Ten Years of BeOS

Tracker writes "BeOS was released to developers officially for the first time ten years ago. OSNews has a charming write-up about the BeOS, some interesting historical events since 1994, and a few anecdotes as well. Today, BeOS still lives on with projects like the freeware BeOS Max (built upon BeOS 5 PE), the open source re-implementation from scratch OpenBeOS and YellowTAB's commercial Zeta OS (based on unreleased and updated code of what would have been 'BeOS 6' if Be wasn't purchased by Palm in 2001)."

Comments

This just in

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft confirms BeOS is dieing

10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean 10 months and then 9 years and 3 months of irrelevance.

BeOS is one of those cool things that "could have been". It could have been amazing and taken over the desktop.

However, it was a flash in the pan.

What killed it? Lack of driver support. (I'm looking at you Linux fanatics)

Re:10 years?

[Havokmon]

What killed it? Lack of driver support. (I'm looking at you Linux fanatics)

Did you miss the whole "Microsoft not allowing OEM's to dual boot multiple OS's" fiasco?

Not that it would have absolutely overtaken Windows - but it was never given a chance.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I wasn't aware that Linux had an exemption to that MSFT demand.

Re:10 years?

[Dagny Taggert]

Given a chance? I know I'm probably inviting disaster here, but is every stinkin' OS out there supposed to be forced down our throats so that, if and when it fails, we can say it was "given a chance"?
I wrote a book once that no one wanted to publish; fair enough. Was I not "given a chance" because so many people read John Grisham and Tom Clancy?

Re:10 years?

[tolan-b]

It didn't. The difference was the BeOS 5 PE could be launched from an icon on your desktop and booted in virtually no time at all (~15 seconds including hardware detection?). BeOS *was* being distributed with Windows PCs, unlike linux, which was pretty rough round the edges then. BeOS had all the ease of a user-centric destkop OS, and could be easily bundled on the same PC. MS didn't like that at all and killed it dead.

Re:10 years?

[FortKnox]

Honestly, the only reason OSNews has anything on it, is because Eugena is rabid about BeOS. She'll never let it go.

Re:10 years?

[torpor]

Plus, it was fun to write drivers for BeOS.

I won't say anything about how fun it was to program for BeOS in general, especially if you consider (at that time) the horrendous loops one often had to jump through to grok Windows programming.

The BeAPI's really were fun ... I don't think lack of drivers was going to be a real problem for BeOS. Lack of developers, yes, and if you can't dual-boot your beigebox PC from Windows to BeOS (because of MS' reluctance for people to be allowed to compare, i.e. 'shop for their OS, as consumers' ...) then I don't see how you're going to really attract coders.

Except, it really was fun to program again, with BeOS. What a great breath of fresh air, sorta ...

Re:10 years?

[CyberKnet]

That depends. Did John Grisham and Tom Clancy force their publishers to only publish their books?

Probably not... they don't have that kind of a monopoly over the book-reading market.

Re:10 years?

[Havokmon]

I wrote a book once that no one wanted to publish; fair enough. Was I not "given a chance" because so many people read John Grisham and Tom Clancy?

Sure - IF John Grisham or Tom Clancy forced every publisher to not publish anyone else.

Apparently you missed the dual-boot fiasco as well. Relating to your situation, it would be that Tom Clancy's publisher ACTUALLY WANTED to publish your work, buy Mr. Clancy refused to let them publish you or they would not get his work (and basically have nothing substantial to sell).

Re:10 years?

[Otter]

What killed it? Lack of driver support. (I'm looking at you Linux fanatics)

No, what killed it was that switching to it required not only buying a new OS but buying all new applications. There simply weren't enough people who found a "multimedia OS" compelling enough to make the large investment just to give BeOS a real shot.

Linux is different because 1) there's now a huge pool of free (beer) GUI software so users can give it a real shot and 2) even before those apps came along, there were plenty of text-only apps that met the needs of Unix users of the day. Those were available for BeOS, too, but the users who wanted the ultimate GUI didn't care whether bison and nn were available.

At least that's why I installed BeOS a shot, but really started using Linux.

Re:10 years?

[noldrin]

Perhaps their master plan that buying a dual processor mother board would be cheaper and faster than buying one really good processor?

Re:10 years?

[Rhys]

Irrelevance is only true if we didn't learn anything from the BeOS.

After all, Xerox PARC's windowing and networking system wasn't really a success either...

Re:10 years?

[Otter]

At least that's why I installed BeOS a shot, but really started using Linux.

Errr, make that -- At least that's why I installed BeOS, but really started using Linux.

The woman in the next office has been in a teleconference all morning with her speakerphone volume turned up so loud it's shaking my corneas, even through the wall. In fairness, though, she's doing work and I'm posting here.

Re:10 years?

[Lord Kano]

What killed it? Lack of driver support. (I'm looking at you Linux fanatics)

Don't forget Apple fanatics while you're at it. Remember when Apple's engineers started withholding engineering specs from Be, and as a result Be couldn't write drivers for the new Apple hardware? This decision from Apple came shortly after Apple decided to purchase NeXt and use their assets to build their next OS.

LK

Re:10 years?

[Marillion]

From Fact Index

In February 2001 Be Inc. filed suit against Microsoft. For several years Microsoft operated exclusive licensing deals with PC manufacturers that effectively prevented the release of machines with more than one operating system, and in practice anything other than Microsoft's Windows. Be claimed that this anti-competitive behavior forced them out of business, as BeOS couldn't get enough of a foothold in the marketplace to overcome this. In fact, Be Inc.'s CEO (Jean-Louis Gassée) offered to give BeOS for free to any PC manufacturer who would dual-boot Windows and BeOS; none of them accepted the offer. On Sept 5th 2003 Microsoft and Be Inc. settled their case with Be Inc. receiving $23.2 million and Microsoft no longer being accused of anticompetitive wrongdoing.

Re:10 years?

[tolan-b]

Most people I know who've used BeOS for any period of time are the same.

It was so elegant.

Re:10 years?

[Hodge]

However, it was a flash in the pan.

A pretty impessive flash though. Even in mono at 640 X 480 I knew I just had to try it. I lived with it as my main system for a couple of years so I think I can maybe add a few things that did kill it (at least for me).

1. Lack of 'clever' interfaces. Apart from a few basic functions there was little USB etc. These days (and even in the late 90s) this meant little PDA connectivity and no cameras, MP3 etc.
2. The ever-quoted lack of software. While there might be 10^6 applications on BeBits there was never a huge amount of 'big' software. This meant little choice in office suites, photo editors etc. There ones that existed were good but a limited choice.
3. Limited take-up of BeOS. Everyone I showed BeOS to was blown away by it but even IT professionals had never heard of it. The laws of supply and demand really mean that (1) and (2) above will be a problem until there is enough interest for applications to be other than hobby products.

What do I miss? I've moved on to OS X as many e-BeOS people seem to. By and large I am very happy, Windows was always boring and utilitarian, a problem that both BeOS and OS X avoided with some style.

I miss the speed, simplicity and stability of BeOS. It was a unix-like OS without the labyrinthine complexity of GNU/Linux. I really miss the custom attributes that were such a unique feature of BeOS - I don't believe any other OS has implemented such a scheme. Would I go back? Unlikely now. OpenBeOS will have to develop hugely to fill the above gaps. Zeta is just the bastard offspring of BeOS - a dead end that's going nowhere.

Re:10 years?

[tuffy]

What killed it?

Lack of software - particularly "killer app" software. Linux could run open-source Unix software almost right from the start. Its "killer apps" are Apache, Sendmail, BIND and Samba. BeOS was a desktop OS with no "must have" desktop software - and it fizzled.

Re:10 years?

[Rude Turnip]

Exactly...keep in mind that *Dell* wanted to install BeOS alongside Windows. AFAIK, Dell wasn't about to install something like that if there wasn't good driver support. The only thing that held them back was MS restricting them from setting up a dual boot system. That was the kind of solid, antitrust stuff the Justice Department should have focused on, not some vague bullshit with Netscape & Sun.

In other news, I finally got part of my "Be vs MS" lawsuit settlement proceeds just recently.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

I really miss the custom attributes that were such a unique feature of BeOS - I don't believe any other OS has implemented such a scheme.

Some have. XFS on IRIX and Linux can too, but on Linux support for those attributes suck.

Re:10 years?

[beforewisdom]

Exactly. Another article on slashdot had a similar title"__ years of ___". Ha. You only get to use that title if the product has actually been in use in that time period.

Re:10 years?

[blindbat]

Many driver issues are irrelevant now with so much stuff being USB. Corporately speaking, not that much really needs drivers.

Rather it is games for home users and apps for business users.

The apps side will diminish a bit with time.

Re:10 years?

[dasmegabyte]

Actually, it would be more like not getting a free copy of the guy's book when you buy a copy of "Hunt for Red October." A lot of people would see this as a good thing...I often receive "promotional" material in magazines, and even with CDs, and it's rarely any good.

If I bought a PC that had two operating systems on it, I'd probably just want to know the quickest way to delete the other one.

Re:10 years?

[Ruprecht the Monkeyb]

The dual-boot issue had very little to do with it (that hurt OS/2 far more than it hurt Be). BeOS had terrible hardware support through its early phases. No OEM in their right mind would have shipped a PC with it. Either they would have had to select from a minor subset of available hardware to build their PCs, or they would be installing an OS that didn't have sound, or support accellerated graphics, or something else. I play with new and fringe OSs for fun, and even I gave up on Be through the first several iterations.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did this stupid idea that Linux should magically support every last bit of hardware ever come from anyway? Out of the box, Windows doesn't support your Super Doodad Thingame 2000XP K-RAD either, so why the fuck should you expect Linux to? If you want to bitch at someone about crappy support for the $3000 DSP board you just bought from Weird Shit Hardware Inc. then complain the Weird Shit Hardware Inc.; they built it, they wrote the Windows drivers, its their responsiblity to write the fucking Linux drivers.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it would be more like when you buy the store brand instead of the national brand and you can't really complain when the product disappoints because you knew that the store brand cuts corners in order to sell you stuff at the low, low, store brand price.

Re:10 years?

[cosmo7]

Try to get some exotic hardware working on linux, and you better hope you know how to compile stuff, as you're going to need it.

Ooh help! I have to compile something! Can you do that on a computer now? Does it say you're supposed to do that? Will I get in trouble? Help help I'm so confused! I'm trying to use a piece of equipment that no one - out of millions of people - has ever used with this operating system but I don't know how to compile! Help! Help! If only I was using Windows everything would be perfect and life would be easy, oh, how I curse the day I got on the clue train.

Re:10 years?

[BlowChunx]

Uhh, yeah...

It seems to me that I could install a functional Linux distibution on the same hardware that the Be geniuses said they were "locked" out of...I guess they just couldn't embrace open source to look at those GPL'd drivers.

Be just seemed to whine rather than get on with the business of doing business. Great ideas, crappy leadership.

Re:10 years?

[MoneyT]

Out of the box, windows auto detects and supports all of my hardware.

Out of the box, I had to manualy cinfigure SuSE to use my network card.

Guess which one your average consumer is going to use?

Re:10 years?

[kbahey]

FactIndex is actually a feed from Wikipedia.

There are actually several sites on the net that are mirrors of Wikipedia content, only with banner ads and such.

Wikipedia has a page on it, but I can't give you the link right now, since Wikipedia seems to be not responding

Re:10 years?

[sootman]

Actually, it was mostly lack of App support that killed it for me. I'd boot into it, play with ArtPaint until it crashed, read Slashdot on NetPositive, play with the 3D audio thingie until it crashed, do the movies-on-a-cube demo, then boot back into Windows and get back to work, making web pages with Netscape, HomeSite, and Photoshop. *sigh* It was cool, though. I had R3, 4, and 5 for Intel. I was always hoping it would wind up catching on. The real-time effects in ArtPaint were awesome, and it ran like a greased duck on an AMD/300 with 48 MB RAM. Oh yeah, and the right-click navigation was cool, too.

And now that I know what a database is good for, I *wish* someone would implement a comparable database-based filesystem. I would *kill* to do complex queries on my filesystem and get the results back instantly. Hardware wasn't too much of a problem--just buy from the list, which I did, and you're fine. SoundBlaster sound card, ATI video card, life was fine. I'm sure i you wanted the newest NVidia stuff for gaming it sucked, but if you are happy with the supported HW list and bought from it, all was great.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of the box, Mandrake Linux 9.1 autodetects and supports all of my hardware.

Out of the box, I had to manually install the nVidia and Via 4in1 drivers to get my audio and video to work properly.

Guess what value there is in anacdotal evidence?

Re:10 years?

[kbahey]

Well, since it is a mirror, then here you go, from Fact Index itself:

Distibution of Content.

Fact Index is not listed though, the other are (nationmaster, tutorgig, 4reference, ..etc.)

Re:10 years?

