
Be: From Concept to Near Death - WoodenChair
https://mondaynote.com/50-years-in-tech-part-15-be-from-concept-to-near-death-f69c64d8725e
======
jonstewart
In 1996, I bought a Power Computing PowerTower 166 (a Mac clone, the second
most powerful Mac one could buy at the time) and ran System 7.5 and then 7.6
on it. But I got bored and figured out how to install BeOS on a second
partition. Holy cow! It was sooooo much faster. It had an OpenGL demo app,
with spinning cubes, and you could drag and drop movies onto it and they’d
play without stuttering as the cube spun around. It was a spare, simple,
beautiful OS.

~~~
scroot
Gotta say, my Power Computing was one of my favorite machines I've ever owned

~~~
butterfi
Power Computing had, if I remember correctly, a one-hour long sale that
doubled the amount of RAM you ordered (back when RAM was really expensive). I
bought a great tower, pulled half the RAM and redistributed to my other
desktop. Good times!

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NeedMoreTea
I never knew they had used the Amiga as their reference platform. I had so
much hope in the mid and late 90s that Be might be the logical next platform
and OS. So much potential. So of course they made little impact. :(

Windows was a remarkable disaster area that I could barely grow to tolerate,
let alone love. Everything seemed to be a canonical example of how not to
implement something.

> "taking the helm of Commodore"

Oh, if only. Anything to get rid of the idiot that ran them into the ground.

~~~
puzzle
Be courted Amiga developers quite heavily. They would show up at events and
declare loudly that the Amiga was a major inspiration and that Be was a modern
Amiga in spirit. There was even a slogan floating around, something like
"Amiga 1985 - Be 1995”.

~~~
agumonkey
so many things were done on Amiga before becoming products..

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cbm-vic-20
I was in university when the BeBox was released. One of my better funded
colleagues got one of them shipped to his dorm room. All the nerds went crazy
over this thing. It was incredibly fast, physical CPU activity lights (it was
a dual PowerPC machine), and a plethora of hardware connectors, including the
"GeekPort", a set of GPIOs that made it really easy to interface with external
hardware.

~~~
zozbot123
Lots of modern desktop PCs have case LED's that could easily find use as
system activity indicators if the Linux kernel (or userspace HAL) supported
them. Unfortunately support seems to be really patchy.

~~~
deadbunny
I believe there is some work on standardizing the RGB LED interface going on
as we speak:

[https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/1/5/191](https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/1/5/191)

~~~
pantalaimon
Linux already has an LED interface, it's just that currently you can give an
LED a brightness value 0-255.

So a RGB LED would have to be represented by three entries in /sys/class/leds/

That's kind of inconvenient when those three LEDs are actually one RGB LED.

This is only how the LEDs are represented to user space, you still need a
driver for the chips the LEDs are connected to.

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danans
The dual-PowerPC BeBox[1] I bought with savings from my campus job in college
was the machine that made me "fall in love" with computers.

At the time I was so incredibly jazzed that I didn't need to "telnet" to the
campus workstations to complete my Unix-based programming projects, since
there was a full standard Unix API and an IDE (CodeWarrior IIRC) came with the
machine. And compared to any other computer, the UI was mind-blowingly
responsive under multitasking. It was also the platform I used for my first
side-project (a graphical IMAP email client).

I thought I was quite the tech rebel at the time, thinking I was onboard the
nascent stages of this OS, but it seems that by the time I became a devotee,
it had already suffered a major internal setback with the AT&T deprecation of
the Hobbit CPU. I had always assumed (mistakenly) that they switched to
PowerPC because it was "better".

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

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donatj
Why is the big main hero screenshot Windows with a Be theme rather than actual
BeOS?

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rwmj
Haiku still exists, and is actually really good now. I was running it for a
while.

~~~
zozbot123
True, but is there any point to Haiku now that the Linux PREEMPT_RT patchset
is just around the corner and will probably give us soft-realtime capabilities
on a par with the old 16-bit computer OS's (Amiga, Atari ST, etc.) and with
BeOS/Haiku itself? Sure, the default UIs (GNOME-Shell, Plasma) are nothing to
write home about from a performance POV, but lightweight alternatives do exist
and are still highly usable. I find that LXDE or Xfce are no trouble at all
even on hardware that's a decade old or perhaps more (the one thing they don't
really address is touch-screen focused use, where GNOME itself has a big, if
serendipitous, headstart).

~~~
acdha
The big thing about BeOS was that everything was non-blocking - simply adding
a kernel patch won’t fix all of the software which locks up any time I/O
blocks, whereas the BeOS UI on 90s hardware was more responsive than, say,
Windows 10 is today.

