
very OO, some say it was C with classes kind of stuff.

------
spain
If you like BeOS, you should check out Haiku which is an open-source OS
inspired by BeOS [0].

[0] [https://www.haiku-os.org/](https://www.haiku-os.org/)

~~~
72deluxe
It's a good project; thankfully there is still the BeOS book within it so you
can write applications on it using the tidy BeOS API. I think there are GCC 2
and GCC 4 compatibility issues (attempting to maintain binary compatibility
won't work with GCC 4), and they have got a package management system which
some feel was too Linux-like, but it's an interesting project and can breathe
life into an old computer somewhere.

Speedy too!

------
brunorsini
I ran BeOS for almost a year around that time. I remember it as fairly stable
and packed with neat little features that made it feel lean and modern. Then I
started to get disappointed that the community didn't seem to be growing fast
enough... It felt a bit like computing while stranded on a desert island

~~~
KMag
I was tripple-booting Linux, Win2k, QNX, and often booting the BeOS demo from
floppy.

The BeOS driver for my 3c905 Ethernet card was buggy and about every other
morning I'd wake up to find a dialog to the effect of "Your network driver has
crashed. Click OK to restart the driver." It stunk to have a poor driver, but
it was really cool that a bad driver didn't take down the system. A couple
years later, I had a CD-R with some of my old financial records on it that got
corrupted and would kernel panic Linux, Win2k, and OS X. These days, DVD and
CD drivers should really be in user space.

Though, I was playing around with semaphores and found a way to reliably
kernel panic BeOS, though the exact same source ran perfectly on Linux. Enough
kernel panics and I slowly got filesystem corruption. One morning I woke up to
my disk light being on. It spun all night and wore a visible track into the
coating of that floppy. Both the floppy drive and the floppy were ruined. I
used the vendor's version of tar to back up my data before reinstalling the
OS. That's when I learned that all of the NetPositive browser bookmarks were
stored as zero-sized files with the links in metadata that wasn't preserved by
tar. When resizing the partition once, I learned that non-tar-preserved
metadata was also what kept the userspace drivers from showing up in the BeOS
task bar.

As much as it would have been cool to have OS X based on BeOS, QNX was much
lighter weight and robust. Plus, the QNX Photon GUI subsystem was like X11 and
Synergy on steroids. OS X is a lot of things, but the Xnu kernel is quite
heavy, and it's not clear that it's possible to implement Mach ports in a
lightweight manner. Both BeOS and QNX show it's possible to have a light
weight high performance kernel that's isolated from most driver bugs.

~~~
A_COMPUTER
Haha, I was doing the same thing in college. It was a great time for messing
with OSes. I started running BeOS and QNX on a daily basis because for some
reason my machine started crashing in Windows and I needed to get work done.
BeOS beat out Linux because the install was simple, it booted fast, and the
desktop was a hell of a lot nicer.

People forget this, but Sun created a Java runtime for BeOS before Linux.

I agree about QNX though, it wasn't as stylish as BeOS, but it was far more
robust and polished.

------
xj9
This video always makes me wish Apple would have bought Be, Inc. instead of
NeXT. The BeOS was _much_ more interesting than NeXTSTEP!

~~~
jbrooksuk
It'd be interesting to know where Apple would be if they had bought Be, Inc.
Would we have iOS? Would Apple be successful? All very interesting!

~~~
laumars
If I remember correctly, NeXT was largely bought for Steve Jobs rather than
NeXTSTEP. Also the iPod and the iPhone (or rather the iPad, as that was what
Apple were originally working on before they miniaturised it and released it
as a smart phone) was Jobs' concept. Obviously prior art existed, but the
digital music player and tablet markets were pretty underwhelming to the
average layman before Apple released their products.

So I don't think Apple's business would have exploded like it if they bought
Be Inc. However Be's core business was multimedia (like Apple's was per-OS X)
and that industry has since felt a little neglected by Apple as they seem to
be concentrating more on gadgets than power users. So if I had to speculate,
I'd say Be Inc / Apple's business would have grown with the media industry and
stayed more faithful to their core users.

I also think Apple would have consumed more of Linux's market share than it
has done now because an Apple owned BeOS would still have retained, at least,
partial POSIX compatibility meaning the leap from UNIX / Linux would be
equivalent as it is now, but there would have been less fanboyism which was
largely drummed up by Jobs to increase sales. I think, perversely, that has
put many new users off from migrating to Apple from the FOSS community who
want to use an open API without the corporate BS.

Lastly, I think Macs might have become the de facto standard web developers
machine. Partly because of being more true to it's core multimedia business
(and the web now being as much a multimedia platform as any other these days),
partly because of it's POSIX compatibility meaning it would be trivial to run
the same Linux / OS X develop tools, partly because of it taking business from
Linux (see above), partly because I think Apple would have continued to allow
3rd party manufacturers to build Apple-compatible machine (IIRC that was one
of the first things Jobs terminated when he rejoined Apple), and partly
because Windows users would feel less threatened making the switch (BeOS
always felt a less significant paradigm shift from Windows than OS 9 / OS X
did).

So in short, I think OS X would have had a greater market share if Apple
bought Be Inc, but I think Apple would have been less successful as a company
since their biggest market at the moment is consumer gadgets (specifically the
iPhone).

This is all just guesswork, obviously. But sometimes it's fun to speculate.