[dave420]

If Linux is going to surpass windows on the desktop, compiling stuff is not an option. It takes time, can break, and is something the end user absolutely positively doesn't need to know anything about. You can't harbour both attitudes - compiling is either a great thing (and linux will never "win" on the desktop"), or it's something linux needs to desperately overcome if it's going to gain any sort of respectable foothold in the desktop market.

Your choice.

Oh, and it's not just hardware that millions of people haven't used before, but simple stuff like modems. Don't make it out to be an exception, when it clearly isn't :)

Re:10 years?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Jon Mini, where are you?

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Most people I know who've used BeOS for any period of time are the same.

> It was so elegant.

No. It was crappy. Better than what windows was, but not elegant.

Come on, window bar too small, no miniaturize but a useless windowshade, very instable, pita to develop (Hellish C++ API). Fast, but mostly useless, with a whole 'unfinished feel' (God, how much that terminal application sucked)

Hint: I ran NeXTStep at the same time. *This* was an elegant piece of software.

Re:10 years?

[oserus]

I know this is opening myself up, but Microsoft never forced anyone to do anything. Those companies complied willingly with Microsofts wishes in exchange for a significantly reduced price on the Windows OS. If they had refused Microsofts wishes, they still had the option of buying the OS at the normal price you or I would have to pay. I know it's kind of a fine distinction, but it does make all the difference in the world to me. I would be right there decrying Microsoft with the rest IF those companies had no other options. However, they did have other options in getting the Windows OS. They CHOSE to sign those contracts in order to increase thier own profits. Now they whine and make Microsoft out to be the bad guy. I don't blame Microsoft for asking some considerations in exchange for the sometimes 80% price reductions companies like Dell recieved. If they wanted to support other OS's or options that were against the contracts, they had that clear option. It just would have hurt thier profits.

Re:10 years?

[micromoog]

Oh, and it's not just hardware that millions of people haven't used before, but simple stuff like modems. Don't make it out to be an exception, when it clearly isn't :)

When's the last time you tried a new distribution of Linux? It now does a better job than Windows for the most part (Windows still requires a lengthy and buggy third-party driver installation process). The reasons for the slow adoption of Linux on the desktop are no longer technical; just market (in a market almost totally controlled by the major competitor). Any progress in this utterly hostile environment is significant.

Re:10 years?

[tolan-b]

"Come on, window bar too small"

Oh no!

"Come on, window bar too small"

Worked fine for me. Come on, a couple of interface decisions you dislike are hardly a damning indictment.

"very instable, pita to develop (Hellish C++ API)"

Was solid for me. Are you sure you don't mean that a some of the apps were unstable? Perhaps that's linked to people trying to port code that just wasn't deisgned for the level of threading that BeOS used.

"Fast, but mostly useless, with a whole 'unfinished feel' (God, how much that terminal application sucked)"

I completely disagree about the feel. Sure it was somewhat unfinished, but what was done was superb. For a desktop OS it was untouched in terms of responsiveness and simnplicity.

"Hint: I ran NeXTStep at the same time. *This* was an elegant piece of software."

Ah.. Zealot much?

Re:10 years?

[Matthew Weigel]

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

The user interface was a bizarre mishmash of copying from Windows and MacOS, with no real understanding of why MS and Apple did the things they did. Sometimes it depended exclusively on the mouse, sometimes it depended on memorizing short cuts that directly contradicted prior training experience (I'm thinking of the whole Ctrl/Alt terminal thing here). It was definitely minimalist, but elegant?

It had some neat ideas on querying the filesystem, and hence using the filesystem as a general organizational system; it had a nice typing system (although restricting typing to MIME has lost favor, mostly because there are a lot of filetypes that have poorly regulated MIME types).

But OS/2 had both of these things at the same time or earlier (OS/2 had an inferior filesystem query system, but it was there; the typing system was vastly superior, however, and even allowed third party types to have customized file properties). And although OS/2 did not provide an OO API, it provided something far better: a real OO UI.

The whole idea of BeOS as the media OS is laughable, too: at inception they were only a few years away from having to compete with Voodoo for OpenGL speed, and their highly optimized real-time A/V support was a few years away from processors being so fast that it, too, ceased to be relevant.

Re:10 years?

[MrHanky]

I miss the speed, simplicity and stability of BeOS.

Speed and simplicity, yes. It was a damn fast and simple desktop OS. Far too simple for me, I actually prefer KDE on Linux (and I'm writing this from OS X), but I'm not going to argue against your taste. But stable? Compared to Windows 9x, I'd have to agree. BeOS wasn't particularly unstable. But with my limited use, I've had it crash on me more than Windows 2k/XP, which I've spent far more time with. Haven't had a crash with OS X yet, but I've only had my Powerbook for a week.

My problem with BeOS was mostly that there were few good apps, and those that were a bit cool, were all pay-ware. I'd already got used to the loads of free software in Debian, and when even an mp3-player (Soundplay was very nice, but bug-ridden and crashed too easily) cost money, I thought BeOS developers were a bit greedy.

Re:10 years?

[dave420]

About 30 minutes ago, I just downloaded the latest knoppix live CD. I also am using RH9 on our production servers at work. I'm not exactly using RH3 now, am I?

"Windows still requires a lengthy and buggy third-party driver installation process" and compiling drivers some guy from arkansas wrote for his printer is not a lengthy and buggy third-part driver installation process? Comparing that to windows is ridiculous. With windows, you get the driver on the CD with the device. You put the CD in, it copies files. 3 minutes later, your hardware is ready for use. No rebooting, no command prompts, no newsgroups, no make, no nothing. How you can seriously say Linux has better driver support than windows is beyond me. A true fanboy, you must be.

Saying it's about marketing is silly. To adopt linux, people have to start using an OS they're unfamiliar with. An OS with lots of quirks and less-than-easy ways of doing things (.conf files? try explaining those to a CEO or your gran). It simply costs too much to change to linux. I'm not talking monetarily, but through productivity. Open Office is a great attempt at taking business from microsoft, but microsofts product is simply better. It loads in seconds, sets the standards (so isn't permanently playing catch-up), looks good and interoperates with the OS. Open office can't boast any of those things, so if people move to it, they automatically lose functionality and productivity.

The second an average windows user can move from Windows to Linux without having to learn anything is the day linux will do well. As the shell is still an integral part of Linux, that's not going to happen any time soon.

Re:10 years?

[TheRaven64]

The lack of application support, sadly, was entirely Be's fault. Just as application developers started to take it seriously as a platform, Be announced the shift to BeIA, effectively killing BeOS as a desktop platform.

Re:10 years?

[larkost]

The problems were a bit more intractable than just buying new software... for a lot of uses there simply wasn't an application out at the right time.

I bought a PowerComputing computer (Apple clone) at the time when they were providing BeOS with every computer, and likes what I saw, but there was so little I could actually do with it at the time.

To give a great example, BeOS was a "Media OS" that could not play QuickTime, the dominant media format of the time. It was a wonderful foundation for an OS... more or less, but was lacking in actual applications (both the software kind, and the activities).

Re:10 years?

[dolmen.fr]

Technically, Windows also has it on NTFS filesystems.
However as no Microsoft application uses them (except maybe the explorer integrated image viewer in WinXP), no one else uses them. And of course, FAT does not have it and backward compatibility seems to be an issue for Microsoft.

Re:10 years?

[bogie]

Most people wear rose tinted glasses when remembering BeOS. Beyond a responsive shell and a few nice apps many important parts of it were either broken/missing. For general desktop use and especially corporate use it was lacking to say the least.

Re:10 years?

[Talez]

(Windows still requires a lengthy and buggy third-party driver installation process).

Hello. This is 1998 calling. Give us our fucking "windows sucks" arguments back.

Re:10 years?

[Joe Tie.]

Of course some OEMs would have shipped with it! An OEM that just happened to have compatible hardware. Driver support wasn't that great, but I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill to suggest the only way it'd work on anything is if the computer was specially designed for it. Back in the day I just threw it onto an off the shelf dell and it worked fine.

Re:10 years?

[MyHair]

I *wish* someone would implement a comparable database-based filesystem. I would *kill* to do complex queries on my filesystem and get the results back instantly.

The OpenBeOS project status page indicates the filesystem is in the late beta stages. I don't know how much work it would be to port it to *nix, but I expect it's possible.

Ooh, I just followed the BeFS link on that page, and it references an experimental Linux BeFS driver. Happy birthday.

P.S. You said you would kill....how about Darl? (I keeed, I keeed.)

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they had refused Microsofts wishes, they still had the option of buying the OS at the normal price you or I would have to pay.

why are you so sure that there is this option? this was a time well-before the DoJ lawsuits, mind you. what if, in order to offer BeOS, they only had the option of buying the OS at a higher than normal price? what if in order to offer BeOS they could not get windows at all? is Microsoft *legally obligated* to offer Windows to *anybody* who wants to?

what if MS said to them "oh? you're offering BeOS? Hrm, oh I'm sorry, we're not willing to offer you any OEM licences at all. Too bad. looks like you'll have to send your staff out to buy shrinkwrapped copies of Windows and manually install them on your PCs before you ship them out. You have my sympathies for what that will do to your production line and the additional staffing costs" etc.

MS plays hardball, even MS admits that. your understanding of the commercial realities is naive.

Re:10 years?

[MesiahTaz]

Try explaining a .conf file? Wow, this will be hard: Rather than storing all settings in a cryptic and easily corruptible registry, everything is in a plain ol' text file. Damn, that was hard to explain.

Re:10 years?

[doublem]

Out of the box Red Hat, Knoppix and Suse autodetect and configure all the hardware on both of my computers at home.

Windows requires five reboots and numerous driver installs one one box and SIX on the other.

All the software for Linux is updated with two commands. All the software is update on Windows with numerous downloads and a few dozen reboots.

It all depends on the hardware.

Part of the issue is that Linux has more frequent OS updates, so more hardware can be added to the "Out of the box" configuration. Windows "Out of the Box" detection is just going to get worse and worse until Longhorn comes out. "Out of the Box" detection is a pretty useless metric, as any OS that is older than the latest graphics / sound /RAID card will require downloads and installs.

Re:10 years?

[dave420]

Users don't have to edit the registry to change anything. It's all reflected in a graphical interface. The registry also has an automated way for people to make changes, which isn't the case with flat text .conf files.

Your attitude is the one keeping Linux back, not Microsoft. If the linux community can't swallow its pride enough to admit when Windows does something people actually respond positively to, linux can't possibly go anywhere near the desktop.

Nice dodging of every other point I made, though. well done.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried BeOS, one of the downloadable editions. It booted great...

... in greyscale.

That's right. It knew enough to use my original radeon video card, but not enough to know how to use it in color. So it was all... in greyscale. It was like they were trying to hard to emulate NeXT or something.

Anyway, 'lack of color' in a 'multimedia OS' did it for me right there. I went back to Linux.

Re:10 years?

[Kenja]

"If I remember it first needed a special powerpc box and it was highly specialized for video production. Think toaster"

You remember wrong. It ran on just about any PPC (before that it ran on AT&T Hobbit chips, but thats another story). It also supported dual CPUs. At the time there where no low cost multi cpu PPC systems out there so Be made their own. It had zero video production ability. It had some nice audio features (four MIDI ports for one thing), but it used basic PCI video cards and had support for one TV card.

"Then they ported it to the powermacs (brand new ) at the time."

Nope, the PPC version ran on Powermacs from the get go. Granted there was a slight hold up as soem drivers needed to be written. However any of the clone systems based on CHIRP or its prediccesor worked out of the box.

"It would not run on standard intel hardware for another few years."

Once Jobs killed the clones off there was no point in supporting the PPC platform any more.

"When an x86 port was finally available software developer companies noticed no one was buying it (thanks to limited hardware requirements) so they decided it was a dude."

The most interesting software was written in the PPC BeBOX days. Most of it never made it over to the intel side. I recal a very cool audio program called BeatBox that let you hook up 12 mice/touch pads and "scratch" MP3 or CD audio tracks in real time.

"The few software that was written was powerpc based."

You seem to have no idea what you're talking about.

"If BE released it for x86 during its initial release its possible they could have had more users."

Why? You may as well say that if Apple hadn't killed off the PPC systems we'd all be running PPC based BeOS boxes.

"Also by now Windows2k is not too bad with video and graphics. Its still slower then linux and Be but not by much."

Eh? Windows2k us MUCH better at video then BeOS ever was.

"We also have journaling filesystems now, advanced threading, realtime support in the newest linux kernels, and today's hardware is much faster."

True, BeOS runs realy well on a P4.

"People used BE for specialized work and a really really fast system on ancient hardware. That problem is going away now."

No they didn't.

Re:10 years?

[Cereal Box]

your understanding of the commercial realities is naive.

And your understanding of the commercial realities is all based on speculation. Why would Microsoft deliberately shut out major OEMs like Dell, HP/Compaq, Gateway, etc. over them shipping a niche OS on certain models? That would basically wipe out Windows on all pre-installed machines. Tell me again why they would want to do that? Not to mention denying OEMs the ability to sell Windows (or selling it at a higher price) would quickly catch the eye of the DOJ...