~~~
pantalaimon
Isn't most software on Haiku a Linux port anyway?

~~~
yellowapple
Not really. Most of the included desktop apps are specific to Haiku (or BeOS)
AFAICT, though third-party apps do indeed more often than not have Linux
versions. The userland looks like it might be GNU (lots of GNU components in
there). The drivers IIRC are either written specifically from Haiku or ported
from FreeBSD.

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smallstepforman
I’ve always wondered (but never read about) what the key people of Microsft,
Apple and IBM thought of the Amiga in the late 80’s. Were they worried,
powerless, dare they dream that C= would do so many missteps? If anyone has
any reading links of how the competition viewed the Amiga, I’d love to read
about it.

~~~
bitwize
IBM licensed Amiga tech for use in the OS/2 2.0 (and later) desktop. In fact,
that's how we got ARexx; as part of the licensing arrangement, IBM granted
Commodore-Amiga a license to use their REXX language.

So... IBM definitely thought there was something of value there.

~~~
puzzle
What Amiga tech is that?

ARexx started as retail software that Wishful Thinking Development sold (like
WShell). Commodore acquired it years later.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
MS didn't want to collaborate on OS2 any more. So IBM licensed some things for
the GUI from Amiga that became Workplace Shell. Possibly included BOOPSI. A
REXX licence was indeed part of the deal from what little I remember.

[http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s02.html#os_...](http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch03s02.html#os_2)

~~~
puzzle
That's an extremely thin sourced description. WPS and BOOPSI both were object-
based systems written in C, yes, but WPS originated from the SOM work at IBM
Austin:
[http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/biblio/ddj/Web...](http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/biblio/ddj/Website/articles/DDJ/1994/9416/9416d/9416d.htm)

I developed for the Amiga and used OS/2, even on PowerPC machines. They did
not look like each other. Although BOOPSI was object-based, it was still
something bolted on top of the 1.x APIs. For example, BOOPSI had base classes
for gadgets and images, but windows were an entity that lived outside
altogether. OS/2 had the same problem: application windows were handles. But
inside WPS, everything was a SOM object.

In the Amiga Workbench, everything was ad-hoc, even if some semblance of
object-orientedness appeared with things like AppIcons, which required
cooperation from the applications. They were still not objects: I am fairly
confident that AppIcons were implemented through calls to workbench.library,
not by creating a new BOOPSI object. I remember this stuff because I had lots
of arguments with some very vocal OS/2 developers.

I still don't see what IBM would have needed from Commodore. It was actually
the other way around: IBM extorted patent fees and cross licensing from
Commodore. They had more patent lawyers in Boca Raton than C= had engineers in
West Chester (my source: Dave Haynie, who dealt with such lawyers and had
probably the most useful Commodore patents, the Zorro ones).

And as I mentioned, ARexx came out in 1987, in the 1.x days, as a commercial
product, years before Commodore adopted it and before the OS/2 events
mentioned. It had no license from IBM (what for?), since Will Hawes wrote it
himself for the Amiga's architecture.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
I don't quite see what they might have needed either - BOOPSI was pure guess
on my part after seeing how that link described it. My only contact with OS/2
was work had one ps/2 tower with it. I used it a little, never encountered an
API or compiler. In those days my experience was 95% Amiga, and just enough
Windows to ensure that after Amiga my career went back to Unix. After
Intuition and BOOPSI, even ARexx, Windows just seemed too primitive and too
much like hard work to develop for.

I do have some vague memory of IBM licensing something for OS/2 from the time.
That weak reference was all search turned up. Quite a few links of people
_talking_ about it though, including a near duplicate of the conversation
we're having on The Register. So if urban legend it definitely gained some
legs somewhere. My CATS newsgroup archives, Devcon handouts and other stuff
from that era are long gone.

That's not very helpful, sorry. :)

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bsder
While AT&T have always been jerks, having Steve Sakoman meltdown because they
lost a key supplier is totally beyond the pale.

