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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?
BeOS may not be dead, but everyone tells me BSD is ;-)
...it's not dead. Obsolete computer systems don't die--they just get severely marginalized...
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
but please let go!! Don't repeat the same mistake I made with Amiga and OS/2
okay maybe its not dead, but its sure starting to smell funny.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
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...
noticeable speed when usng the find queries..
Apparently it's missing a spell checker.
...and look how wildly they succeeded there. You can look in a thousand video editing suites now and not find one BeBox. They're all using Mac OS X now. Why? Well, aside from the fact that it works better and has a zillion times more software....
A buddy of mine from school had a BeBox. They were Dual Motorola 68K class (maybe 68040s) boxes. Not only were they pretty damn fast, but they were cool loooking. I recall much hype about these boxes but as far as I know, only a few hundred were ever built. To this day I'm suprised they abandoned the hardware business so quickly.
Has anyone got Linux or some other OS going on a BeBox? I would expect most of the stuff ported for YellowDog would run without much work, although you might not get load balancing on 68k processors without a bit of kernel hacking
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
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!
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.
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.
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.
with the amusing conclusion that BeOS isn't dead after all!
Not dead, but probably dying. And a couple of hundred trolls are willing to prove it to you. In related news, Natalie Portman was recently found to naked and petrified pour hot grits down the pants of a beowolf cluster.
This is probably a good time to check the "No Score +1 Bonus" button.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
I tried the BeOS a few years back, when the company was around, and they had released some sort of "Preview Edition" which installed itself as one large file on your FAT partition, and you booted into that. The same as some Linuxes do..
Anyhow, I played around with it for a day or two, then nuked it. Why? Two simple reasons.
It did not detect or configure my network card. And it wasn't really clear how to do that. Linux installers do that, and have done it for years.
It didn't detect or configure my video card. And when I followed the instructions on doing so, the BeOS wouldn't boot.
So that was it for the BeOS. Maybe the full version would configure everything during it's installation; but why would I pay to find out?
So yeah, I do feel sad when people go on about the death of the BeOS. But I have much more compassion for the OS/2 users. That installed right (mostly), and I lived with that for 4 years.
Yeah... Suuuuuuuure. Next you'll tell us that legendary beast called the "Mac" still lives. ;-)
And, of course, we can't ignore that ultra hard core group of Amiga users. Any day now, one of the many compnies that have shuffled *that* hot potato around will release the new-and-improved Amiga, with something better than the 68060. Uh-huh. Sure. And my Atari 800 runs Windows XP.
I love articles like this one. No one actually used BeOS when it *did* really exist, thus its demise. Why should it matter that some poor deluded bastards still have a dusty, unused partition running it? I still have a DEC Rainbow in my basement, that I occasionally turn on and run NetHack with. That doesn't somehow make Digital any more "real".
While I do have an affection for obscure operating systems (and the BeOS is certainly now that), the fact that BeOS is obscure is not what makes me admire the damn thing so much.
...now if only I could find a BeBox on the cheap!
As the article says, it was well designed from the beginning, and well thought out through the end. The same can not be said for any other recently modern OS, really, save for maybe OSX (and this requires one to look at OSX as a "new" OS).
Windows certainly doesn't qualify, and even Linux (which I use and love a great deal) was never initially designed or thought out to be the OS it is today. It's been hacked together over the years to add features like the ones that were in the BeOS from the start (not that the hacks haven't been good...they have...but they're still hacks)...In a way, I'm quite disappointed that Be lost out. There's still always the hope that Palm might do something fun with them, but they'll probably just screw it up...
Sites slashdotted, can someone post the text or a mirror?
I do security
but that server is as dead as Disco
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
How about the gloss over of single-user? With the general introduction of networking to the masses, never mind the security implications, why would anyone want to use a single-user OS anymore?
Did they ever fix the printing subsystem to be useful? For a 'media OS' (good to see JLG still has his marketing skills), the printing support wasn't that great...
It is also well known that BeOS took the best features from a lot of different OSes... to say "with features built years ago that only today are companies putting into their future OS releases" is a bit much. Most of the features in BeOS were available on most major Unix platforms, even then. In comparison, it is perhaps better to say that BeOS had a 'clean slate' implementation of those features.
