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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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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!
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.
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.