~~~
georgeecollins
I do not think that is correct. Apple needed a new OS badly. I developed game
software for PCs in the Win 98 / OS8 era for both platforms. Macs were still a
nice experience but their performance relative to a PC was terrible.

Steve Jobs at that time did not have the reputation he does now, or even had a
few years later. Many people view Next as a business failure at the time. They
were still in business, but relative to the huge investment they had gotten
they were doing pretty poorly. There is a book written at the time, "Steve
Jobs and the Next Big Thing." That sums up conventional wisdom circa that
time.

The fact that they were considering Be and Next at the same time tells you
that they were looking for an OS.

~~~
laumars
I suspect you may have misread my post since you're offering a counter
argument to points I wasn't discussing.

I wasn't suggesting that Apple shouldn't have bought nor released any new OS.
I was speculating about a future where Apple bought Be instead of NeXT (hence
my frequent references to Be Inc)

However on the (unrelated) points you raised, I do completely agree with you.

------
jay-saint
Ah the nostalgia. In 1999 I was a sophomore in college and built my first PC
that was all my own. I used the legendary Abit BP6 Motherboard
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6)
I had a pair of Socket 370 Celeron 366a processors overclocked to 100mhz,
which made the system think it had a pair of P3 550mhz cpus.

BeOS was a great OS for experimenting SMP. The CPU monitor in the video would
show you the loads for each CPU and you could click the left side to toggle a
CPU on and off. You could immediately see frame rates drop and the remaining
cpu's usage spike.

~~~
cturner
Similar story. I put together a dual-P2/350s on (I think) a Tyan motherboard
in December 1998 as a dedicated BeOS host. Wasn't good at budgeting and found
myself in another state having run out of money a few weeks later, and had a
bit of a challenge getting home.

Parts of haiku remain impressive. Example, there's two performant message-bus
mechanisms available via standard system calls:

* The flagship IPC mechanism is the BMessage. You can exchange messages unicast, or broadcast using BRosterm, or pub/sub with StartWatching/SendNotices.

* You can also treat the filesystem as an async messaging system using BPathMonitor. Yes, you can create RAM disks. They have FUSE as well.

It runs pretty well under VirtualPC. There's a trick to configuring the mouse
to touchscreen once you've installed the seamless-mouse tools.

------
gonzo
I had an original BeBox, which I upgraded to the faster CPUs when available. I
bought the BeOS team a case of champagne when they shipped a major release.

I'm happy Apple bought NeXT.

~~~
fit2rule
I've still got my BeBox and boot it every year just to confirm it still works.
It still works! I have no clue what I'll do with it - its not worth selling.
Anyone got any clues?

~~~
crxgames
I'd be interested in it.

~~~
fit2rule
What do you think it'd be worth to you? Shipping from Europe.

------
npunt
Ah this brings back memories! I happened to go to the Be developer conference
back in summer 1996 - didn't know anyone, wasn't even a developer, just a
curious high schooler interning at a mac user group down in LA. Hopped on an
airplane alone to come out to San Jose because why not?

I remember talking to some Apple exec sitting next to me in the presentation
room as some Be people finished their speech. I asked about their prospects
and he said something like 'yeah its been tough for us but Gil Amelio is going
to turn things around'. Gil had just joined as CEO back in February. I
remember thinking that the guy didn't sound like he really believed what he
was saying though - there was a a certain resignation, or just a moment where
he didn't feel he had to keep the 'everythings great' performance up for a
high school kid. After the NeXT acquisition I remember thinking about this guy
and that he probably didn't have a job anymore. Who knows, maybe that was
actually Jonny Ive.

At the conference there was a whole group of Apple people checking things out
and talking to everyone. I don't remember if it was public knowledge that they
were negotiating with Be at the time, but it was no secret why they were
there. There was a lot of excitement among the developers there, but also a
lot of trepidation - there was just loose talk of being useful for really
specialized AV fields but no path or believable / clear idea of how this could
go to mass market. Even a 15 year old knew that. Plus, Microsoft was
unstoppable back then. A fair amount of talk among the devs was about how this
could be the next Apple OS, and I think that's what excited people. But
everything hinged on acquisition.

Afterwards I think I exchanged a few emails with Dominic, because I was
interested in BeFS. I didn't really know how to talk to him so I think I just
offered him access to my mp3 server. Meanwhile when I got back to the mac user
group, I installed the developer preview CD on some PowerComputing macs we had
and they just transformed into beasts. BeOS was otherworldly, using it felt
like you were 5 years in the future but in an alternative universe (full of
tiny yellow title bars). Because all of the apps were just apps to show off
Be's capabilities, it was also vaguely reminiscent of the 90s demoscene, with
Be one-upping Future Crew by dropping _an entire OS_.

History shows NeXT was the right move. But Be... they were something special.

------
Scottn1
OMG brings back memories and makes me sad at same time it failed to gain
ground. I was a BIG BeOS fan. In fact I'd probably be able to dig up from my
storage the actual purchased BeOS package and the "The BeOS Bible" book I
bought too. It was the "Opera Browser" of operating systems at the time to me.
Lightweight, nimble, fast and just completely felt it was well thought out by
brilliant engineers that weren't tied down to legacy.

I remember pitching it to my co-workers and praising its ability to still play
multiple movies smoothly in a dragging window even with other tasks running in
the background, which at the time was really cool considering same hardware
Windows/Linux could not. And to this day, it had my favorite all-time
newsreader (can't remember the name but it was threaded news that used
multiple windows)

In the end, it just didn't the apps and the world was Microsoft centric and
this thing called "Linux" was the buzz, along with Apple gaining ground.

------
jason_slack
Wow, I haven't seen this video in a long time.

Buying a BeBox was one of the best things I ever did. I took out a loan for
about $2,000 from my bank to get one and start writing apps. Not a lot
materialized out of it financially but the experience was invaluable. I met a
lot of people from the community that I still chat with to this day.

Be, Inc had some really good ideas.