Re:10 years?

[mjm1231]

And the set of PCs I admin includes 60 or so consumer class DELL boxes, which, when the video driver supplied by the automatic Windows update is installed, causes them to blue screen anytime you try to change video resolution. Looking up the lovely stop code is within the ability of your average consumer?

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

> > "Come on, window bar too small"

> Oh no!

I am serious. I recall window title that were only the width of the title. It is painfull, because buttons on the right were not always at the same place, and moving a window require a different dexterity depending on the size of the title. Weird.

> > "very instable, pita to develop (Hellish C++ API)"

> Was solid for me

Well, I recall making my first Be app. Fighting with the BScrollBar class to draw a miserable scroll, only to discover that I basically had to deal with all the little things myself (thumb size, enable/disable, etc...) was quite a pain for me. A few hundred of lines of code to do what IB let NeXT devs do with no code...

> "Fast, but mostly useless, with a whole 'unfinished feel' (God, how much that terminal application sucked)"

Okay. I must confess, it was one of the very first Be machine, with an early OS version. But it definitely frozen on me several time. And the terminal emulator sucked ass.

> Ah.. Zealot much?

Yep :-) And keep in mind that I am trashing Be in comparison to NeXT. Be was very superior to windows.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, jerky, that's why I can do stuff on a P3 500Mhz 128Mb BeOS system that I still can't do on a 2Ghz Athlon w/768Mb RAM.

Re:10 years?

[lscoughlin]

For a while, microsoft was the _only_ os for most vendors pc's. Thats when these contracts got signed.

Yes, a vendor could of gotten out of the agreement and payed "regular" prices. But then their hardware would of been significantly more expensive then that of their competitors.

Is it gun to the head forcing? Not exactly.

Is it strong coercion based on the strength of a market strangling monopoly? Yes.

Re:10 years?

[Pxtl]

From the register:

Hitachi had agreed to license BeOS, and ship a dual-boot system using Be's boot loader and an icon on the desktop that enabled a Windows user to reboot into BeOS with one click.

"Microsoft sent two U.S. managers to Japan who expressed their 'anger' with Hitachi over its arrangement with Be, and 'reminded' Hitachi of the terms of its Windows license," according to the claim. "

now stfu.

Re:10 years?

[Build6]

it's arguable that with more work, enough support would have been plunked in the OS to support more of the common OSS tools, where "beos" would be a target in many Makefiles (it's been a long while since I've seen a Makefile that *didn't* have apple/mac/darwin as a target, for example. it's not impossible that beos would never have reached this stage).

anyways, what i'm curious about though is this. Remember the old (and now forgotten?) RIAA attempt to watermark song files, that Edward Felten (and friends) conclusively defeated? In their paper, the screenshots they had, the windows looked suspiciously like they were from the BeOS GUI. Can anyone confirm if they WERE in fact using BeOS (or if it's just a window manager)? if that were the case, a bigger debt is owed to BeOS than many people realise... .

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

And what killed "killer app" software was that Be couldn't make up their mind. We actually started porting our software to the original 603e BeBox and had a running proof of concept version in time for the first BeOS conference and Grasse's word that we could demo it.

So we flew a developer out there, but Be switched to a new OS the night before the conference without telling us, breaking everything.

Then they switched to Intel, started talking about selling BeOS, made a run trying to strongarm Apple into buying it. In summary, they did their level best to convince us that we had a whole lot of better things to do than trying to get a working BeOS port.

Re:10 years?

[gmhowell]

We already knew Eugenia needed a distemper booster, now we find she missed her rabies shot as well?

Re:10 years?

[hesiod]

> It loads in seconds, sets the standards

I agree that MS Office is a billion times better than OO.o, but the only way it "sets the standards" is by modifying previous standards. It's not about catching up at all, it's about MS intentionally changing things so that it doesn't work the same as old "standards," which don't happen to be standards at all.

The point of "standards" is that a group of people decides what a file format looks like. If that "group" is one company that will not release the information, it is just a format, not a standard.

I dislike Windows immensely, but Linux is not a viable permanent option at the moment. I heard someone claim that Linux is faster, but that is only true if you tweak things, or at least don't use default install options. I have an AMD 450 that dual boots Windows 2000 SP4 and Mandrake Linux 10. They take about the same amount of time to get to the login prompt, (Linux may actually be 2-3 seconds faster there) but after logging in, Windows takes about 7 seconds to show the desktop, and another 3 or four until you can actually do anything. When Gnome (KDE was even slower) loads, it's about 20 seconds until the desktop shows up and another 10-20 (or longer) until anything can be run. When the desktop comes up, I usually open up a console window. I click on the icon and have to wait almost 45 seconds until it appears. After that, the operational speed of the OSes are pretty similar.
Yes, I'm sure it's possible to change some things to make it run faster, but I have no idea what, other than disabling services & options that are present in Windows. That would take some previous knowledge and/or a lot of research. The real problem is that "the average desktop user" will not know that this is possible. You can educate them, but they don't want to know how to recompile anything, or even edit a textfile to change options. Yes, it's easy to do, if you know what you are doing -- most people don't.

Then the elitist geek attitude comes in, "then they should learn how to use it." No, they shouldn't. Not everyone that drives a car knows how an internal combustion engine works. We know that really, it's pretty simple. That doesn't mean that someone should be unable to drive if they don't know how it works (I know, many of you would disagree -- get over yourself).

You don't know how the brain works, does that mean you shouldn't be able to use it?

Re:10 years?

[Cereal Box]

Hmm, you still haven't proven anything. Did Microsoft state that they would disallow Hitachi from installing Windows on their PCs? No, they were just "unhappy" over the arrangement, and it was Hitachi who relented. Microsoft didn't actually do anything, except remind Hitachi that they won't get favorable license prices if they did what they were doing. Apparently Hitachi found favorable Windows prices more important than bundling BeOS.

You still haven't answered the bigger question as to WHY Microsoft would prevent OEMs from shipping Windows *AT ALL* if they sold PCs with BeOS, given that such a move would pretty much ensure that Windows doesn't get installed on a large number of new desktop PCs. Your conspiracy theory sounds a little stupid when you put it that way, huh?

Re:10 years?

[Performaman]

"MS plays hardball, even MS admits that." Apple dosen't stop companies from shipping Macs with Yellow Dog Linux installed in place of MacOS. Gates is simply obsessed with total control of the market, no matter what the cost.

Re:10 years?

[bfg9000]

...*Dell* wanted to install BeOS alongside Windows...

Hmmm. Maybe Dell, or more likely IBM, can be convinced to install Linux alongside Windows....

I would guess that at least 10-15% of Windows users would switch to Linux if it came installed on their Hard Drive and was set up for them in advance -- honestly, every app I use has an open-source counterpart that isn't drastically different from the Windows app that performs the same function. For me (and many others), Mozilla, the Gimp, MPlayer, VLC, XMMS, etc. cover all the functionality we "need" Windows for anyway, with a lower cost, better "cool" factor, and less viruses/spyware/trojans/backdoors. I haven't bought an app for years (that wasn't bundled with an OS). Everything I do is either interacting with the net or is an open-source and free app!

And if Linux got some mainstream (dual-boot) support from a big company, you can be sure drivers for cameras, etc. would be sure to follow -- as would the other big companies (HP, etc.).

Maybe Dell, not IBM, will prove to be Linux' "saviour". Linux becoming mainstream (and eventually dominant) is only one business decision away.

Re:10 years?

[Gilk180]

Because they know that major OEM's are smart enough to distribute the os that will sell the most computers. This is one of the reasons why monopolies are bad for open markets: they have the power to limit competition by making rules such as the one mentioned.

Re:10 years?

[MoneyT]

Apple also makes money on hardware sold. MS does not.

Re:10 years?

[Cereal Box]

Right, but I'm willing to bet that these deals are pretty common place, considering that in order to get your OS shipped in the first place, you've gonna have to cut a deal anyway. You don't think major computer retailers should be expected to pay retail for the OS's they ship, do you? No, of course not. If you want your OS shipped, you're going to have to entice the big boys somehow. I have a feeling that if RedHat or some other OS company were to start looking towards having their OS bundled with Dell, HP, etc. they would have to cut some serious deals. The only reason you can't see if this situation pans out or not is because, well, Microsoft is dominating right now. And I think the reason things got this way between Microsoft and OEMs is because when Microsoft first started bundling Windows, they cut OEMs a deal, and as the popularity of Windows exploded, they were able to leverage those existing deals into what we have today. You must be kidding yourself if you think that RedHat or Be wouldn't do the same thing given the chance.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use the same arguments against Windows, though. "While the registry is still an integral part of Windows, desktop adoption ain't gonna happen" etc.

Remember, no OS is perfect. But you have to weigh up the problems with each:

LINUX PROBLEMS
- narrower x86 hardware support
- smaller range of commercial apps
- requires a bit more learning

WINDOWS PROBLEMS
- major security issues
- slowdowns, registry bloats
- glitches, bugs and occasionally crashes
- spyware, adware, etc.

The Linux problems are far more tolerable. See, imagine if it was the other way round; imagine if Linux was dominant, and people were discussing Windows as the underdog. They'd say EXACTLY the same things:

"Windows won't make it on the desktop and overtake Linux, because of the security problems, slowdowns, bugs, crashes, spyware etc."

It's not down to small problems any more. It's mindshare, marketing power and a US govt that lets Microsoft behave illegaly.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

the mere possibility of a threat from MS doing something like this is enough to stop them from even asking. if they never ask, there's no need for MS to make the threat. note that the only OEM to offer BeOS was essentially small fry. dell et al are making enough money to not need to differentiate themselves by offering BeOS. the point of offering BeOS is to try to be slightly better/more value than dell, you don't have to do it if you ARE dell.

don't forget how long IBM suffered paying high windows licence prices ever since the OS/2 spat.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Switch to XFce (http://www.xfce.org). Seriously, it's so much faster than the hideously bloated monstrosities of GNOME and KDE.

Personally, I believe GNOME and KDE are damaging Linux on the desktop because of experiences like yours -- if they're just as slow as Windows, it's no incentive to switch.

Re:10 years?

[Pxtl]

THe "not installed at all" is someone elses line. Microsoft was just going to kill the OEM system, which would mean that
a) they'd have to pay end-user prices and
b) they'd have to use the end-user installation system that would be slow and thus expensive in manpower.

Besides, if it wasn't true, then why did MS settle out of court and pay $23,250,000 to Be when they sued them?

Re:10 years?

[Gilk180]

I didn't say that they shouldn't do this. Or that they don't have the right to (unless the government steps in and says otherwise). I just said that this is what their monopoly powers allow. In a competitive market no one player would be capable of making these demands without seriously harming themselves through loss of sales, unless single-supplier agreements were common in the market in which case everyone would have these agreements and difference manufacturers would include whatever os they had an agreement with.

If RH wanted to do the same thing, they would have to cut a deal, but in today's market, they don't have the power to make demands like MS does.

Re:10 years?

[Cereal Box]

but in today's market, they don't have the power to make demands like MS does.

And I'm sure that's how it was for Microsoft back in the early days. But like Microsoft, if RedHat were able to gain a strong footing in the market, they would be able to leverage their deals, much like how Microsoft has.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because anti-competitve behavior doesn't mean MS went in and put a gun to Hitachi's head.

'Being' a monopoly is not illegal (otherwise you could not start a new business in a new field).
The law says you cannot erect barriers to entry so that no one else can enter the market.

The compliance of the others(Hitachi/Dell/HP) is not illegal, though I would say spineless.

If you give people an advantage, they will always take it. Microsoft just did this x100.

Re:10 years?

[DaveJay]

Don't forget GobeProductive, the third-party word processor. It was so straightforward and useful that I bought release 3 for Windows when it came out. Sadly, release 3 was more or less GobeProductive 2 for BeOS ported to Windows and (scheduled, but never released to my knowledge) Linux, and it didn't pan out.

I still use it, though, and do most of my writing in it.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did Microsoft state that they would disallow Hitachi from installing Windows on their PCs? No, they were just "unhappy" over the arrangement

I get the feeling that if you were that film producer in The Godfather, putting a severed horse's head in your bed wouldn't be enough to communicate to you what they wanted, they really would have to kill you immediately.

