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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?
As far as I'm concerned, from a purely technical standpoint, BeOS is the BEst Operating System ever. It has absolutely everythign I've ever wanted. The only reason I don't use it is the lack of software. Can I get photoshop for it? How about Winamp? Icq? Aim? Eudora? Most importantly Half-Life: Counterstrike? Some yes some no. Despite all of its outstanding technical greatness BeOS doesn't have all of the software I need.
Windows has absolutely everything, and games.
Linux has everythign I need, or a good equivalent of what I need, and it has tools for developing software.
So I run windows and Mandrake. I would LOVE to run BeOS, it's got everything I've ever wanted. But no software. Sorrow!
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
My major clue is that the install process seems to still require the making of a 1.44" boot floppy. That is, if you want to run it by itself, outside of another OS.
To me this speaks volumes about just how old it really is, and probably indicates it is never going to be updated to modern hardware. Also, what makes it relevant in this day and age? Can it do anything another system cannot do better? If the answer is no, or even an extravagantly technical yes (which would never matter to most users), then the world has passed it by.
The impact of BeOS was probably like Ross Perot in the 1992 presidential election. He lost, but got a large enough percentage of the vote to scare the mainstream politicians into sharpening up their act. I think this is arguably one of the factors for the prosperity of the 1990s. If I am correct, we can thank BeOS for encouraging other software makers to improve their quality/performance. Therefore BeOS benefits us even now, but we do not get the benefit from actually using it.
The operating system is TOTALLY irrelevent when it comes to most users. There are only three things that matter: 1) Applications, 2) Hardware support, and 3) Applications. You can have the worst operating system in the world (Windows 3.1) and utterly destroy a clearly superior operating system (OS/2) simply because you win the hardware and application battle.
Be was dead before it started, because the ONLY hope for a new operating system is compatibility with the current application base. What I don't understand is how Be deluded themselves into thinking that application developers are going to spend valuable resources porting to a completely new operating system without any users just because it's "new and cool".
No one cares about operating systems. Say it three times.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
> Dead or not, BeOS was one of the best operating systems
;-) ...), but that's because its
> I have ever used.
I won't go that far, but certainly Be had some innovations that other
OSes would do well to consider. Even today. No, I'm not talking
about the filesystem.
> If only it had the software/hardware support.
I don't think either was really a problem. It had the stuff that
actually mattered. (Emacs, Mozilla, what else do you need?
It ran fine on my hardware. Now, it has problems with some newer
hardware (USB, 3D acceleration,
development waned and stopped; it was up to approximately current
at the time of the release of R5. At the time, it had better
hardware support in some areas than Linux. (For example, BeOS had
drivers for some software modems before Linux did.) It has rotted
since things fell apart, but that's a symptom, not the problem.
BeOS needed two things. Advertising and OEMs. Oh, and there were
a handful of important missing features, such as the ability to set
colour prefs globally, but the Mac is _still_ missing that one, so
it must not be fatal. Java support was lousy, but there have been
issues with that on the Mac also, as recently as a year ago, so
again, it must not be fatal.
BeOS, like I said, needed two thing: advertising and OEMs. But
instead of trying to sell the system, Be kept trying to sell the
technology (to Apple, to Palm, to embedded markets, to game
developers, and who knows where else that they didn't make public).
I don't know whether they could have successfully sold the system
as a desktop system, but I wish they would have tried a little
harder to do that. AFAIK there was never _one_ TV commercial for
BeOS systems. I know commercials cost money, but look where not
advertising ended them. You have to try something, and the things
they tried didn't work.
> It booted faster than DOS(and I'm not kidding)
Maybe not kidding, but you're exaggerating fiercely. The time DOS
required to boot was dwarfed several orders of magnitude by the
time the BIOS needed to do the POST; to say the same of BeOS would
be a significant hyperbole. It did boot much faster than Windows
or Linux, but as the other poster pointed out, boot time is really
not a big deal to most users.
> It had one of the best browsers I've ever seen
Err, I don't know what you saw in NetPositive. It didn't seem like
a very good browser to me. This really didn't matter though. First,
most users don't care beans about the quality of the browser (hence
the popularity of IE4 in its day, which was nothing to write home
about either), and second, you could download and install Netscape 4
(which at the time was not seeming so ancient; today of course you
can get Mozilla for BeOS).
> and it was very very slim
That really only mattered for dual-boot scenarios. I will say, BeOS
is a multibooter's dream come true. "Plays well with others" could
just about be its official motto. It also had an excellent driver
model, which basically didn't require any changes when hardware was
swapped out -- very user friendly, that. HardDrake is only just now
beginning to approach this. It also had a couple of nice features,
such as having a different res and colour depth for each workspace.
> What they needed is a linux binary emulator
Way more trouble than it would be worth. An X11/GTK+/Qt library
done as a wrapper around the native GUI would have been orders of
magnitude easier to do and gained source compatibility, which would
be plenty good enough. And yeah, I know FreeBSD does it, but OSS
does a lot of things in different ways from how companies do them.
> and a well designed wine-like windows binary emulator
Even harder to do than the Linux binary emulator, because Windows
is more poorly documented (in terms of its internals and ABI).
It would also be more worth doing, but the amount of work involved
could be prohibitive, and performance would probably not be great.
Besides, OS/2 went down this path, and the only reason they didn't
go bankrupt is because IBM has lots of other irons in the fire
besides the OS.
> I stopped using it because it didn't support my NIC, and when i
> sat down to port the driver from BSD i found myself lost in the
> lack of debugging documentation and gave up.
I think Be made a mistake getting out of hardware. They got out
because Apple wasn't cooperating any longer, and they ported to
x86, and as far as it went that was fine, but while offering up
a version that will run on various x86 hardware with an HCL is no
bad thing, I think they still should have sold prebuilt beboxen,
in an x86 variety. And I think they should have marketed them.
Now, I think Palm should come to terms with the realisation that
they aren't going to develop BeOS (unless they _are_ doing so, in
which case great), and get what PR they can out of the deal by
open-sourcing whatever parts of the BeOS source code they have the
rights to. (Obviously there would be some pieces of BeOS that were
sublicensed and could not be released, like there were some bits
of Communicator and StarOffice that couldn't be released with the
rest, but that's a minor complication.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.