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?

Comments

Down but not out...

[phatvibez]

There are several attempts to resurect the Be Operating System, check out:

OpenBeos

OpenBeos is creating a new BeOS from scratch that will be binary compatible with the original BeOS (at first anyway and plan on adding new features that will probably break this later). So far they are coming along at a good pace. They have already created beta's for OpenBFS, Open Media Kits, and their Print Server.

They are using the NewOS Kernel

Blue Eyed OS (B.E.O.S)

Blue Eyed OS is an atempt to bring the Be API and interface to the Linux kernel.

YellowTab

YellowTab has some screenshots here: YellowTab Screenshots

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!

Oh yeah? I can list plenty of dead OS's...

[maynard]

As a counterpoint to your statement:

REally, OSes never die, they are essentially immortal, becuase once you find someone who really likes it, they will go to any length to keep the dream alive. Any length.

So where is RT-11? RSX? Venix? PRIMEOS? CYBER NOS/VE? HP MVS? Lots of operating environments have come and gone... the only systems which remain for the long haul are those with source availability and a developer base able to support the source. This doesn't have to be open source, there are commercial groups who perform this service for a range of defunct products. In fact, many large vertical applications are sold stipulating source availability in the event of vendor bankruptcy. Those systems often stay alive far longer than the vendor ever intended. A good example would be PDP-11s still out in the field controlling tools used in sheet metal factories. It's a dying breed, but they're still out there -- and they're only dying because LSI-11 cards on the used market are getting hard to find.

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

One processor per person _is_ enough

[jncook]

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.

Re:Why are you so surprised they abandoned it?

[Maniakes]

They abandoned the BeBox hardware and even stopped supporting it in later revs of the OS.

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.

Compaq repeatedly assured Be of its enthusiasm for the project, and stated that only BeOS could meet the project's technical, cost, and delivery timeline requirements. Compaq assured Be that Windows CE was not suitable for the device.

In October 1998, however, Compaq informed Be that it had disclosed information about the Be Internet appliance project to Microsoft. Later that same month, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates visited Compaq CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer as part of a "Digital Appliances Review."

In early November, under pressure from Microsoft, Compaq informed Be that it was no longer interested in licensing BeOS.