You still haven't answered the bigger question as to WHY Microsoft would prevent OEMs from shipping Windows *AT ALL* if they sold PCs with BeOS,

I'll bet you lose a lot of strategy games.

taking a small loss to get rid of a potential big problem in the future is WORTH IT. hitachi as a vendor doesn't compare to a guy like dell, and dell isn't the one making the request. they could take the money hitachi gives them and shred it for compost and it would be a rounding error in their financial statements.

and, since you seem to read things in a very straight-and-narrow way, no, i'm not saying that beos would necessarily have become a big problem in the future. it's the point of making an example, so that NOBODY tries to bundle ANY other OS in the future.

it's the same logic as where you shoot someone just to keep everyone else on their toes.

linux had been a major phenomenon for a LONG time before the OEMs began to dare offering it preinstalled on their machines. weren't there all those stories about how hard it was to get a Thinkpad with linux preinstalled even though their PR had officially stated it was available? wasnt there a story right here on slashdot about that?

given that such a move would pretty much ensure that Windows doesn't get installed on a large number of new desktop PCs.

no. mathematically it means nothing, because it doesn't mean that "windows doesn't get installed on a large number of new desktop PCs", it would mean that "hitachi never gets to sell a large number of desktop PCs, while MS still gets their revenue because people who would have bought those hitachi desktop PCs WOULD HAVE BOUGHT IT FROM ANOTHER VENDOR WHO ALSO PAYS THE WINDOWS TAX ANYWAY". You're assuming the persons buying those desktop PCs would have said "what?! no hitachi desktop PCs? I'll never buy another PC!".

Re:10 years?

[Pxtl]

Umm, right. MS didn't put a gun to Hitachi's head. They just engaged in anti-competative behaviour. Which is why they got sued, and is what they were accused of. They killed a good operating system by using their market leverage regardless of the quality of the product. Which defeats the whole purpose of a capitalist system, the free market, etc. to a point where we may as well just be hardcore democratic socialists where the large incompetent organizations that produce crap and stifle competition would at least be democratically elected. Or we can have real competition.

For BeOS, Fuck microsoft up their stupid stupid asses.

Re:10 years?

[-tji]

They were probably a bit too early for the multimedia OS play.. The big push for multimedia is still building now. If Be could have provided a "killer app", like a nice PVR, it would have helped. Their OS was too general purpose to compel masses of users to try it.

BeOS would have made a nice media center, with an HDTV PVR (capable of recording multiple streams, while playing back.. their excellent multitasking and threading would be great here), iTunes-ish audio server/player, and perhaps some DV editing capabilities with DVD burning. There are only a few HDTV tuner cards available, so driver support would be a maangeable problem, and there are still no good PVR apps for HD content.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only 10 years?

Oh wait. I read that wrong.
I thought it said "10 years of B.S.!"

My bad.

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Be just seemed to whine rather than get on with the business of doing business. Great ideas, crappy leadership."

This can be compared to the Linux world today, with a lack of good ideas, and no leadership whatsoever.

Re:10 years?

[johnnyb]

" Users don't have to edit the registry to change anything. It's all reflected in a graphical interface."

Hahahahahahahahaha!

You have _used_ Windows, right?

How do you remove processes from being run at bootup, then? That's right, the registry, because there isn't an interface to do that.

Re:10 years?

[johnnyb]

" If Linux is going to surpass windows on the desktop, compiling stuff is not an option. "

Who compiles these days anyway?

"is something the end user absolutely positively doesn't need to know anything about."

Correct. And there is no reason they need to these days on Linux.

"You can't harbour both attitudes"

Actually you can. This IS the strength of Linux. Those with the ability can do cutting-edge stuff using source code, and those without the ability can just wait for it to stabilize and be available as a binary install for their platform.

This is the way it works for all systems, it's just that the development phase is available for more people than it is for proprietary software. If you don't want to participate in it, DON'T, and wait for more stable releases.

Why is choice such a difficult thing for people to grasp? If your options expand, but you don't like the new ones, DON'T CHOOSE THEM.

Re:10 years?

[Taeralis]

run-->msconfig-->startup tab

Re:10 years?

[hesiod]

> Switch to XFce

Normally I don't like "then install this..." answers, but that does look very nice. Looks like a WM should, but isn't cluttered with junk all over the place. I think I'm gonna give that a go tonight, thanks!

Re:10 years?

[Lord Kano]

It seems to me that I could install a functional Linux distibution on the same hardware that the Be geniuses said they were "locked" out of...I guess they just couldn't embrace open source to look at those GPL'd drivers.

Be had made the advances that they did because of information that came directly from Apple. When Apple shut off the flow of information, be chose to go another route, mainly x86, as a result Mac users lost out on another option.

Be was a for profit entity, they had a fiduciary obligation to guard the assets of their shareholders. To incorporate GPLed drivers into the OS would have forced them to open code that they did not wish to open. The GPL is great for linux, but Be OS was not linux.

LK

Re:10 years?

[LilMikey]

I can agree with you on 90% of what you're saying however I disagree with your car analogy.

True, Linux does require some computing knowledge to use; definitely more than Windows but your internal combustion engine comparison is a bit overkill. The days of massive source compiles and miles of broken dependencies are over. Software installation in most cases is easier in linux than in windows thanks to apt, urpmi, even click-and-run. True that may be more than Joe User should be required to know but Linux is quickly getting better and the swath of 'newbie' and live CD distros proves it. It's more like knowing how to change your oil than internal combustion.

On the contrary, the problem with Windows is it's too dumbed down... it's too easy to use. There's no barrier to entry or accountability for a user's actions. So we have idiots running around opening every .pif attachment they see and bazillions of unpatched zombies destroying everyone's internet. Linux may require you to know how to perform basic maintenance on your vehicle, but with Windows you don't even have to know how to work the blinkers. Guess which one causes more crashes.

Re:10 years?

[drsmithy]

"MS plays hardball, even MS admits that." Apple dosen't stop companies from shipping Macs with Yellow Dog Linux installed in place of MacOS.

Difference being Apple still gets money from that situation (and not only from the hardware - the resellers can't buy their Macs without OS X). When OEMs replace Windows on a machine, Microsoft get nothing.

Re:10 years?

[wemgadge]

"What killed it? Lack of driver support. (I'm looking at you Linux fanatics)"

Two things killed it: BeOS missed there oportunity to replace MacOS 9 on the Mac desktop because they asked for too much money from Apple when they were approached.

Then when it came time to fully launch 5.0, as much as they tried they couldn't get a single OEM to bundle BEOS 5 Pro with a new PC.

They made a great last ditch effort with the promo campaign of 5.0 PE, but it wasn't enough to get people to switch

(coincidently, I happen to have the June 2000 Maximum PC bonus cd that featured PE.. also included on the disk? Civilation: Call to Power! for BEos.. I still boot into PE just to play this game)

Re:10 years?

[dave420]

start -> run -> msconfig

apart from that one, right? :-P

Re:10 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm how does the average user install a network card in the pc in the first place? too bad no OS can upgrade your hardware...

Re:10 years?

[Sj0]

I think you have the dependency map reversed. OEMs need Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't need the OEMs. If this wasn't the case, OS/2 Warp would've done better in the marketplace, and there never would've been the first microsoft trial at all. They CERTAINLY wouldn't have lost it.

I don't really think you understand that MS does have a monopoly. After that happens, the rules change somewhat, and you can't just go around using your dominance to shut everyone out of the market. That's why antitrust laws EXIST.

10 years of BeOS

[Hodge]

And maybe its influence will be felt in the soon-to-be-released Palm OS 6 (Cobalt).

Re:10 years of BeOS

[WareW01f]

Actually from what I've seen, a lot is in there. PalmSource (not to be confused with PalmOne mind you) seems to have put a ton of work into making Palm OS a *real* OS with the same mentality that BeOS had (sorry has) of working multimedia into the core of the OS. Let's just say that mine was one of many jaws dropping at PalmSource earlier this year.

So yes, there is a lot of Be in Cobalt (multimedia, POSIX, etc)

Now we just have to see were the market is going. PalmSource seems to be looking at Garnet (which is targeted at the small foot-print phone market space) as the cash cow for the future. I had hoped that Sony would lead the charge and release a Cobalt Clie (as they tend to beat the more conservative PalmOne to market on such things) but with them dropping out. Outlook not so good. I just hope that Colbalt doesn't get infected with the same ahead-of-its-time issue that BeOS suffered. At least to PalmSource's credit, they really bent over backwards to make the old PalmOS stuff work, without polluting the new too badly. (If BeOS had had a WINE for MacOS emulator to bridge the app gap, it might have done better.)

Re:10 years of BeOS

[goates]

"(If BeOS had had a WINE for MacOS emulator to bridge the app gap, it might have done better.)"

I thought it did. It was called SheepShaver or something like that. This still didn't solve the driver problems though.

Re:10 years of BeOS

[amdg]

SheepShaver ran "classic" Mac OS apps on BeOS. It has since been GPL'd and ported to Linux.

Obligatory BeOS Quotes

[Gunfighter]

A few years back, one of the members of my Quake clan was a programmer who preferred BeOS as his platform of choice for development and other everyday tasks. He eventually went to work for Be and we didn't hear from him much after that. Nevertheless, we always gave him hell about his BeOS preference. Here are a few choice quotes from our IRC logs:

This first one is particularly applicable as it pertains to the "uncorruptable" BeOS filesystem.

but you have more problems with win95 than i have ever imagined anyone having
nah...you should see some of the people on my dorm floor...
one guy had to fdisk like 5 times last semester
hehe
You CAN'T corrupt the BeOS file system
Even by kicking out the power cord
you can't play Q2 on it either :P

potty stop - brb
overkill.. yellow card
what, you'd rather say i was going to "the little programmer's room" or something??
I got take a BeOS

"BeOS combines the best features of all the major operating systems: the ease-of-use of the Macintosh, the power and flexibility of Linux, and Minesweeper from Windows."

Re:Obligatory BeOS Quotes

[Anonymous Coward]

That makes no sense... What's the quote suppose to say? I don't get it.

Re:Obligatory BeOS Quotes

[Gunfighter]

Perhaps these will be a little easier to read (forgot to change the < to &lt)

<dEad{Ni}> but you have more problems with win95 than i have ever imagined anyone having
<Tolen{Ni}> nah...you should see some of the people on my dorm floor...
<Tolen{Ni}> one guy had to fdisk like 5 times last semester
<Magaera{Ni}> hehe
<Magaera{Ni}> You CAN'T corrupt the BeOS file system
<Magaera{Ni}> Even by kicking out the power cord
<Gunfighter{Ni}> you can't play Q2 on it either :P

<Magaera{Ni}> potty stop - brb
<Gunfighter{Ni}> overkill.. yellow card
<Magaera{Ni}> what, you'd rather say i was going to "the little programmer's room" or something??
<Deathwish{Ni}> I got take a BeOS

<Magaera{Ni}> "BeOS combines the best features of all the major operating systems: the ease-of-use of the Macintosh, the power and flexibility of Linux, and Minesweeper from Windows."

Re:Obligatory BeOS Quotes

[keg]

Ni!

B.E.OS

[stew77]

Don't forget BlueEyedOS: a BeOS-inspired operating system powered by a Linux kernel.

IMHO a very good approach, as using the Linux kernel and XFree86 will take care of the lack-of-drivers problem that the original BeOS had. Also, this will give it decent OpenGL performance for free, which was also one of the weak points of the original BeOS (and will be one of the other sucessors).

Re:B.E.OS

[tolan-b]

The (unfortuately unreleased as it was near the end of BeOS' life) OpenGL kit outperformed Linux by about 40%, and Windows by about 50% iirc.

Re:B.E.OS

[dave420]

Hardly - it just gives a BeOS front to the limited range of linux drivers, instead. Better, but not good. :-P

Re:B.E.OS

[Xyde]

Pity it will also inherit that inherent ugliness that XFree86 seems to bring with it.

One of the best features of BeOS was that it was practically a Mac (but with multitasking!) on a PC. The Tracker was very much like the Finder, windows were similar (close box on the left, size & shade buttons on the right, grouped scroll thumbs, etc.), applications were well designed UI wise, and simple, never cluttered, used a sane file association system (I think they used MIME types) as opposed to having file extensions hard coded to open in a certain app - you have to remember that at one point BeOS was being engineered specifically to sell to Apple to become their new OS. Needless to say they picked OPENSTEP instead and now we have OS X, but that's another story...

Unless they've gutted XFree86 I can see this just becoming another stock standrd, bloated (BeOS was a perfectly usable OS + a multitude of applications in under 200MB) distro but with a BeOS skin. Which is NOT the same thing.

All the apps will still use GTK or KDE because nobody will be bothered redoing the GUI in BlueEyedOS's native toolkit (why bother when it works okay using whatever we're using now but just looks a bit out of place). Even Apple couldn't make X11 acceptable with their implementation and look at how anal they are about OS X's GUI being perfect and consistent. It just looks like some generic linux distro with a bad aqua skin slapped on top.

I won't say this will be a failure, because by definition it is nigh impossible for any open source project to be a failure. I'm sure there are people out there who will love it (and as long as at least one person still uses it and appreciates it, that's all that matters), but I will say that I think this will be a failure as a new BeOS.

Re:B.E.OS

[nother_nix_hacker]

Pity it will also inherit that inherent ugliness that XFree86 seems to bring with it.

XFree86 Doesn't have a look. The toolkits that sit on top of it do.

