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History and Perspective on BeOS
prepp writes "Avid BeOS user Robert Renling posts his first article
about the Be Operating System." An interesting little article, with the amusing conclusion that BeOS isn't dead after all! Ah Zealots. Aren't we fun?
http://syllable.sourceforge.net The Syllable operating system isn't meant to be a BeOS clone, but it's fairly mature and it is targetted to turn out much like it. BeOS fans and people with technical skills may like to take a look.
Example?
Not-quite-Unix
BeOS had a powerful command line and Unix-like underpinnings that could compile and run POSIX compliant software. Every Unix-like operating system has failed in the marketplace except Linux (which is free, and for all intents and purposes it is Unix). The Amiga Operating System was developed with similar goals in mind, and that particular operating system withered and died as well. Being able to compile POSIX compliant software is not a marketable advantage (even Windows NT can do it).
It's an interesting article, and I think it sums up why BeOS really failed. I truely liked BeOS, but not for my main desktop.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
they were powerpcs, 603-66s and 603e-133s.
I miss my BeBox more than I can convey in words:( I'm going to get all bleary eyed if I continue this post, so...
They boot from the CD like you'd expect any modern OS to, and they come with a hacked up ver of LILO called BELO:)
I do agree about the Ross Perot thing though: it made a few people wake up to features they could provide and raised the bar for speed and responsiveness, but just like with Perot, as soon as Be became a non-issue the OS vendors relaxed and continued as before.
OpenBeos
Blue Eyed OS (B.E.O.S)
YellowTab
and BeBits gets updated regulary with new applications for the BeOS.
the BeOS is down, but not out...the Be community is still very strong!
--- Brad (http://www.LinuxReview.net)
Actually, the BeBox has dual 603e PowerPC processors, running at either 66 or 133 MHz. I have a revision 6 motherboard BeBox set up in my room right now. 3 PCI slots, 6 ISA, 3 MIDI, 2 stereo audio out, 1 stereo in, SCSI, PS/2, and an old-school-style keyboard plug. It has 8 slots for 72 pin 60ns non-parity RAM SIMMs. (It will take parity RAM, but the BIOS doesn't do parity-checking, so it doesn't matter. EDO RAM has been reported to work in some cases, but it won't boot with it in mine. The theoretical max of RAM I've heard is 1GB.)
... there are Windows and Linux versions, too), and gads of utilities at BeBits, including the best audio player anywhere, SoundPlay; it was the first to play an MP3 backwards in real time without skipping.
The original BeBox ran 8 hobbit processors from AT&T, but when they found out they were EOLing the hobbit, they switched to PPC. It also has processor-load LEDs on the front that show real-time CPU usuage.
There's a port of Linux/PPC for the BeOS, and I believe they also had mklinux running on it. I don't know, as I personally run BeOS 5.0.3 Professional on it. There's a lack of software and drivers, but it has Mozilla, Gobe Productive (awesome office suite from the guys that originally did Claris Works, and was recently open sourced
Just some info, and thought I'd clear the air. But BeOS definitely isn't dead as an operating system, only BeOS, Inc. is.
-- Rob
Y'a jamais des choses qu'on peut pas se débrouiller ; juste laisse-moi t'aider!
Information on Corum III for BeOS
http://www.gobe.com/storecorum3.html
Place where you can buy Corum III for BeOS
http://www.gobe.com/order.html
BeOS never required a boot disk. The installation CD boots, and lets you manage your paritions from there before installation. You can also do a fully-booting installation from an BeOS partition to another (well, a booting one at least). As for the remark regarding BELO (what's that), BeOS's boot loader was called bootman, and was usually installed in the MBR. Far easier than LILO to set up. Run bootman, select the partitions to want to show up in the boot menu, give them labels, choose a defualt, and click OK. Couldn't be easier. I use it for Win2K, Win98, BeOS, and Linux.
-- Rob
Y'a jamais des choses qu'on peut pas se débrouiller ; juste laisse-moi t'aider!
Summarizing what everyone said here is basically lack of drivers and apps but otherwise the best OS in history...
... it's getting closer every day to completion. This time though, it's open source and you can affect in a better way whether your driver will be there or not.
// Zoink
I don't know if you people noticed http://www.openbeos.org
Apps? Java is on it's way, OpenOffice is there and Mozilla up and running. Someone mentioned Photoshop... Refraction is a clone which is already released.
BeOS might be dead, OBOS has just started and will succeed where others have failed...
We are United in BeUnited....
So, on the one hand -- yeah, if the source and tools exist, and if there's enough of a userbase to profit by providing that support, an old application and/or operating environment can survive long after the original vendor bites the dust. But this is a small minority of all the systems that have lived. So you shouldn't expect something like BeOS to last much longer given lack of source and the small business community which invested in the environment. Hell, how long will it be before VMS joins the crowd of relics I listed previously?
Your point about vertical applications is valid, though I given that BeOS is a commodity no different than WinXP, MacOS X, Linux, or any other operating system a vendor targeting vertical markets like you list would provide their customers with a better solution by choosing widely deployed platforms. I honestly think they would be doing a disservice to their customers to recommend BeOS given that it lacks any kind of corporate or large community developer base, never mind original source.
Cheers,
--Maynard
I ran BeOS starting with the early developer release, through PR1 and 2, up through Person Edition 5. BeOS convinced me to buy a Power Mac clone, and once they transitioned to Intel, to buy Intel hardware.
One thing missing from the above discussion is one of Jean Louis Gassee's original design goals for the BeOS: symmetric multiprocessing. During the early BeOS days he would frequently repeat "one processor per person is not enough." That's what convinced them to build their early AT&T Hobbit-based multiprocessor machines, and eventually the BeBox, the dual PowerPC machine designed by Joe Palmer and beloved by many hackers. They did it because there was no cheap multiprocessor hardware available at that time. The goal, said JLG, was a multiprocessor machine that you could "lift with your credit card."