BeFS, however, was really the crown jewel... and probably the only thing really worth saving.
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.
Be's most exciting innovations that other systems are just starting to add support for (according to the article):
Multi-threading
Stability
MIME Types
Being able to open JPEG files
Biggest downside:
Doesn't support USB.
I don't know what he was using for a comparison but I would assume something console based from MS, circa 1988.
...so he can be haughty.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
But that webserver is about to die with the frantic slashdotting is taking.
Of course I can agree that BeOS isn't dead, as there is a still an avid userbase. But besides that, the development on that is slowing down to a crawl. I just hope that OpenBeOS will have much success, as it would restore the OS as an open source project, giving it a chance to actually see daylight, and possibly taking a chunk out of the large M$ market share.
Net+ was the worst browser! It was like Opera v2, or the brower from IBM that came with OS/2. The entire point of it was to go get a better browser. The only problem was that there never was a good browser, since there was no might like IBM's to get Netscape to port over to the OS (back before Mozilla had enough strength to stand on its own).
No CSS, HTML 3.2 barely, no JS.. While I don't like JS (I leave most of it off it Mozilla), a lot of sites (ab)use it to perform basic things that should be done at a lower layer, like browser redirects and URL construction. Net+ was impossible to use on anything other that Be's HTML documentation.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Yah, after a few replies correcting me, I guess it was a PowerPC box. I only ever saw the thing once. It was tucked neatly next to a rack of other hardware (!!?!!) in a dorm room (!). The guy who's machine it was was insane. He had one machine on which he was trying to set the record for the most OSs on a single box. There was a /. article on this subject a while back but I couldn't find it jsut now for a link. oh well.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
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)
"To Be or not to Be... um - that's Shakespeare - right?"
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
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.
What info did you need that you didn't find ?
between the Anotated BeBook and the Be newsletters... and the source codes...
Though NIC drivers are maybe the hardest and least documented ones. But as far as debugging goes, BeOS still takes the road, and as far as kernel land is concerned, Linux looses it with it's SysReq key.. The BeOS kernel embeds a full blown debugger. (even with a gdb stub, but Linux has it too IIRC).
All versions of BeOS(with the exception of the download version) can run on Pre G3 PCI macs (Be claims apple changed how to interact with the hardware making it impossible for beos to load) but if you bought it the cdrom was a hybrid
that would boot on them.
the PPC version was getting less and less suport once the G3's came out
I believe BeOS 5 Persona Edition would run on pre-G3 PowerMacs, but after that it went x86-exclusive. Might be a good way to revive an old Mac, though. I'm sure someone else here will or has posted the link to the free download.
Netpositive was garbage. The first thing anyone did when using beos was download a browser that actually worked with pages written after 1996.
The thing about old OS's is people tend to remember them with Rose-tinted glasses. BeOs had a lot a major problems with it. Yea it was lightweight, and had a few decent multimedia apps, but beyond that it really didn't have much to offer, and still was missing some major functions like proper networking.
I think the one thing it will be remembered for mostly is being able to spin a bunch of teapots at once if you happened to own some of the limited hardware it ran on.
It is funny considering how long ago development stopped on BeOS how the zealots still insist it was the best OS ever.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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....
I messes around with the BeOS on my p120. It was fast as hell but it was near the end so there wasn't much around to actually do!
I loved beos, it was a great little OS super fast loading with hardware detection each time it loaded, a fast responding GUI, possibly the best File system ever, but one thing it lacked that really killed it was the fact that there was never any good software for it, the included web browser (net+) was the best you could get for the system and it dint support java/java script/flash or anything else. because it lacked hardware OpenGL there was never any games for it. and the apps that were available such as newsreaders and email clients were basic at best and tended to crash. even with all that I would still be
running it if it wernt for the fact it doesn't support my hardware anymore, but thats what happens when a company goes under
I read a lot of posts here saying "Beos would never have succeeded with MS around" or "who had the crappy idea to make yet another OS when there is Linux / BSD?". I don't know if I can leave it at that without some righteous ranting. (Apparently not)
Beos might be dead but why? In my opinion that happened because a lot of mistakes were made (and creating Beos was none of them):
1. Be had (and still has) a dead grip on the source code. This is sad, because not only did this scare away opensource guys it was also the main reason for Beos development coming to a stand still. When it was clear (with the economic downturn and blablabla) that Beos couldn't be developed further by one company alone they should have opened the source and a lot of developers would have taken the OS under their wings.