Re:B.E.OS

[Blakey Rat]

Read what the grandparent said about Apple again. X11 in MacOS X looks like crap despite Apple's best efforts... if *Apple* can't get X11 to look good, nobody can.

Re:B.E.OS

[stew77]

that's because Apple is using X11 for running X11 programs. B.E.OS wil be using X11 for BeOS programs, so it's unlikely that you will see motif or athena widgets in it.

Re:B.E.OS

[daviddennis]

Correct to a point, but I seem to remember X is big, complex and unwieldy, making it a significant impediment to having a responsive GUI. And if there's one thing you can say about BeOS, it was outstandingly responsive even on relatively poky hardware.

On the other hand, nowadays computers are so fast that even X can be made to perform well. So it might be that gaining more drivers would be worth the possibly slight performance hit.

D

Re:B.E.OS

[Anonymous Coward]

as opposed to having file extensions hard coded to open in a certain app

File extensions are most certainly not hard coded to anything in Windows. If they were you'd have to recompile something every time you wanted to change them.

Re:B.E.OS

[Brandybuck]

XFree86, X.org, fd.org, etc, are merely low level libraries. X is not inherently ugly, as X is nothing more than drawing and windowing primitives.

Re:B.E.OS

[Xyde]

What X11 BeOS programs?

BeOS's problem was that there was no software. Who's going to port all the old BeOS stuff to X11? Who's going to port all the new KDE/GTK X11 stuff to BeOS "native" X11 (whatever the hell that is)? Why bother? Why use X11 at all in that case? Backwards compatility? No, you just stated we won't be seeing normal X11 programs running in it.

X11 is satisfactory for most things but it's hardly an ideal foundation for the windowing system of a brand new OS.

Re:B.E.OS

[johnnyb]

Actually, the problem with X is that people just don't know how to run it. Most distros run it with a normal priority. This is idiocy for a desktop system (granted, many distros aren't geared for the desktop). This works great for a server, where you would rather Apache serve a request fast than to get a nice screen refresh.

If you bump up the priority of X, the panel, and your window manager to something like -20, you will find that X responsiveness increases tremendously.

This is exactly what the other OS's do to get their responsiveness (that, and I _think_ they mlock parts of the application and explorer into memory).

Still got my BeBox.

[torpor]

Sitting there, blinkenlights and all. Haven't used it in years, but of all the computers I have owned in my life, thats really only one of the few that I don't want to do away with.

Strange attachment to it ... I always had issues with Amiga freaks and their platform worship, and being a bit of a Unix weenie I'm not really inclined to consider myself a machine fetishist, so attachment to that blue monolith, which I literally see every day as I get in my chair at the office, feels ... quaint?

Still, I suppose I'll find a use for it. 66mhz dual-proc ppc601's (is it, i forget?), and it runs smoothly every time I've turned it on recently. I guess Linux wouldn't be out of the question for it, but I can't help this nagging feeling that there could be -other- things to run on that poor, simply nice little machine...

Re:Still got my BeBox.

[razmaspaz]

I finally threw out my irix box from SG. It was so cute sitting in the corner being all purple...what is wrong with me...its a friggin computer...I needed to move on.

So do you!

Re:Still got my BeBox.

[torpor]

look ... yeah ... i agree. i've thrown more than a few irix boxes out in my time, too.

but the thing is, no. i like that freakin' bebox. its not just a computer any more, its something to look at in my room.

like a sculpture, or a painting on the wall.

that bebox is one ultra-quiet powerfan away from being art i'd turn on just to look at.

Re:Still got my BeBox.

[razmaspaz]

Fair Enough!

Re:Still got my BeBox.

[tonywong]

They should be motorola 603e's (production BeBoxen). Funny that Be used the 603 vs. the 604 series, as the cache coherency protocol in the 603 was only 3-way (MEI - AFAIR), vs. 4-way for the 604 (MESI).

Re:Still got my BeBox.

[DrCode]

Guess I was lucky to actually sell my AtariST in the late 80's. But that thing was a monstrosity with something like 3 external power supplies.

Re:Still got my BeBox.

[PunkPig]

I so wanted a BeBox back in the day. Too bad I had no money back then (hmmmm times never change). Anyway, I did get a Be t-shirt....and I still got it!

Re:Still got my BeBox.

[torpor]

No I am not trading you my BeBox for your Be T-shirt.

Even though I do not have one. Yet.

Re:Still got my BeBox.

[runderwo]

3 external supplies? What were they? My STe's internal supply recently started acting up, so I replaced a bunch of dried up capacitors and it's fine now. But the wall cord plugs straight into the power supply on mine, no externals needed.

Re:Still got my BeBox.

[mihalis]

I finally threw out my irix box from SG. It was so cute sitting in the corner being all purple...what is wrong with me...its a friggin computer...I needed to move on.

So do you!

Ah! No! not my NeXT Cube!

Re:Still got my BeBox.

[DrCode]

I was an early ST software developer and had a prototype model. I believe the power supplies were for the CPU (inside the KBD), the hard-drive (in a shop-built box), and a floppy drive.

Re:Still got my BeBox.

[runderwo]

Cool! Don't suppose you have any pics of it hanging around somewhere? That would be a sight to see.

big

[Anonymous Coward]

big surprise, Eugenia Loli-Queru has a "charming" write up about beos

Eugenia and her BeOS fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps if Eugenia weren't so fixated with her beloved BeOS, OSNews would be a better site.

I mean BeOS was great and had great potential, but to continue to base all your reviews around how it compared to the late,great BeOS, and to counter any critisicm with deletions and insults does not a good site make.

Between her BeOS comparisons, her interviews with former BeOS co-workers, not to mention her husband and her egotism when it comes to her opinions vs. others, OSNews has lost a lot of regular readers, and continues to lose ground.

Personal opinions do not matter when covering tech. news. Save them for the forum debates...

Re:Eugenia and her BeOS fetish

[Anonymous Coward]

"... and to counter any critisicm with deletions and insults does not a good site make. ... not to mention ... her egotism when it comes to her opinions vs. others, OSNews has lost a lot of regular readers, and continues to lose ground.

Personal opinions do not matter when covering tech. news. ..."

I totally agree.

I stopped visiting the site quite a while ago for just those resons.

In the forum's & comments sections she vigourously censors opinion by deletion, & god help you if you dare to email her an opinion or dissenting view.

Unfortunately she is running the site purely to push her own ego driven views.

LOL!

[torpor]

"BeOS combines the best features of all the major operating systems: the ease-of-use of the Macintosh, the power and flexibility of Linux, and Minesweeper from Windows."

Karma be damned, that is funny.

I honestly can't think of an "oh, and maybe ..." response. The above statement is complete.

Re:LOL!

[identity0]

No, it isn't.

"...and the marketing team from OS/2, and the rabid fans from Amiga."

There. Now's its complete. :P

(Yes, I have BeOS 4.5)

cough *bs* cough

[jbellis]

BeOS's only real chance came before their egotistical CEO turned down apple's offer of more than they were worth. Apple went with NeXT, and Be went... nowhere.

Re:cough *bs* cough

[osgeek]

Although I was enjoying BeOS development at the time, it's a good thing that Apple went with NeXT. With NeXT, they got Jobs, who was the real reason for Apple's turn-around and continued relevance today.

If they had bought BeOS, both companies would now be gone instead of just the one.

Re:cough *bs* cough

[Havokmon]

BeOS's only real chance came before their egotistical CEO turned down apple's offer of more than they were worth. Apple went with NeXT, and Be went... nowhere.

So BeOS DIDN'T settle a lawsuit with MS concerning dual-booting?

Re:cough *bs* cough

[Lord Kano]

Oddly enough, it's because of Jobs that I haven't bought any new Apple hardware in over 7 years.

LK

Re:cough *bs* cough

[Anonymous Coward]

Oddly enough that would mean that it was something other than Jobs, because he's only been back for 7 years.

Re:cough *bs* cough

[Nutcase]

That lawsuit was settled in September of 2003. When they were down to a skeleton company w/ 1 employee - their lawyer. They settled because they had no money to continue fighting, and needed to pay creditors.

So yes, after microsoft put them out of business by eliminating the market through monopolistic business practices, Be sued them for it and settled for 23 million when they couldn't go on.

This doesn't eliminate the original point.. it only shows how fully destroyed they were by Microsoft.

Re:cough *bs* cough

[Build6]

I second that.

I loved BeOS. I truly, truly loved it. I think, purely in terms of technology, Apple made a mistake in choosing NeXT over Be. (*)

But, ultimately, it was the right choice - it's hard to imagine where Apple would be now if there had not been the iMac, and everything that led on subsequently from that (right up to the iPod). Apple may still be a niche player in the eyes of the analysts, but it's a much bigger niche than it would have been, and considering the disappearing use of "beleaguered" in relation to Apple, it's a niche most people are willing to accept Apple can continue in for a while at least. all this i believe really did arise via the Hand of Jobs (and Ives).

(*): I feel the oft-repeated lack of printer support in BeOS is overstated - OS X printer support is CUPS based anyways - it's not a "NeXT" thing - and there's no fundamental reason why Be couldn't have gone down the same route. As for the much-touted rapid/easy application development aspects of OpenStep/NeXT, well, arguably the sheer allure of the underlying non-cruftiness of the BeOS would have drawn as much development support. Xcode with Objective C traces it's lineage from NeXT, but at least as of now there does not seem to be noticeable success in forestalling the application gap.

Re:cough *bs* cough

[meatball_mulligan]

...it's a good thing that Apple went with NeXT. With NeXT, they got Jobs, who was the real reason for Apple's turn-around and continued relevance today.

As a longtime Apple geek, I was excited to see Jobs return as well. The company has rebounded fantastically under his reign. But the best thing about Apple choosing NeXT over Be is UNIX. Even with BeOS's technical coolness, I think that no small part of the success of OS X lies in its UNIX roots.

m.m.

Re:cough *bs* cough

[orac2]

the disappearing use of "beleaguered" in relation to Apple...i believe really did arise via the Hand of Jobs (and Ives).

I was intrigued enough by your idea of a bell weather term for Apple's health to check it out and see if there really was a correllation between it and Jobs' arrival. I ran a 10 year search on Nexis for US Newspaper and Wire articles that mention "beleaguered, Apple Computer." I didn't check the content of the articles because, hey, I have a job, so their joint appearance in any given article could be coincidental, but with that caveat the counts are:

1993: 3
1994: 0
1995: 0
1996: 11
1997: 12 (The year Jobs rejoins Apple)
1998: 3
1999: 1
2000: 0
2001: 1
2002: 0
2003: 1

Re:cough *bs* cough

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved BeOS. I truly, truly loved it. I think, purely in terms of technology, Apple made a mistake in choosing NeXT over Be. As an ex-NeXTSTEP developer, I gotta wonder about this. BeOS was touted as superior because it was a from-the-ground-up design of a whole new OS. But what about BeOS was better than NeXTSTEP? Lessee....

• Development environment. Be's was good. NeXT's was world-class.
• Graphics model. Be had its own model built on a relatively traditional 2D graphics API. NeXT's was completely device independent in an unusual way: it ran through Display PostScript, and later (in Cocoa) through PDF and via PDF, through OpenGL. This wound up being enormously useful.
• Media APIs. Be had great APIs. But NeXT pioneered all this, with DSPs built into its hardware, a sophisticated sound synthesis API, well-designed sound processing APIs (I know -- I wrote software for it), NeXTTIME, and Display Renderman. My favorite NeXT vs. Be story was when, after Gassee had demoed to Apple a BeBox running two simultaneous movie streams, Jobs showed up and demoed a NeXT box running four simultaneous streams. :-)
• OOP design. I think there's no question about it: C++ was not a good choice for Be. They picked it because it was supposedly faster. I think they ultimately regretted it as it made their GUI API rather more convoluted than NeXT's was. There's something to be said for a dynamic language.
• Underlying OS. Be had its own. NeXT had BSD running on Mach. Both supported threads cleanly.
• Boot time. Be booted fast. But that's because it had no drivers. There was literally nothing to load. You can't make hay from a stone.
• UI. IMHO, NeXT's was way better. Clean and elegant.
• File system. Ah, now here's where Be had some great stuff. But you're going to pick an OS based on the file system?

I think this is why Apple picked NeXT instead of Be. Comparing the two, BeOS was basically NeXTSTEP without ten years of maturity. Both companies built their own hardware at first; both had a new OOP-based API, media APs, graphics subsystem, and GUI. NeXT had done it first by almost ten years, and largely better.

Re:cough *bs* cough

[Anonymous Coward]

So yes, after microsoft put them out of business by eliminating the market through monopolistic business practices, Be sued them for it and settled for 23 million when they couldn't go on.

Was there a big market for unfinished beta operating systems before Microsoft eliminated it?

Re:cough *bs* cough

[Lord Kano]

In June 1997 I bought a new Mac. Jobs came back during that year and began making changes to Apple. By the time that I was ready for some new hardware, Jobs's changes had been implemented and I was no longer interested in buying Apple hardware.