Startups are, almost by definition, exercises in turning disasters into
opportunities.

MIPS and ARM were quite well established by that time. TI DSP's similarly.
Redoing the hardware was certainly an option.

~~~
yellowapple
"Redoing the hardware was certainly an option."

And that's exactly what Be did, switching to dual PowerPC processors instead.

------
bluedino
Gasse is one of the few people I have subscribed to on Medium. His rants on
Apple/tech can be a little off, but he's a great writer and has lots of
interesting stories.

Even though I know how this ends up (they move to PowerPC), I felt left
hanging when AT&T canceled the Hobbit processor and they weren't sure what to
do next. It was like the feeling you get at the end of a chapter of a great
novel.

~~~
exsf0859
If you like Gassee's writing about Be, there's plenty more available in his
articles for the Be Newsletter:

[https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-
docs/benewsletter/index.html](https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-
docs/benewsletter/index.html)

~~~
jodrellblank
From that link, Gassé writing in 1997:

 _When Jobs hired Sculley, the company was on the way up. Today, it 's losing
customers, developers, money, and market share. [..]_

 _Apple doesn 't need a CEO, they need a messiah (or a crash test dummy). And
any problem that requires walking on water as a solution is, you'll grant me,
a problem ill-stated. Still, there may be a way to make the search for a new
CEO easier_

------
DrJosiah
Only got to use the downloadable / bootable BeOS on CD / installable. Had a
lot of fun on a P166 MMX in my dorm, and a P2-400 in greyscale at work (Nvidia
TNT wasn't supported in color initially).

Sad to have watched BeOS go away. It was and still is pretty amazing.

------
hguhghuff
I wonder what strategy might have succeeded in Be getting traction against
Windows back then?

Free from day one?

The big problem for any competitor to Windows was that nothing had the drivers
support that windows had. Steve Jobs solves that by supporting only his own
hardware. Drivers was a huge issue.

~~~
kowdermeister
> Free from day one?

That's great in theory, but how do you then pay the developers?

~~~
tialaramex
The income from selling BeOS wasn't ever covering a significant fraction of
R&D costs so who cares?

Be was losing about $10M per year from the outset. It never came anywhere
close to breaking even. The idea was, either this takes off (in which case you
can make money a lot of different ways even if you give the core product away)
or the threat that it might forces Apple to buy the whole thing, either way
you get your money back and JLG gets what he wants, which is and has always
been to be "right" even when he's monumentally and obviously wrong.

[ JLG led Apple product development when it was failing, Be which failed, and
the Palm spin out that made an OS so lousy even _Palm_ never bothered using it
any products. The man is often cited as a "guru" presumably in the same sense
as when some random guy is brought in by gullible actors or musicians who've
got a lot of money suddenly ]

In the late 1990s it looked as though it would probably close its doors and
the investors would get nothing (technically they'd get the source code,
branding and so on, but those are basically worthless), which happens all the
time with that sort of business.

But the dot com boom saved them. Not Be, the investors. An Offering was
written which under normal circumstances would get laughed out of the room. Ha
ha ha, you have a product that nobody uses, and you want a nine figure sum of
money for a business with a failed Apple executive and a bunch of hackers, No.
But at the time you could write blah blah blah "Internet" blah blah and people
wouldn't bother reading past the bottom of the first page of your IPO because
they already had their wallets open.

So now the original investors had their money back, and gradually the big
institutional hitters (e.g. pension companies) could exit too, you take $50000
of BEOS and you sell it to a thousand Be fans for $50 per time, when it turns
into $4 of cash five years later you're fine and they learn a valuable lesson
about investment.

Be got a little bit of money left over. The idea was, pivot into making
software for "Internet appliances". You know, the computer next to your stove,
or that multi-purpose device in your gym which... oh right, yeah, no, those
aren't a thing, the idea went nowhere and Be's business went down in flames.
JLG got to go ruin Palm instead.

~~~
zozbot123
> The idea was, pivot into making software for "Internet appliances". You
> know, the computer next to your stove, or that multi-purpose device in your
> gym which... oh right, yeah, no, those aren't a thing

Well, they weren't a thing _at the time_ , and couldn't be a thing given the
severe lack of wireless, always-on, Internet connections. They definitely are
a thing today, but too late to save Be.