But JLG was wrong. He thought that people would have a never-ending desire for more processing speed, and that the right way to meet that need was to build computers with multiple CPUs at the price-performance sweet spot. And in 1990 that seemed true. But through the 90's CPU speeds increased to the point that word processing, e-mail, Internet access, and 2D graphics editing became fast enough for ordinary use on even the cheapest hardware. Suddenly there was little benefit to an intentionally-not-backwards-compatible OS.
Doing symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) well is difficult. To do it right requires a lot of thought about which parts of the system can be threaded and how to avoid threads locking on shared resources. Be's solution to this problem was to rewrite the whole system from scratch -- from the kernel to the filesystem to the GUI. And they didn't care about backwards compatibility; it always seemed like the POSIX layer was an afterthought (remember how many versions were released that didn't support select()? )
So once the performance benefit of BeOS (at least for most desktop users) vanished, what was left? Little hardware support, given their small development team and no vendor support. A not-particularly innovative GUI, since they decided to closely follow the predominant Windows/MacOS design. A beautifully designed API and highly modular system, but unfortunately not one that had any end user benefits.
It's ironic to think about what would have happened if Apple had purchased Be. True, they would have lost Steve Jobs, and perhaps the company. But a MacOS X-class OS would have shipped four years earlier, and had outstanding multiprocessor support in the core. Apple didn't bite, Be had nothing left, so they died. Sad.
While we did stop making it, we never stopped supporting it. I remember doing installs and testing of 5.0 (the last release) on BeBoxen.
They abandoned the Mac users that ran BeOS on Macs.
Not our fault, Apple's fault. Apple refused to release the specs for the G4, and we didn't have the resources to reverse engineer it. We kept supporting PPC 601-604 Macs until the end.
They abandoned BeOS users and developers to pursue the (idiotic) network appliance market
That was a last ditch effort to survive. We were losing $20 million a year on $2 million revenue selling BeOS to the desktop, with no prospects for improvement in the year we had left before running out of cash.
Not surprisingly, the network appliance makers were not eager to jump into bed with a company that might abandon them next.
Perhaps, but several (including Compaq) did sign on to use BeIA, only to switch to WinCE under threats from microsoft.
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
Huh? They are both distributed on bootable CD's.
Sounds like your dated hardware requires you to make boot disks.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
something new to play with...
http://www.vasper.net/main.php
BeOS 5 PE Max Edition V2 Release Notes
http://www.vasper.net/rnotes2.htm
Biggest downside:
Doesn't support USB.
Thats not quite correct considering that my usb input devices work fine under beos without any added configuration. It might not have supported every usb device, but basic ones were supported.
1) It's not whether or not the Linux system can technically handle all the threads. It can and has been able to for years now. The problem is that Linux GUI applications are not written in such a way that emphasises interactive performance. And there doesn't have to be that much optimization for it. The BeOS (and Windows to a large extent) kernels "optimize" for interactive performance in the sense that they offer a standard priority scheduler. The GUI itself then uses this to set the priority of GUI apps high by default. The same effect can be achieved in Linux by manually renicing X and your apps (or in the case of a DE, the gnome-session or startkde processes).
2) Sticking attributes in a directory is a bad idea. Giampalo, in his book about the Be file system., talks about how that was his original implementation (each file has an associated atttribute directory) but the GUI's need to access several attributes (timestamps, filetypes, etc) for each file necessitated including a shortcut mechanism at least for certain small attributes. And attributes are a *good* idea. Moving forward, both XFS and Reiser4 will have them, and Linux will support them through a common API. As for filetyping, UNIX's "fingerprint" mechanism is only half a solution. Most files have no detectable fingerprint and this will only become more common as more text-based formats (XML) proliferate. BeOS includes a registrar daemon that uses file fingerprinting to recognize files and attach to them an attribute identifying the type. These attributes can be edited by the user for increased flexibility.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
hmm thats strange im using sshd and ssh from the 2xx branch.. oh well its my imagination then...
t s.com/app/2741
granted the sshd build is a bit flawed but not unsecure.
http://www.bebits.com/app/2894
http://www.bebi
"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do NOT wave in a Vacuum " --Arthur C Clarke
In early November, under pressure from Microsoft, Compaq informed Be that it was no longer interested in licensing BeOS.
Until late last year I was working with a team using the Compaq "Clipper" devices running BeIA on a B2B project. While I'm no MS fan, in fact quite the opposite, I'm sure the pressure from the Beast of Redmond wasn't the only reason for the switch.
The BeIA OS, while impressive had serious bugs until the point we abandoned it. Calls and emails to Be went unreturned for months on end, and updates to fix bugs were few and far between. The main problem (or one of them) that we had was with the Opera browser and OS constantly leaking memory until the device would reset - losing any information in other apps. This meant having to add code to constantly save state to the flash RAM, severely shortening its life.
Curiously the browser would crash after loading 15-20 pages, then be killed and restart, but the user would be oblivious to this, since if it was running fullscreen (the default, and only option on a locked machine) then the old image of the browser would stay in the display buffer, then replaced when the browser restarted - which I thought was a cool trick!
It was far more suitable than WinCE, there's no doubt about that, but QNX was probably a more efficient system still...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
BeOS is NOT dead!
I am running a non-commercial download archive for BeOS with more than 1.300 entries,
over 2.300 visitors a day and more than 300 gigabytes of traffic a month.
- This is too much for a dead os!
http://bezip.de
Ciao,
Sebastian