> And the metadata support was instantaneous, without noticeable overhead or delays
Seconding things: BeFS was staggeringly fast – doing a simple query in something like Outlook or Mail.app is still nowhere near the same class as either the standard BeOS mail client or PMMail, even with generations of hardware improvements. On an idle system with an SSD, a Spotlight or Windows Search / Cortana query isn't as responsive as a BeFS query was on my old Pentium 90 with 5200 RPM drives.
At least some part of that is due to the fact that BeOS had a very good scheduler – I remember being impressed one time when I was transferring a lot of video off of a camera[1] building Mozilla from source, and realized that it didn't make either web browsing or email less responsive.
1. this was DV over Firewire so it wasn't a hard-realtime task but the tape made it soft-ish, and the sound change was quite noticeable when the tape drive had to spin down to wait for the host PC, which happened under Windows but never BeOS.
Seconding things: BeFS was staggeringly fast – doing a simple query in something like Outlook or Mail.app is still nowhere near the same class as either the standard BeOS mail client or PMMail, even with generations of hardware improvements. On an idle system with an SSD, a Spotlight or Windows Search / Cortana query isn't as responsive as a BeFS query was on my old Pentium 90 with 5200 RPM drives.
At least some part of that is due to the fact that BeOS had a very good scheduler – I remember being impressed one time when I was transferring a lot of video off of a camera[1] building Mozilla from source, and realized that it didn't make either web browsing or email less responsive.
1. this was DV over Firewire so it wasn't a hard-realtime task but the tape made it soft-ish, and the sound change was quite noticeable when the tape drive had to spin down to wait for the host PC, which happened under Windows but never BeOS.