2. Persistence (or the lack thereof). They thought Beos was going to take over the world over night. When this didn't happen they simply packed and gave up, because Be's business model wasn't stable. If someone had taken a 5 minutes break to think about things they would most likely be among the living companies still. (I don't say this because I am a wise ass who don't know shit about business, because when the IT business was beginning to fall apart I founded an IT company even though the people said "don't do this, it's stupid". It succeeded, it was very difficult at first but we persisted. If you just hold on long enough you will change things!
3. Partnerships (or the lack thereof). Be wanted to have the cake all for itself. They must have thought that developers and software firms will be grateful just to develop stuff for Beos. This is wrong. They should have made aliances with software companies to roll out tons of apps (Instant Messaging, multimedia, hardware, PIM, a.s.o.). Why the hell didn't they..?
Sad to see Beos going down, its a great technology. I know I'm going to get flamed for this but when it comes to architecture I prefer Beos over Unix/Linux/BSD/Microsoft anytime.
but www.befaqs.com sure is.
ok.... it's not dead.. think of the original BeOS being like unix and the new obos flavors being like linux. it'll take off, just give it some time
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
AmigaDOS was actually created as a masters thesis project in operating systems at a university in England, IIRC (it could have been a different country.)
It did not have Unix-style commands, APIs, or underpinnings. There were a lot of add-on programs created to give it shell-like functionality, and it supported ideas like process parentage and priorities, but no one who has ever done systems programming on a *nix system would confuse it with a *nix core.
The Amiga died due to Commodore's pathetic marketing. Period.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Customer: 'Ello, I wish to register a complaint.
(The owner does not respond.)
C: 'Ello, Miss?
Owner: What do you mean "miss"?
C: I'm sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint!
O: We're closin' for lunch.
C: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this OS what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
O: Oh yes, the, uh, the BeOS...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?
C: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it!
O: No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting.
C: Look, matey, I know a dead OS when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
O: No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable OS, the BeOS, idn'it, ay? Beautiful GUI!
C: The GUI don't enter into it. It's stone dead.
O: Nononono, no, no! 'E's resting!
You'll be stone dead in a moment!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
First of all, I'm not in the naysayers camp about OpenBeOS. If developers want to rewrite BeOS to scratch their own personal itch, far be it from me to tell others how to spend their personal time. However, OpenBeOS is not ready now. Yet for a vendor targeting a vertical market there are so many other available platforms to choose from now, that waiting (or even developing) for OpenBeOS simply doesn't make sense. These guys are in business to make money, not to scratch a personal development itch. If that's the market I wanted to target I would likely choose either Windows or Linux, depending on how I wanted to price my product, and how I wanted to arrange support. I might even go QT and target both platforms. The last thing I would do is hope and pray for OpenBeOS to come along and save my day when the market was there for the plucking and alternatives to OpenBeOS readily available. Just my .02...
Cheers,
--Maynard
-Kevin
for those who have seem to forgotten BeOS orginally was not multiuser.. so yes of course it booted faster than some dos and mac systems..duh!
But BeOS needed to be multi-user and a year or so after Steve Jobs turned down an offer to buy BeOS.. finally one forme Apple Exec Jean G..finally got his head out of his butt..but I digress..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
The key distinction here is that those are server OSes. The poster was referring to that thing that's actually running on your computer, that you type directly into on a daily basis. Linux, Amiga, Be, Mac (with sub-zealout categories including OS 9 and OS X), and Linux (KDE, Gnome, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, twm :-) and so on).
People are making me mad saying there wasn't any decent software on be, bullcrap.