LK

Re:cough *bs* cough

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft have been making a killing on them for over two decades now.

Re:cough *bs* cough

[AxelTorvalds]

It's not the CUPS part of the printer support that's difficult. You see Apple uses postscript to render their GUI, it translates directly into what the printer draws. It's real deal WYSIWYG. CUPS is used as a transport mechanism and a down sampling mechanism for non-postscript or non-PDF printers (PDF is just Postscript v3 anyways) If you're doing real deal production, NeXT and Apple blow BeOS away.

Next, i10n. Again, BeOS is empty handed. I'm talking double byte, Arabic, Hebrew... As of version 4 they had nothing, I'm not sure if they cobbled something together but whatever it was, it was cobbeled, like the networking stack.

Color matching. This is a media OS? What do they do about color matching? Oh that's right, it doesn't print...

As for the ease or producing apps, BeOS does have a nice looking class framework but if it was so easy, then where were all of the apps? You know? There is a definite chicken and egg problem, nobody develops for systems with no users but still. Be should have stepped that up or something.

That's all stuff that matters. There was no comparison or choice for Apple. NeXT had that stuff already. My fear with BeOS and OS/2 both is that we'll forget the critical lessons learned from them. BeOS died because it was too much sizzle and not enough steak; I'm talking about the real deal, not booting in 20 seconds, how the hell we're you going to sell it to the Chinese? Or Israel? Lot's of buzz but they didn't deliver all of the goods. That and burning your base never helps, leaving PPC hanging, leaving hardware hanging, leaving metrowerks customers hanging; it's all business but when people put good money in to your product you bend over to keep them happy, Be through their base out. A flashy and quick GUI is nice but you need some meat behind it all, some apps; at the very least a real browser.

Re:cough *bs* cough

[Anonymous Coward]

that's fascinating.

god, why do i read slashdot?

is there some point?

let me guess...you've bought your fair share of x86 commodity hardware.

commodity soley because a company called Microsoft has used it's monopoly position to standardize things across the board.

anyway, i've just added more bullshit to an already weak as shit subthread.

good bye Lord Guano

Re:cough *bs* cough

[Sj0]

Learn history before you mouth off. Standardized hardware is wholly a result of the work of IBM, and to a lesser extent, Compaq. If Bills mother didn't go to the united way with a VP from IBM, we'd have another, extremely similar, OS on our IBM XT, followed by another windowing system(DR GEM?), etc...

Microsoft is extremely egocentric. They think they did a lot of things that happened long before they got any real power to do anything, and everything they have today they owe to IBM -- without them, they'd still just be a language company porting DEC code they found in dumpsters. Of course, I'm sure they'd like everyone to THINK they've been a powerful company forever, but the PC would have moved forward with or without Microsoft -- I guarantee it.

Too bad

[Blackeagle_Falcon]

I guess you just can't make money selling Batmobiles

Re:Too bad

[AKAImBatman]

With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.

Unfortunately, the shear number of inexperienced volunteers has resulted in odd occurrences in some tanks. Anyone reporting broken treads, turrets that turn one way, tanks stuck in reverse, and shells that fail to fire are told that they're doing it wrong and should get out of the tank. This has lead a few upstart car dealers to resell these tanks for money in exchange for a worthless guarantee that these problems won't occur. One has added a coat of neon pink paint and fuzzy dice to differentiate their vehicle. Another has removed the transmission, clamped the gun shut, removed the hatch and proclaimed it "free from infringing parts". No one has yet figured out quite what they mean by this, but they do seem to be selling their tanks at an exceptional rate.

Re:Too bad

[pragma_x]

Stephenson sure has a way with words:

When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. [...] This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.

Not sure about Mozilla, but that certainly explains IE's memory problems.

Re:Too bad

[cheese_wallet]

" and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan

Not sure about Mozilla, but that certainly explains IE's memory problems"

That is just mean. I can't believe you would ridicule a man for suffering from a disease.

Re:Too bad

[teamhasnoi]

Regan's defense in the Iran-Contra affair was, "I don't remember", and "I can't recall".

Re:Too bad

[pragma_x]

All apologies to the late President Reagan. This was never meant to be anything spiteful or distasteful.

Apple and BeOS

[thirteenVA]

Make's you wonder what what OS X would have been like had Apples plan to by BeOS not fallen through. BeOS had a lot of features NeXT did not have and some that are just being implemented now, such as journaled file systems found in Panther.

Re:Apple and BeOS

[TheMadRedHatter]

I just hope that in 10.4 Apple decides that metadata is good. There's some Be people in Apple, so hopefully :)

TheMadRedHatter

Re:Apple and BeOS

[roard]

Make's you wonder what what OS X would have been like had Apples plan to by BeOS not fallen through. BeOS had a lot of features NeXT did not have and some that are just being implemented now, such as journaled file systems found in Panther. Well, the reverse is true ;-) -- the NeXT development environment was way ahead (and still is). Even if BeOS dev was quite nice, for sure. Plus, OPENSTEP used vector display system (DisplayPostScript), which then permitted true wysiwyg, and leads to DisplayPDF. Actually, you can't imagine what OSX would have been like, because frankly, OSX is quite different from OPENSTEP, and not always in a good way. The need of supporting legacy -- software and UI -- would have modified BeOS the same way it has modified OPENSTEP. I personally much prefer OPENSTEP UI (I'm speaking about the feel, not the look -- although I also happend to like the clean look of OPENSTEP over the in-your-face look in OSX ... but commercially (marketing) it's more useful to have OSX look :-)

Re:Apple and BeOS

[cryptochrome]

Floundering most likely. NeXT brought a lot of things, but probably the most meaningful was the ability to tap into the *nix software universe. Lack of apps has always been Apple's Achille's heel.

Re:Apple and BeOS

[MoneyT]

If you read the article, you would think it doesn't matter as a bunch of Be's developers seem to be at apple now or worked at apple for some time after Be.

Re:Apple and BeOS

[ChristTrekker]

I just hope that in 10.4 Apple decides that metadata is good.

We can hope! I've been praying for that since I first started reading about 10.0. Maybe filetype will once again be relegated to metadata so we don't have stupid filename extensions.

Re:Apple and BeOS

[Archibald Buttle]

Whilst not a true Unix BeOS did have a degree of compatibility. If memory serves most of the GNU tools got ported to it. Other Unix apps also made the transition. So to say that this would have doomed Apple isn't true.

What I think would have been a greater problem is developer tools. The NeXT developer tools were great, as was the OpenStep API. Apple have improved on these significantly with XCode and Cocoa.

Re:Apple and BeOS

[TheRaven64]

The best thing about BeOS was the filesystem, which did most of the things WinFS wants to do, back in '97. The guy responsible for the BFS is now at Apple. I'm really looking forward to seeing what he can come up with with 7 years more experience.

Re:Apple and BeOS

[GregChant]

Apple has already stated that metadata is 'legacy'. I highly doubt it will be in X.4.

Bad style of writing

[Roompel]

Am I the only one who hates the style the articles on OSNews are written? They are very close to cheese.

Re:Bad style of writing

[Anonymous Coward]

OSNews.com accepts user-submitted articles, and few of them are written by professionals. In fact, most of the IT articles written on hardware review and hobbyist sites are written by people with little formal, creative, or technical writing skills.

Driver support

[pedantic bore]

So, why doesn't someone ressurect it? Using a layer like VMware (or your favorite substitute shim layer) is a way to hide the details of the drivers from the kernel.

Re:Driver support

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I can't believe nobody has mentioned OpenBeOS yet!

http://openbeos.org

Proofreading!

[Tarantolato]

OSNews has a charming write-up about the BeOS

You misspelled "morbid obsession with".

This first time I heard about Be was in Forbes

[vasqzr]

Article

Now that I read it, it wasn't even that article. It started something like "Everything Bill Gates has sold you will be obsolete" and it had the BeOS guy standing by a BeBox.

Re:This first time I heard about Be was in Forbes

[mojoNYC]

presumably that was when you were still young and impressionable...Forbes has about as much technical knowledge as the Wall Street Journal--that is to say, very little--they are one of the major cheerleaders for SCO, btw, which should speak for itself...

GeekPort

[tcyun]

The fact that the BeBoxes had the "geek port" always put a smile on my face. the fact that the OS supported hardware designed for futzing around made me smile. I wonder why the idea never caught on to have a standard, hardware interface designed for home soldering enthusiasts (the port was designed to be physically large enough to manipulate without special equipment).

Re:GeekPort

[torpor]

yeah, geek port ... the coolest thing i ever saw someone do with that was lighting control for their basement dungeon, but i never got around to getting one of those cables built somehow ...

ah, bebox. its really just the blinkenlights i like, its so 'orac'. i'm sure theres a speech synthesizer for it ... that'd be a neat party prop, heh heh ... 'orac, turn down the lights', BLINKenBlinKenBlinkenblinken ...

Re:GeekPort

[stratjakt]

There are a million ISA/PCI/etc devices like that. I remember in high school we had a prototyping I/O card for electronics class, it had a fat port on the back that you could connect to an optional external card that had screwdown terminals. Programming it was dead simple, we'd mock stuff up in QuickBasic but you could have used anything you wanted.

The coolest thing about it, was that it was - to the computer - an addon LPT port. So you could build your gizmo easily with the screw-down terminals, and once it was working you could easily replace the bare wires to the IO card with a DB25 connector and have an actual useful thing.

Google around, there are a million such devices. They dont come standard on Dells because the people who would want one build their own machines.

Re:GeekPort

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder why the idea never caught on to have a standard, hardware interface designed for home soldering enthusiasts (the port was designed to be physically large enough to manipulate without special equipment).

What's wrong with an RS232 serial connection?

Re:GeekPort

[tcyun]

IIRC, the GeekPort had better/more power through the pins, better layout of where the powered pins/wires were located, and more controllable element than RS232.

That said, yes, RS232 is quite similar and many have done similar fun hacks using that connector.

Re:GeekPort

[jonadab]

> I wonder why the idea never caught on to have a standard, hardware interface
> designed for home soldering enthusiasts (the port was designed to be physically
> large enough to manipulate without special equipment).

We already have a standard for that. It's called RS232. Been around forever.

Can someone explain Zeta to me?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't really understand how the Zeta project exists.

Do they own the code? If Be was sold to Palm, how are these guys continuing work from the BeOS codebase? Was the OS sold separately, and if so, then who cares about the Palm deal?

Or is the whole Zeta thing owned by Palm?

Re:Can someone explain Zeta to me?

[teamhasnoi]

IIRC, Zeta was the result of a deal made before Palm purchased Be. As I understand, YellowTab got the rights to use the code for BeOS for perpetuity. Zeta is made from the codebase of Dano (AKA BeOS 6) that was never 'officially' released. To my knowledge, YT does not 'own' the code, they just own a license to use it - a rather permissive license (but I digress).

Palm has no plans to open source the BeOS code, mainly because there would be no profit in it, and also because there are licensing issues with bits and pieces of it. Most BeOS fans wanted Palm to open source the code to speed up OpenBeOS and the other projects out there, but I think we've done fine without it. :)

Zeta is a small company in Germany, and as far as I know, has no connection to Palm other than the license deal.

As it was written, so shall it be, from the book of Be... ;)

Re:Can someone explain Zeta to me?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have zapped by Zeta being sold on some teleshopping channel in Germany, like along with stuff like refill ink and digital cameras. Touted as virus free, fast, and totally user friendly it kind of rounds up the equipment the target audience expects and buys from these businesses..

Re:Can someone explain Zeta to me?

[teamhasnoi]

Zeta is a small company in Germany, and as far as I know, has no connection to Palm other than the license deal.

Should read:

YellowTab is a small company in Germany, and as far as I know, has no connection to Palm other than the license deal.

Oops. YellowTab = company, Zeta = software.

BeOS was hard to get over

[CoughDropAddict]

...but I think I've finally done it. OSX has a lot of nice features that are comparable to what BeOS brought to the table (for example, Carbon is on par with the BeOS APIs, and both are worlds ahead of Win32).

One thing that is still unmatched is the responsiveness of BeOS's GUI. I was running BeOS on a PII-300 in 1999, and none of today's operating systems can match the responsiveness I had, even on today's fastest machines. Window resizing and scrolling were rock-solid and flicker-free. As much as I love OSX, resizing and scrolling feel sluggish. Windows is better, but prone to flicker and outright delays if the application is busy doing something. The GUI in BeOS never missed a beat, largely due to pervasive multithreading of the core infrastructure.

Re:BeOS was hard to get over

[Electric Eye]

Well, keep in mind that Apple, to date, has sacrificed performance over graphics and "functionality." It should be a hell of a lot faster, but Jobs wants everyone to lick those pretty candy buttons on their screens. OSX is still slower, especially on the net, than a new Windoze PC. That's inexcusable, and any and all gripes about its performance are warranted. Hopefully, they'll put more effort into that in the coming year.

