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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?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Dead or not, BeOS was one of the best operating systems I have ever used. If only it had the software/hardware support. It booted faster than DOS(and I'm not kidding), heck, it booted faster than anything else I've ever seen. It had one of the best browsers I've ever seen(Netpositive) and it was very very slim. What they needed is a linux binary emulator and a well designed wine-like windows binary emulator for the software, and a bunch of HOWTOs on how to port BSD/Linux drivers.
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.
Sad. Just sad.
I guess BeBits is still there and offering software...
The most interesting thing I ever did on BeOS was open the same mp3 about 30 times (at least) and had them all playing at once. Eventually the mp3 player crashed so that any new instances didn't work, but the playing ones did still work and finished up. I was really impressed. Also even under all that load the desktop was as responsive as kde 2. This was a 450 Mhz PIII. I was absolutly amazed.
As an aside, does anybody know what happened to Corum III (It was a secret of manaish game that was going to be released). I loved the demo, but was not going to pay for it on many month preorder, the company claimed to go gold, and yet never released their product. I could not find any references to the series on the net, and the only references to the 3rd one were for BeOS. Was this not really a port? I really wanted to play this game.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
BeOS really prompted me to start exploring other operating systems. Before that I had toyed with Linux once or twice, but it never worked quite the way I was hoping to. I started hearing some buzz about BeOS and actually /bought/ r4.5.2, along with the BeOS Bible. This was one of the only pieces of software I /paid/ for (as opposed to warezed) since maybe DOS 6.0.
:). BeOS was not a server OS, but ruled on the desktop.
I was fortunate enough to have an external USR modem, as well as a VooDoo 3 graphics card; no problem with compatibility, in fact I had the perfect system. Aside from the OS being incredibly fast, it more or less worked the way it was supposed to. I also thought the GUI combined the best of both Windows and MacOS. For those that say it lacked applications, that's true - but at the time it wasn't really any worse than running Linux. There was a decent office suite, Opera for a Net+ replacement, and a couple different mail apps to choose from. I can't remember which one I settled for, but I remember using a hex editor to remove its unregistered tagline
As Be the corporation started dying, I was seeing less and less work put into the OS. In r5 Pro OpenGL support had been removed for some reason, and to my knowledge never returned. It started to become clear that the OS was seeing its last days, and I didn't really want to be like the Amiga zealots who still exist today, so I went searched for some alternatives.
The thing is, using Be showed me that using my computer could be kind of fun again; maybe not fun, but at least enjoyable. I started toying with Linux on an old Pentium box, only with the intention to make it into a firewall for the box that was running Windows and Be (since Be had no firewall). Eventually this led me to install Redhat 6.2 on another partition on my main workstation (the box running Be), and I was using Linux as my primary OS for maybe a year or two.
Meanwhile, I was toying around with the old Pentium firewall more and more, and making it do some really great things under Linux - as a server. On the other hand, getting day to day tasks done in Linux on my workstation box was a new issue every day. I kept Linux running on my server (where it's still running) and axed both Linux and Be on my workstation, opting instead to Windows 2000 Pro. I hated how Windows looked and felt, and didn't much like the company who made it - but things more or less worked . . . at least for six months or so, then something breaks for some reason and a format is necessary.
Last year I acquired an old Macintosh Quadra 700 with OpenBSD on it. This little Mac, alongside the interest I already had in OS X, really nudged me even closer to putting down the money for a Power Mac G4, and so I did this May. OS X is most of the things I loved in BeOS (a nice, logical GUI) and consistency (it generally does not require reinstallation after 6 months, for no reason at all). At the same time, it fills the gaps that Linux did. It's UNIX, and works nicely alongside my BSD and Redhat boxes; when I'm not sure how to do something the 'Apple way' I can just open up a terminal and do it the way I would on any other UNIX box. On the more evil side, Office and Photoshop are there, so I don't have to reboot just to get something done. And if worse comes to absolute worst, Virtual PC can be used for any Windows-only app I might encounter (but it hasn't really occurred yet).
To this day I'm suprised they abandoned the hardware business so quickly.
While I loved BeOS as an OS, I hated Be, Inc. as a company. They abandoned every product and customer that they ever had. They abandoned the BeBox hardware and even stopped supporting it in later revs of the OS. They abandoned the Mac users that ran BeOS on Macs. They abandoned BeOS users and developers to pursue the (idiotic) network appliance market. Not surprisingly, the network appliance makers were not eager to jump into bed with a company that might abandon them next.
Be was a perfect example of what happens, and what should happen, to a company that abandons its customers and supporters.