All that killed Be was crappy hardware support.When Be came out, it supported about 5 or 6 network cards from 2 manufacturers (3com and intel) 1 scsi adapter from adaptec, and 3d support was mostly written for the 3dfx chipset. Why wouldn't they support a adaptec 29160??? Pretty standard stuff if you ask me.
Be 5 they added a little more hardware support, but again it was very limited.
Now back to my original bitch about people bitching there was no software.
Be had word processors, (and excellent printer support, sort of a oxymoron compared to the rest of their hardware support)
Be had (has) some of the best console and arcade emulation support EVER! Mame games that take a 700mhz cpu in dos can do just as good with a 350.
Their sound editing tools were the best, Be's sound drivers concentrated on low latency which meant the real time effects processing on be kicked ass.
As far as M$ killing be, well M$ did tell OEMS you beos no windows. Lets not forget palm though, who bought it all out and has kept all the source for their palm os sort of like a junkyard parting out a car (sad to see it end like that) The palm thing is kinda sad because it forever dooms Be to run on slow hardware.
All in all though, be was excellent. My band uses it on a 200mhz pentium for recording jam sessions and it works great. Only 2 ppl in our band are computer savvy and Be is simple enough where the other guys can sit down and use it.
Well enough ranting about the whole be fiasco for today...it's sunday, time to pray to a dead god.
What ever happened to that lawsuit Be had against microsoft over anti-trust issues? Last I checked (a month or two ago), they were continuing to run the corp for the purpose of pursuing litigation. Read the dissolution statement on the website - it goes out of its way to preserve the right of the Be shareholders to file lawsuits.
I'll betcha there's something in the works, otherwise they wouldn't have spent the time keeping the corp running.
I seem to remember RT-11 as a single user platform... can't really call it a desktop box since even the lowest end PDP-11/03 fit in a half-hight 36u rack, but dishwasher box might be an apt description... (and shall I bring up Xerox Altos as yet further evidence that your position is unsubstantiated by the facts?) --M
Apple approached Gassee before Jobs looking for a software rescue of Apple. Gassee wanted an even billion while Jobs settled for $400M (and eventual takeover of Apple). Apple OS X could have BeOS instead of NeXT-Unix.
so you are saying that, in the best traditions of "business sense" they ran it into the ground with bad decision after bad decision, yet not opening it would have been another bad decision? To me it looks like sour grapes on Be's part, or somehow the ceo needed a vist from his employees and stockholders all holding baseball bats or something.
AC, I absolutely agree. As I wrote, the entire Be business plan was flawed and based on false expectations and wrong decisions. I didn't say in any way (as Oliver Defacszio would have it) that open source is the saviour for any project nor did I say that Be should have been a philantropic organization. All I meant is that there have been a lot of stupid decisions and opening the source to get broader support would probably have helped a lot to keep the project alive. Also, read my previous post again, this time not only that one sentence, as there were other points in it besides the (granted) stale open source statements.
Funny you should mention that. Next release of Windows is trying to do just that. Putting a database at the core of an OS. Just like BeOS.
Afterall, Microsoft = Innovation.
BFS is superior to the other file systems due to several factors. One is the ability to represent multiple media devices as a single partition or volume. It has advanced caching methods. It greatly optimizied multimedia applications (well, in theory because there wasn't much to play with on BeOS) and was portable, meaning it could be moved between different hardware platforms easily.
But I'm sure MS coders will fix that =)
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.
The last company I worked for used Prime. OF course, they're gone (absorbed into another division), but from what I understand the Prime is still running in case they need any data from it. They're afraid to shut it off, because it might not come back up. So I guess that OS will live forever, or at least until a hardware failure.
I gave up thinking of a cool sig
I agree, I have been watching AtheOS, and now Syllable, for a while and it looks promising!
especially when looking at this...
Daryl Dudely's new preference apps
and now they even have samba compiled for it Here!
I even have a link to them on my website so that I can easily check out any new updates.
--- Brad (http://www.LinuxReview.net)
Are you saying that you disagree with the basic premise that most of the dead OSes are basically server OSes? Or that most workstation OSes that attained reasonable market success are still being supported or re-implemented?