Re:BeOS was hard to get over

[Blakey Rat]

Yes, but to Apple's credit, every version of OS X has been faster than the last. 10.0.0 was a dog, 10.1 was acceptably usable, 10.2 was actually usable, and 10.3 is relatively quite perky... but, as you said, still a bit slower than Windows XP. Hopefully, 10.4 will nip this in the bud and catch up with all the other OSes out there.

Re:BeOS was hard to get over

[stew77]

Carbon is on par with the BeOS APIs

Where'd you get a version of Carbon that's object oriented and threadsafe?

Re:BeOS was hard to get over

[CoughDropAddict]

Where'd you get a version of Carbon that's object oriented and threadsafe?

Ack, I meant Cocoa.

Re:BeOS was hard to get over

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully, 10.4 will nip this in the bud and catch up with all the other OSes out there.

Um, to nip something in the bud means to catch and solve a problem before it has a chance to bother anyone.

While I share your hope that 10.4 will finally rid OS X of that sluggish resizing, I really don't think that solving a problem slowly and gradually over a period of several years counts as "nipping it in the bud"...

Re:BeOS was hard to get over

[TheViewFromTheGround]

You mention the responsiveness of BeOS. I think that needs to be underscored: the responsiveness wasn't simply a nice cosmetic feature, it was a really big issue with multimedia. I remember seeing that the latency of a call to the Windows sound playback system was about 50ms, and on BeOS it was under 8-9ms on average hardware. At the time, I was just bopping around high school, but I knew a couple of people in their 20s developing homemade audio and video manipulation programs to make experimental music, and they were all developing on BeOS because they found it so much easier and quicker than Mac or PC development. That being said, I think it's quite clear that Be made about a million missteps business-wise and otherwise. Combine that with the 2*10^3 lb gorilla, and the OS had no chance.

Re:BeOS was hard to get over

[elliot2]

Yeah right, BeOS the multimedia OS. There was this sound program which came with BeOS (I actually bought BeOS, I also bought OS/2 - what shall I buy next, it will fail). Just for testing I tried to load a huge wave file and did a little cut and paste and stuff. It was horrible slow and sluggish. The same thing with Windows with Goldwave or any other program was very quick and no problem at all. And playing multiple sound- or videostreams at once was not a problem with Windows. Pure BeOS marketing talk. I think the majority of software which was available for BeOS was not as good as the software for Windows at that time. I really wanted to see BeOS succeed but there was no good software. Not everything was bad but it was not enough.

Re:BeOS was hard to get over

[Anonymous Coward]

It's both just not terribly good at either, but there is also QT/MAC and Cocoa which is the greatest environment I ever seen. I looked at windows platforms MFC etc, then at QT and I thought QT was beautiful until I got a powerbook and decided to mess around with cocoa on a 3hr flight. Lets just say never going back, it is so quick and easy and you get so much stuff for free no coding. Also objective-C is much safer and nicer than C++ the only scary thing is the memory management that takes some getting used to.

Re:BeOS was hard to get over

[Senjutsu]

I actually bought BeOS, I also bought OS/2 - what shall I buy next, it will fail.

Windows? Please?

Re:BeOS was hard to get over

[elliot2]

I also bought several Suse distros. But not on purpose :-) Windows OEM versions seem to be magic resistant too.

Re:BeOS was hard to get over

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what you're talking about in terms of OS X being slower than Windows (any version) on the net. I actually jumped to Apple's G5 and OS X 10.3 from Windows XP. OS X's networking performance is well above that of *ANY* version of Windows. Windows has a terrible TCP/IP stack. Always has and probably always will. Before anyone starts yelling about lack of knowledge or not really having used Windows much, I have been a network and systems administrator for more than a decade. I've experience with every version of windows to date. I was even a beta tester of nt 4 server. It has NEVER compared well to other platforms' tcp/ip stack implementations. While there are some issues with OS X I see fairly regularly (like the SBOD and am unable to regain control of the box) I believe it is a much better platform than Windows will be anytime in the next 5 years. BTW, I loved NeXTStep as well. Very elagant platform that was far far too ahead of it's time.

What About Sun's Announcement?

[neildiamond]

I realize that BeOS is really popular and widely-used, but didn't anyone notice that Sun is planning to open-source Solaris? Somehow I think that is bigger news.

Re:What About Sun's Announcement?

[AKAImBatman]

Maybe because it was already reported?

While not exactly a clone..

[Karamchand]

..one shouldnt forget AtheOS which has some similarities to BeOS.

Re:While not exactly a clone..

[Vanders]

Just to point out a few things that a lot of people might not be aware of.

1. AtheOS is no longer developed, and the codebase has not been updated in several years.
2. Syllable is our community-driven fork of AtheOS, which was started two years ago.
3. AtheOS domain lapsed and is now hosting a knock-off website hawking drugs

We're halfway through development of Syllable 0.5.4, which like all previous releases of Syllable, will rock. We support a whole bunch of hardware, have developed the codebase heavily and for those of you who were familiar with Kurt Skuans style of working with AtheOS, we have a far more open development model. All are welcome to contribute. You can even download a LiveCD if you want to give it a spin.

Re:While not exactly a clone..

[Anonymous Coward]

Syllable is our community-driven fork of AtheOS, which was started two years ago.

Splitters!!!

AntiTrust Trial.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Be played a heck of an end game, but when you look back at Microsoft's antitrust lawsuit with the DOJ you'll find soem interesting things. Microsoft pointed to the existense of BE as evidence of competition in the OS field. At the time, Be was still focused on trying to win over apple fans. A be executive replied that it was a joke. Be didn't compete directly with Microsoft. Then after the trial Be launched a lawsuit against microsoft using the microsoft's own evidence against them.

Not to sound like a fanatic... but...

[TomorrowPlusX]

So, OK, I've read now a dozen smug barbs against BeOS fanatics.

My guess is 99% of you never did anything more than boot it, realize it had no good web browser and then returned to windows/linux/bsd/whathave you.

What I want to say is I spent 4 years using BeOS as my primary platform. Why? Because I don't like using a system I am uncomfortable developing on. [ Yes, I'm talking about you, Win32] BeOS's ease-of-use and user focus were secondary to it's having an API and clarity of development which blew my mind.

I gave it up for linux, when I discovered Qt, and now I'm on Mac OS X, which is from an API standpoint actually better. Amazing.

So, I'm rambling here but the thing is, beOS made it *easy* to write amazing things. Not many systems can claim that, except maybe Cocoa.

Case-in-point: I had a dell laptop with a trackpad. I hated having my insertion point jump around when I typed and brushed the trackpad with my thumb. So I decided to write an input-server plugin to discard those events. How long did it take me to write it? *One* hour. Not because I'm a genius programmer -- I'm not. it was because beOS was a well-designed coherent system with APIs that made sense *across* the board, and excellent documentation from nape to nuts.

My plugin: http://bebits.com/app/1344

Re:Not to sound like a fanatic... but...

[Anonymous Coward]

After having run it for four freaking years, one would think you'd have caught on that it's "BeOS" not "beOS". Nice try.

Re:Not to sound like a fanatic... but...

[Kenja]

MyWindow = new BeWindow();

I realy miss that. (sniff)

Re:Not to sound like a fanatic... but...

[TomorrowPlusX]

It's called a TYPO. Jackass.

Now, go back into your parent's basement to play FPSs and to bitch and moan on IRC.

Meanwhile, your betters will be outside, doing meaningful things.

Re:Not to sound like a fanatic... but...

[wehe]

Just in case you want to know more about BeOS on laptops and notebooks. Not much yet, but a start.

Re:Not to sound like a fanatic... but...

[slittle]

My guess is 99% of you never did anything more than boot it, realize it had no good web browser and then returned to windows/linux/bsd/whathave you.

Actually, I booted it, realised it was already obsolete, and went elsewhere. Single fucking user for fucks sake! WHAT THE FUCK!?!?!

Beos is getting some use... at work.

[teamhasnoi]

I just installed BeOS for the shipping department for their UPS websurfing and terminal to our inventory system - they are computer illiterate, but have picked up BeOS in a half hour (this is how you get to the net, this is how you log in to the inventory system, workspaces let you 'switch screens' etc.).

Why BeOS, you crazy SOB? Well, it's a P225, so BeOS flies on it - it boots in 20 seconds (90% of that is POST) and I dont have to worry about antivirus, spyware, trojans or other Windows crap. It's fast, and does what it's supposed to, and no one will be installing Solitare on it. :)

I am finding the built-in terminal lacking as far as term emulation goes, so I'll keep an eye out for updates.

If it goes down, they're back to running to the PC - (Win98 minus IE and Outlook Ex, plus Firefox and Thunderbird), but I haven't had many problems with BeOS yet.

And what the hell, we've got the equivalent of the Battlestar Galactica armada in old-ass computers, BeOS should be getting its time along Mac OS X, 9, 7.x, Windows 98, XP, and did I mention we have our inventory system running on SCO Unix? ;)

Re:Beos is getting some use... at work.

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, your inventory system on Linux ? (isn't the same thing ?)

Re:Beos is getting some use... at work.

[paulthomas]

and did I mention we have our inventory system running on SCO Unix?

Shhh!

Quake II

[muyuubyou]

is here. Late is better than never.

Idiots?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now why does it have to be TX? Or is it just taken for granted that no one would notice a missing idiot in your state?

Re:Idiots?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now why does it have to be TX?

It is because their idiot is in Washington...

The real question

[vlad_petric]

Would they have survived by going opensource ? With a dual licensing GPL/Commercial ?

You do need a horde of developpers to get drivers, which you either have to pay or entice with a truly open model. Be did neither.

If Machiavelli lived today, his quintesential book would be called "Il Executivo", not "Il Principe"

Re:The real question

[lifebouy]

Yes I agree. I loved BeOS. But it's downfall was caused pretty much directly by the fact that it was controlled by a corporation. They sold out the userbase for a one-time profit, litigating Microsoft. They refused to open the source, which at the time would have drawn developers in droves. The driver issues would have worked themselves out shortly after that. And then, even if Be Inc. went under or was bought out, it would have left a legacy, which could be rivaling linux and OS X today. If ever a company should have stuck it out and developed an open source business model, it was Be Inc. They stood as good a chance as, say Mandrake or Suse. Better, really, because all they would have really had to open up is the OS. They could still have developed commercial apps to sell for BeOS, with only a small committee to guide OS development.

What I learned from BeOS is that Open Source is the only real answer to the Microsoft monopoly. Before Be, I believed it, but without evidence. Be proved it.

BeOS was fantastic

[Anita Coney]

BeOS 5 was just a fantastic OS. It made computing fun. The trial version set up all my hardware and installed in about 5 minutes, including a TV card, modem, etc.

I ran the desktop 1280x1024x32. So once I ran Quake at 640x480 and a TV window also at 640x480 at the same time. It didn't crash, it didn't slow down, they both ran flawlessly. There is no way Windows could have done that at the time, or anytime for that matter.

I stopped running BeOS when they pulled the plug for it. And still today I wish I wouldn't have switched back.

Re:My mac troubles!

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do I begin ??

Here you go

Here's your reason why...

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

Eugenia Loli-Queru

Re:Here's your reason why...

[Anonymous Coward]

just fucking sad.

...keeping in mind that a women wrote the article

[Daneurysm]

It felt pure. I am not using BeOS anymore (I boot to it once every 1-2 months or so) but I will always keep with me this feeling, a feeling that no other software ever given me.

I know, how adolescent.

Bear Hands

[Z4rd0Z]

From the article:
It is kind of romantic hearing all these stories, e.g. a developer who later became a Be engineer had to carry his BeBox to his house from the post office with bear hands (and the BeBox was a very heavy machine compared to PCs)...

I wonder why he didn't just use his own hands...seems like bear hands would only make the load heavier.

Part of their death...

[madsenj37]

comes from trying to support two architectures. Microsoft tried it with NT (x86, alpha, PPC) and they failed as well. I hate to say this because I used to use, and still occaisionally do, BeOS on the PPC platform. If they had started out with x86 and focused on it instead of PPC, they would have had a better chance. With PPC they could have supported the G3 and G4 but they were afraid of Apple and refused to do it without their consent.

Re:Part of their death...

[jonadab]

> comes from trying to support two architectures

Yeah, we know how much trouble that's been for BSD and Linux...

Re:Part of their death...

[madsenj37]

Its different when you charge for your product. As did BeOS and Microsoft.

The hell? Linux isn't different at all

[Overly Critical Guy]

Linux is different because 1) there's now a huge pool of free (beer) GUI software so users can give it a real shot

So instead of buying applications, they have to download and/or compile them. It's still getting a whole bunch of new applications that are mere shells of the commercial implementations they're trying to emulate. You may as well not even consider them in the equation.

2) even before those apps came along, there were plenty of text-only apps that met the needs of Unix users of the day. Those were available for BeOS, too, but the users who wanted the ultimate GUI didn't care whether bison and nn were available.