~~~
fit2rule
Still got your BeBox? I turn mine on every now and then to make sure it still
works - I don't think I can ever bring myself to sell it, but I'm still at a
loss as to what I will do with it.

~~~
crxgames
Which model?

~~~
fit2rule
Rev A, 66mhz. I bought a new PC instead of upgrading to the 133mhz model, and
ran NextStep on it, then BeOS .. then Linux. ;)

------
Aqueous
BeOS is a good example why if you're already big you can be proprietary but if
you're small it's better to release as open source (when there are big players
in the market.)

If BeOS had simply released its source early on it might still be very much
alive and healthy today. Given that it achieved on the desktop what Linux
still has not, it might have bested Linux in at least the desktop arena. It's
main mistake was trying to make it in the proprietary OS market, up against
both Microsoft and Apple. Certainly after Apple had failed to buy BeOS, their
next best bet was transform BeOS into a GPL or BSD-licensed project.

Now, we have Haiku OS, but it is a bit late, and can only ever be an
approximation of the original experience / API.

------
mnml_
When I was a kid I was running BeOS and it was really cool at the time.

------
endeavour
I remember being impressed that the BeOS media player could play audio CDs
backwards in real-time. Not really sure why you'd want to but it was quite a
good party trick.

~~~
LoSboccacc
yeah, could transcode anything to anything in real time and feed it to an
appropriate player.

BeOS is the only OS which implemented the same UX of unix pipes in a way that
actually made sense in a graphical environment.

------
lectrick
Is it time yet for a new OS that emphasizes immutability, security,
concurrency and other functional-language paradigms?

I feel like even today, we are not seeing the true possible performance of our
hardware due to all the "sediment layers" (as Jean-Louis Gassée put it) of our
popular OS'es. We're also not seeing the possible reliability and security,
either.

~~~
tel
MirageOS? ([http://openmirage.org/](http://openmirage.org/))

I kid, but only a little.

------
agumonkey
I feel the same watching this or Shawshank redemption. There's some lost
beauty in it. Even BeOS source code / API was beautiful. I remember some code
to query and filter FS results based on metadata, not far from a tiny SQL C++
eDSL.

------
whoopdedo
At 13:00 he demonstrates positional audio. Whoever uploaded this to Youtube
reversed the channels so the sound pans right when he moves the source to the
left.

Twenty years later and why doesn't my computer come with a 3D mixer already?

------
mrsirduke
Running BeOS on my Pentium II Celeron 333 MHz was pure joy. It's such a shame
it didn't amount to more than it did.

That and OS/2.

~~~
feld
There's plenty of OS/2 still in production. You should be concerned about
that.

~~~
mrsirduke
You mean in ATM's? I'm almost more concerned by them running a full Windows
XP, but that's just me.

~~~
Zardoz84
ATMS of Santander Bank (Banco Santander on spanish) keeps using OS/2\. I just
saw it a few month ago when one got bricked and I saw the old nice OS/2 bootup
splash screen.

~~~
sigzero
Hey no OS/2 bashing. I was out of work and got a job building a satellite NOC
using OS/2\. :)

~~~
protomyth
I views OS/2 like I view the AS/400, setup and let it run forever. Not cool,
not current, but they do the job.

------
headgasket
This is the perfect example as to why we need to focus on the customer problem
not the technical solution.

------
sigzero
I remember that. I also remember all the excitement around it and then it
fizzled.

------
alper
Are current Linux distributions as good as this yet?