Neither. I originally pointed out a variety of OS environments which have died throughout the years to refute the claims of the top level post in this thread. The list I posted is a small subset of the entire history. Your argument that I listed only server OSs is incorrect simply because I listed one OS which by definition could never have been a server. Then I pointed to a graphical desktop OS that was intended as an early desktop which is now completely dead, to nail the point in further. Finally, I now point out that since I only listed a small subset of the total I bet one could easily find further examples beyond BeOS of completely dead desktop operating systems. Hmmm: CP/M, NEWDOS/80, OS9, TOS, CP/M (oh, so many more)... just off the top of my head.
As an aside, I note that many of the other OSs I listed were not "server" systems in the modern sense of the word because they were traditionally installed as multiuser minis or mainframes with a number of serial terminals hung off them. This was long before networking became common. But I would agree the distinction is blurred. Another point I would make is that many of these environments didn't really share the philosophical development background of 'NIX, so the APIs and system environments were totally different. For example, a port from HP MVS to HP-UX could be a significant task given the large differences between the two platforms. Though we appear to largely agree on this.
Cheers,
--Maynard
Parent is an informative post about the demise of BeOS, from an apparent ex-employee. Please mod it up. :)
Someone you trust is one of us.
Pick one.
I pick correct, because I like having things done right the first time. It reduces the amount of crap I have to put up with.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If BeOS is dead, then I have a pretty efficient zombie hiding in my machine!
Ultimately I want to go Linux, but I am having a heck of a time deciding on a simple distro for my 'lil 4-year old laptop AMD K6-266 w/ 3-gig HD. All I want is a really thin net client really. I have tried Debian; but I am too much of a newbie to be able to get it working - whilst learning that however; I've thrown BeOS on it just this very evening; got the pcmcia network card talking to the OS, and am posting from it now - I'ts a little gem of an OS and seems very bloat free. Love the GUI too.
All I got to do now is learn how to configure me a linux install reasonably like this!
N.B. No, I'm not a 13 year old new to computing, just new to OS exploration.
--is not to be confused with user #672982 - Bame Flait
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
I admire the openbeos people. i hope they succeed in making a viable beos that I can run.
unfortunately I'm afraid beos will, like os/2, go down as being the os we wished that was.
I've used os/2 and beos and at least 30 other OSs and those two I miss most of all.
-
It either:
a) lives on in its music
b) Works at the local 7/11 with Elvis and Osama
http://simh.trailing-edge.com/.
However, if it's not open sourced, obviously, it can't evolve much further, so in that sense, operating systems do die.
Linux doesn't try to optimize interactive responsiveness--and most of its users wouldn't want it to. Linux aims for having a compromise between good interactive performance, good batch performance, and good multiuser performance.
However, with the new kernel thread implementation (run 100000 threads if you like) and the preemptible kernel, I suspect that Linux actually would match BeOS if you chose to configure it that way.
BeOS stored the MIME type of a file in an attribute
The designers of UNIX chose 25 years ago to keep the file system as simple as possible, and their choice has proven to be the right one for UNIX and Linux applications. If you want something like an attributed file system under UNIX, you stick the content and the attributes together into a directory; a UI can treat the directory as a single entity. That's what Mac OS X does, and it works very well.
For files in particular, file type identification based on fingerprints, as used in UNIX, is more robust and, if anything, simpler from the application programmer's point of view.
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
Me, I'm Joe User. I run WindowsXP cau that's what everyone else uses. I got Windows in 98 to tag along the internet thing, and it's great.
I'll tell you what tho - Windows is unsatisfying as an OS. I've never compiled a linux kernal, don't know crap about what distinguishes Unix from Linux, and the only programming I know is BASIC from back when I was a teenager using a black and green AppleIIc.
What I read here about BeOS isn't an OS that's all-geeck no-chic; I read about something that appeals to me, an average user, who niether knows nothing about putting up a server nor needs to have telnet or ftp or a bunch of other crap in an OS. I don't wanna recompile my kernal, or design my own drivers like I hear Linux folk do. I want my computer to boot up like my television, to do what I tell it, and to not crash on me.
Since my computer serves as my multimedia playcenter, sending music and video to my home theater blah blah etc, here I am reading about an OS that has everything I could want: a multimedia based OS that's stable, intuitive, user friendly, and stable.
People can claim all they want about XPs enhanced functionality (and yes it does play games well) or Linux'es stability, but for me, Joe User, that's a bunch of crap I don't need.
AFAIC I'm gonna give BeOS a try on my 2100amd equipped system for kicks. If that doesn't work I consider myself lucky to have an older 500mhz with a 3dfx in the closet that I can try it out on. For all I know, this may be just what I need to get over the sluggishness and bloat that is XP. A nice petite OS with blazingly fast speed and great multimedia support sounds like exactly what I've been looking for.
Get a clue, man, licensing something under a Free Software license like the GPL does not mean giving it away for free.
Nothing in the GPL forces you to offer your binaries, source-code, or ISO's available for free download from the net. It only requires that you (at least) allow those who want the source to get it at the physical price of delivering it.
You can, for example, sell a CD with only the binaries and an installer on it, along with an offering to deliver the source code at the cost of shipment. Alternatively, you can include the source on the CD you sell.
The important point from a business point of view is that you neither have to offer the source nor the binaries on the web for download; though, in most cases, offering the source for download will not hurt business (though offering the binaries for download probably will).
Most people who are your target customers do not want to compile something from scratch. They probably don't even know how to do it. So offering the source for distribution under the GPL has little if any effect on your business.
So in short, the point is that if you do things right, you can have a viable business model based around GPL'ed software. For the most part, this means NOT offering the binaries for download for free on the web. As for the source, that's largely a non-factor from a business standpoint; though it may be best to offer it for download on the web for public relations.
OSI-compliant and FSF-compliant software may not be an all-encompassing savior for businesses. But if implemented right, it can hardly hurt.
And once again, neither Open Sourced Software nor Free Software means you necessarily get something for free. Most things which are Open Sourced Software or Free Software *happen* to be free as in they can be downloaded for free; that does not mean that OSS or FS software *must* be free as in downloadable for free.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
By the time OpenBEOS is ready both Windows and Linux will be everything everyone could ever possibly want or need them to be. You're just fighting too big of a grain man. Give it up.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
RT-11 and RSX11M are in my basement, if you must know. As soon as I can get media that doesn't require 3-phase, TOPS-20 will be as well.
This article contains a number of inaccuracies and omissions, which leads one to wonder if the author is not writing with rose-colored glasses firmly in place:
1. "BeOS is fully POSIX compliant" -- not correct; it would be more accurate to say "mostly" rather than fully. I could quote from the Be FAQs on this point, because I wrote the original FAQ (I worked at Be for three years).
2. USB & FireWire support -- the article states that the USB support is not very complete, and shortly thereafter implies that FireWire is supported more fully. It's really more the reverse, though I doubt if the USB code would work with much of the built-in USB hardware being released these days (you never know, though; we got the original stack from Intel). At any rate, if you happen to have a BeOS retail box, you'll see USB listed (along with the Intel credit), and no FireWire (though my most current box is for R4.5, not R5).
3. Design of the kernel -- I can't comment on a technical level, but my recollection of conversations with kernel engineers was more that the kernel was monolithic (and that we thought that was a good thing). The design inspiration was from the XINU operating system ("XINU" is "UNIX" backwards), I'll leave it to operating systems connoisseurs to determine whether that compares with the Hurd or L4, as the author asserts. Perhaps the author is thinking of a new kernel being written for the "not dead yet" OpenBeOS project(s).
In all, the article reminds me altogether too much of the many articles about the Amiga OS that I read while I worked at Be. Sad, but true. I wish those projects luck -- I miss Be and BeOS -- but I consider them wishful thinking. I've moved on to Mac OS X, and don't plan to go back.
Maybe the team now at Palm will change my mind -- I hope so!
When a motherboard failed on me, I was able to take the hard drive out, and install it in another box, with all different hardware, and the system booted cleanly (with the exception of the network card which ahd to be re-configured.) to a working desktop.
I Honestly think that with two workstations that have hardware tha BeOS supports, you could use a removable drive tray system to take your hard disk back and forth with you between work and home. My experience is that the workstation would look the same on each platform.
I will acknowledge that moving it from a 233mhz K6 to a 1GHZ P3 would have a performance impact, as would moving from a 14" CRT to a 17" LCD impact the user's view. When it comes to a user needing to get work done, those are incidental, unless the change prevents you from getting work done.
I still do use BeOS on at least two systems. One for my multi-media center to stream my music, the other for my old desktop. My current "primary system" is a laptop usually running Mandrake 9.0. For some reason it ain't playing my MP3 files, even though it is perfectly happy to use the sound system to anounce to me that I have e-mail.
Why do I still use BeOS there? because it works and I really do not see a good reason to move those systems to any other operating system. Might that change? Possibly. At the same time by the time I need to make that decision, OpenBeOS may be an available binary install that I can use. If so, I would be happy to go with that.
I have used DOS 3.1, 3,3, 4.01, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0 and a couple of open source varients, most Windows varients, several linux distributions including slackware, debian, redhat, caldera, corel, and Mandrake, OS/2 2.1, 3.0, 4.0 and BeOS 4.5.2, 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2 . I have even gotten Plan 9 (one of the early releases) to boot, though not to a production state by any means, and several Macintosh versions.
Of all of these, _Only_ BeOS installed without a hitch onto any of my hardware, and made use of almost all of the attached peripherals. The world ain't perfect. The closest OS implementation I have seen to "perfect" would be BeOS.
Could it have used more hardware support? Sure! The APIs have been out there, I suspect that more than a few people would welcome your efforts to help out with more than a complaint that you don't think it supports your Voodoo 5 card. I think that is true even going forward.
Later.
-Rusty
You never know...
Well ...
As long as the community is still in love with BeOS ... it's alive and no way dead! ...
Long life, BeOS! ...
Ok...
I tried BeOS as my primary operating system for 3 months (this was a prior release over the final). I returned once again during the final release for a very short period. My roommate was a huge fan of BeOS and he stuck with it til the end. (At which point we thoroughly converted him into a Linux lifer).
While I truely enjoyed all the very technically pleasing asepcts of the operating system... there were problems. I really did admire the file system, threading, memory management and unix style xterm/console... there were problems.
Driver support was absolutely appauling. I know, I know, it did not have an amazingly huge installed user base and these things naturally follow. However, if we are going to stand idly by and watch BeOS be touted as the world's greatest creation, lets just be honest.
Application support was non-existant. There were no decent browsers and a hand full of applications that implemented only the very basic's. I have horrible memories about non-intuitive UI implementation in the provided applications and utitilities.
They really did a great job of implementing the fundamental foundation. However, a great home has more then just a nice starting base.
Its great it recovered from application crashes and would know when to auto-magically kill problems. In fact, with the frequency in which applications died it was quite necessary. At the time, it was admitted that tracker was horrible, but was just until something better was going to be released. I had more the one instance where networking would bomb out and never ever return to a functional state. This was truely fixed in 4.5? I really could go on for quite a while. I wanted to fall in love with this operating system, but its less important features that actually effected the user in some noticleable way just never got addressed.
I'm not sure what the author is smoking, but I could take a guess its the same thing Balmer hits before he goes out to praise MS.
Yes, I'm posting anonymously too. I'm not lavishing any portion of this, these were all my experiences under the very technically elite skeleton BeOS was.
IBM gave Netscape Communications (back before they were bought by AOL) lots and lots of money. They setup agreements specifically so that Netscape 2's codebase with extensions to Javascript and plugins would be released for OS/2 in 1997. It was fairly comparable to Netscape 3.0 on Windows at the time. BeOS never got a browser that was any good until Opera put out a port. It never really became a popular one.
As for the moderation, I'm sure meta-moderation will clear that up. Net+ sucked ass. The community, not the company, were the ones who managed to get a browser for their OS that wasn't crappy.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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
BeOS was an excellent operating system in many areas. But Be did some mistakes:
1) they did not allocate enough programmers for writing device drivers
2) they did not make an Office suite
3) they abandonded the BeBox
Building a cool OS is not enough. After version 4.5, they should have allocated some more resources building device drivers and an office suite.
There also was a major drawback in the BMessage class: if the app did not process messages fast enough, it ended up loosing messages.
They could have made it if they followed the Apple model.
So where is RT-11? RSX? Venix? PRIMEOS? CYBER NOS/VE? HP MVS? Lots of operating environments have come and gone...
I work in the finance industry and I can practically guarantee that within 20 mins walk of my office you will find all of those operating systems still in production use. The combination of extreme urgency and extreme aversion to risk in this business means that there are some very strange configurations in use today that doubtless made perfect sense at the time and far outlive their original designer's intentions.
A customer enters a Bomber shop.
...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?
Customer: 'Ello, I wish to register a complaint.
(The owner does not respond.)
C: 'Ello, Miss?
Owner: What do you mean "miss"?
C: I'm sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint!
O: We're closin' for lunch.
C: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this Bomber what I
purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
O: Oh yes, the, uh, the Boeing Blue B-52
C: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's
wrong with it!
O: No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting.
C: Look, matey, I know a dead Bomber when I see one, and I'm looking
at one right now.
O: No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable Bomber, the Boeing Blue B-52, idn'it, ay? Beautiful fuselage!
C: The fuselage don't enter into it. It's stone dead.
O: Nononono, no, no! 'E's resting!
C: All right then, if he's restin', I'll wake him up!
(shouting into the hangar)
'Ello, Mister bomber B-52! I've got a lovely fresh bomb load for you if
you show...(owner hits the hangar)
O: There, he moved!
[This message was re-edited by voretxau on January 29, 2002 at 20:02.]
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
Excellent post!
I completely agree. I had a number of discussions about BeOS and its merits with one of my friends who does software development for a living. He was a huge BeOS fan, and is probably the one responsible for me giving it a good second look. (I installed a free copy I received with a magazine, but quickly uninstalled it after it didn't seem very useful at first glance.)
It seems to me that most BeOS fans are, in fact, software developers. Most of the really powerful features inside BeOS are only appreciated by a developer. (Users really don't care how threads or objects are handled, as long as they like the look and feel, and functionality of whatever software they're using!)
I think this is what will lead to its eventual death, and certainly what caused the end of its original production and updates.
First and foremost, an OS has to cater to its *users*. For an operating system that was so "developer friendly", I didn't see all that much real development going on. You had the typical re-hashes/ports from the Unix/Linux world, and a relative "handfull" of original programs. Much of the shareware I downloaded for BeOS was quite bug-ridden and broken. Sure, they did regular updates - but you shouldn't have to suffer through 4 or 5 updates to your favorite IRC client before you get one that quits crashing and shutting down during use.
Not only that, but if there was any supposed "niche" potential to BeOS, it was supposed to be multimedia. Where was the firewire support for downloading from DV camcorders, then? Where were the up-to-date video drivers for high-performance cards? Where were all the hard disk recording and MIDI sequencers? (Sure, someone had 1 or 2 shareware MIDI sequencers for BeOS - but at least give me *one* commercial "standard" in a Be version! Cakewalk? Steinberg CuBase? Logic Audio? Nope.... not there.)
It seems to me like this was really an OS that died before it was even ready to get started. It probably could have gone someplace if they built the apps and secured deals with commercial vendors to port to it BEFORE it was officially announced to the public.
As a musician, I understand the glory of NeXTSTEP, BeOS, and AmigaOS; but catering to the artistic community is not going to be successful economically. The segment of the market that Microsoft doesn't have belongs to Apple; and probably always will.
Now, since Apple bought NeXT, there's at least *some* "trickle down" of decent technology to the artistic community. But pure, fine, newly-engineered, beautiful technology will never survive as a commercial desktop OS venture. Only Free Software can afford to take the time to do this.
Thus spake the master programmer:
"Let the programmers be many and the managers few -- then all will
be productive."
-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
I sense much hatred in you my child... Argh, I have to learn to type slower, this 20 second rule is getting annoying!