Linux is different because it has the same GNU text apps that all the other UNIX-clones have?

The only, ONLY way Linux is different is that it is Open Source. The hacky desktop emulators Linux has are completely horrible, yet nobody will change them, except innovative people like those hacking on Y-Windows. Otherwise, Linux is just a haven for anti-"M$" zealots who think computer operating systems are something to actually expend energy being religious over. To the rest of the world that actually has a life, there are more important things to consider--like getting their work done (as opposed to spending four hours getting godawful XMMS not to skip with a standard soundcard).

higher expectations

[nazarijo]

for me it was all about the rise in expectations of a system after seeing BeOS. suddenly you wanted a seamless UI, a familiar and powerful CLI (they chose bash), a clean API, and great performance. compared to MacOS, Windows, and Linux at the time, it was light years ahead. in some ways it still is.

after BeOS, using Mac OS pre-X was painful and boring. Windows felt clunky, and Linux felt too unpolished. after BeOS i chose Linux (then BSD a couple of years later) as my primary system, but i've always lamented the compromises in some areas. i didn't, however, miss having applications to do my work (the main reason i never went very far with BeOS). i still have and use the powermac 8500 i ran BeOS on, it now runs NetBSD.

thanks to all of the amazing Be engineers, you guys made something truly inspiring. you made people remember how exciting it is to see emerging systems and usable desktops. in many ways we're all still trying to catch up.

who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

??

OpenBEOS, BeBOX and my opinion.

[telemonster]

I had a friend (BART!) that was big into BeOS. It really was a neat OS, and to this day I think it would be better suited towards the desktop over linux in many ways. A bunch of media companies appeared to be commited to BeOS. I believe companies like Ensoniq, Yamaha and the likes were looking at it as a platform for multitrack audio recording and editing. It is a shame it died.

On that note, over at www.openbeos.org there is some pretty impressive development on an open source BeOS clone that is actually binarily compatible with the original BeOS (I believe). I haven't tried it myself, but stop by every month or so to check on the progress. It still appears to progress sometimes.

Lastly, I have a BeBox dual 66mhz that my friend Bart gave me. It needs a IO card and the plastic front with the LED bar graphs. If anyone has these parts without a complete box and is willing to part with them, please contact me.

Re:OpenBEOS, BeBOX and my opinion.

[robballan]

Yeh, I have the cover. Contact me at robb@helical.com.

BeOS was a ray of hope

[Sloppy]

I still remember that day in early October 1995. Those were probably the worst times of the personal computer scene. Everything was going to shit, and innovation had slowed to a crawl on every front (at least as far as software was concerned). x86 machines preloaded with Windows 95 were showing up, and many of them were flakey as fuck. Even IBM was preloading Windows 95, a sign they had given up on their own, better OS. Even Apple was producing the very worst machines (the "roadapples") that they ever made in the company's history. The Amiga was going through the deaththroes of changing owners and stagnation. Linux was still iffy, and obscure from the mainstream's point of view.

1995 sucked!

Then an audacious person introduced a dual-CPU developer machine with a nifty new OS with hardly any legacy constraints. It was shockingly unfathomable. It was idealistic and hopeful, in a time when that sort of attitude was deader than it had ever been. It sure cheered me up.

Re:BeOS was a ray of hope

[evilviper]

[...] Linux was still iffy, and obscure from the mainstream's point of view.

1995 sucked!

Well, FreeBSD was going strong in 1995.

There were also at least a couple commercial Unix-based OSes that ran on PCs.

Then there were the DOS-based OSes (term used loosly) that were being developed. Many people were writing large DOS programs that gave a full-OS and GUI interface on top of DOS, in an effort to beat-out the rather lowsy Windows 3.1. Frankly, it's sad that they all failed. I would love to have seen GEM take over the PC market, instead of Windows95.

1995 was a transitional period, but then again, what period wasn't? Right now things are going from 32 to 64-bit, gradually, and a great deal of people have been going from Windows to Unix, or to Mac. I'm sure that 10 years from now, we'll hear people telling the same kinds of stories about 2004... Things like:

"It was before 3D interfaces came out, and there was little innovation. Programmers were just writing web-browsers over and over again. It was a terrible time."

Re:The hell? Linux isn't different at all

[grumbel]

It's still getting a whole bunch of new applications that are mere shells of the commercial implementations they're trying to emulate. You may as well not even consider them in the equation.

The important property of Open Source is that it doesn't have to be better than its commercial counter parts to be successfull, it just has to be good enough for whatever the users are using it. And seriously, all my word processing needs had been fullfilled by AmiPro in the days where 386er where still normal, there is nothing on this earth that even could get me remotly motivated to even start thinking about buying MSOffice 200X, OpenOffice, AbiWorld or LaTex are more than good enough for my needs.

OpenSource might not be up to commercial applications nor might it be dominant on the marked (how could it?, since its free...), I however still prefer my Linux system any day, about throwing out a few thousand Euros for what I would need to get the commercial equivalent.

Romance novel

[HotButteredHampster]

It felt pure. I am not using BeOS anymore (I boot to it once every 1-2 months or so) but I will always keep with me this feeling, a feeling that no other software ever given me.

When we met, there was a surge of electricity that sent shudders through me. He was attractive, but not in that finished, generic way: he was rough around the edges, the kind of guy you wanted to take and tame. I introduced myself, and he let me know he was a single-user OS^H^H^H^H^H^Hone-woman kind of guy and he was available.

The next few days were incredible, as I explored his depths and he took me places I'd never seen before. Later, in the quiet of the evening as we lay breathless with my hand on his mouse...

HBH

If it was good, people would use it

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm under the impression if its free and its good, people will use it, even if it is difficult to use.

Sure some products stand on the shoulders of giants and we end up using them despite their lack of innovation or appeal. Some people like that though.

Irony

[fsterman]

Microsoft killed Be, but it seems that /. just killed Zeta

Use open source beos max for future OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't porting over the mainsteam linux applications to the open source BeOS version and then going forward with that as the open source OS be a much better path than staying with linux?

This would make open source OS much much more acceptable to the normal non-geek end user.

Re:Use open source beos max for future OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Porting Linux-apps to BeOS is not for the faint of heart as Linux apps usually assumes that most things run in one or very few threads. BeOS has a very limited mmap-ability and other big differences.

Why BeOS failed, IMO.

[robpoe]

Why did BeOS fail? I dont know all the reasons, but here are my ideas.

When BeOS was coming out with their RC's that people had to PAY to get, I sent them an email. Said basically "I'm a reseller. I resell and recommend operating systems to my customers. I understand that you have a superior product and I'd like to take a look at it. Would you please either provide me a download or send me a CD."

No matter how many times I asked, I was always referred to the "Pay us money and we'll send you an RC."

Screw that. If you're trying to make it .. and you have a product that you're going to sell against Microsoft - then dont piss off the resellers and VARs out there by making THEM pay for trying it..

For that matter, I'd have rented a copy of it..Or put it up on my credit card as security for me having to ship the CD back to them..

Re:Why BeOS failed, IMO.

[eidechse]

I agree. I was interested in playing around with BeOS so I looked at what dev tools/sdks were available.

IIRC, it was at least $50 (not counting using the gnu tools) and went a lot higher. $50 is nothing as far as the costs of dev tools are concerned, but I was irked.

As you said, if you're new and trying to make it you should be courting developers (and resellers), not acting indifferent to them or prematurely trying to use them as a revenue stream.

Please notice...

[Zx-man]

...that, being close to the NeXT and/or Rhapsody visually, the BeOS had a different internal architecture... Not saying that it file system was not fully POSIX comparable, 'tis it had no access control => not suitable for many tasks.
Although it was a really good and promising system, once...

P.S. Did anyone mention that the BeBox really was a, of course, heavily customized, PCC and is GNU/Linux & NetBSD compatible?
P.P.S. This text was written in Micro$oft Word in a VmWare Workstation inside a Bochs running in the PearPC

be real

[comet69]

i used R4 when it first came out, then eventually went to BeOS 5 Max Edition.. it was pretty fun I guess.. it was nice to have on a seperate partition.. and when max edition was first released, it had one of those boot executables that you could just click on or run from your current OS, then it would auto-reboot into BeOS.. kinda nifty if you just feel like fuckin around, and experimenting with some different things, and a different look.. every once and a while i just like to SEE something a little different on my GUI..

personally, i'll use any Free OS as long as I can use AIM, Email, WWW, IRC, and download music and tv episodes of course ;)

honestly, beos is quite perfect for the basic essentials.. and definitely isn't hard to setup.. I'm really looking forward to checking out the release of OpenBeos.. should be interesting.. hopefully they will get that shit working soon so all the developers wont give up..

Re:The hell? Linux isn't different at all

[johnnyb]

"So instead of buying applications, they have to download and/or compile them"

We have these great things these days - they're called "distributions". You should try one.

Apple did wha??

[cheerios]

Of course, that ignores the fact Apple never did anything to improve the looks of X11. It looks just the same as when I launch it in any other *nix. Apple doesn't even really want you USING it. They'd rather you stayed in pretty aqua-land, and, personally, I'm perfectly happy to do that.

Sony Internet Device Powered By BeOS?

[TAZ6416]

I seem to recall in the last month of Be Sony released a internet device which was basically a little screen, processor box with mouse/keyboard and modem. It was for sale for about 2 weeks, then pulled and Be was sold 1 week later.

Seems to me that the Sony device was only released for legal reasons (why else sell it for 2 weeks then pull it), can anyone shed light on this?

Jonathan

mod parent up

[RidiculousPie]

mod parent up, useful program for windows spyware etc removal.

OS/2

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

HPFS from OS/2 (by Microsoft) has Extended Attributes, limited to 64 KB.
And since OS/2 has some uses for them, they are present also in FAT. The disk sectors for the EAs are stored in disk positions assigned to a file "EA DATA. SF". Disk defragmenters must not move this file.
In HPFS, the EA sectors are near the actual file contents.

I refuse to visit osnews

[Anonymous Coward]

Eugenia's offensive attitude has lost a lot of readers, me included.

Re:FP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm.
After careful consideration of your comment, it would appear that:
YOU FAIL IT
That is all.

Gone but not forgotten...

[rice_burners_suck]

(As the about box used to say.)

Ah, this article brought back a lot of old memories... My favorite part:

The BeOS legacy might live on via the Zeta product and/or OpenBeOS, however it will never feel the same as it used to feel in the 4.5.2 days (according to many engineers, the best version of BeOS ever released -- for its time). The OS just felt like it had a soul, like it would know what you were thinking when using it (even if BeOS does have its own technical problems). It felt pure. I am not using BeOS anymore (I boot to it once every 1-2 months or so) but I will always keep with me this feeling, a feeling that no other software ever given me.

Yes, 4.5.2 really was the best BeOS ever, as well as the best OS period. I had it running on 2 boxes, day and night, for months upon months. One of the computers had all my music stored in its database-like filesystem. It used to play these hundreds of songs just about 24 hours a day, to be paused whenever I left and resumed when I came back. This was next to several Linux and FreeBSD boxes, very "heavy" in terms of all the software that ran on them... I'll never forget how the computer I had configured as a NAT firewall ran X with XEarth in the background, and a ton of unnecessary processes at the same time... or how there was some weird bug in KDE back then, I think I had version 1, that caused the GUI to go completely crazy while the VM would go on these disk grinding frenzies, which would last about 30 minutes before the computer regained its sanity, and it routed packets perfectly through all of this crap. I have always liked these OSes, but I have to admit that I always enjoyed working with BeOS a lot more than these other operating systems, all of which I swear by. BeOS just had this feeling, as the author of the article said... I don't think that any other OS will reproduce the spirit, culture, and fluidity of this fine piece of software.

Ooooooooh well.

Ahem.

[Anonymous Coward]

That should read
"cough *BeS* cough"

How could Be boot so fast?

[renoX]

I played with BeOS and was really blown away by its speed: it was very responsive and booted under 20s!

I know why it was responsive: heavy usage of multi-threading, which is difficult to do on Linux because it means recoding all the applications!

But how could BeOS boot so fast??

Does someone know? And why isn't it possible to do the same on Linux?

Good idea

[Pan T. Hose]

Don't forget BlueEyedOS: a BeOS-inspired operating system powered by a Linux kernel. IMHO a very good approach, as using the Linux kernel and XFree86 will take care of the lack-of-drivers problem that the original BeOS had. Also, this will give it decent OpenGL performance for free, which was also one of the weak points of the original BeOS (and will be one of the other sucessors).

That's a very good idea. We should also use rxvt and bash and GNU fileutils, textutils and other command line tools and Perl to give it a decent CLI. Also, APT could be used as a great package management system. That should solve most of the weak points of the original BeOS. I know, let's call it Bebian GNU/Linux!

I used BeOS

[gerf]

At the time, i was a complete computer n00b, having no idea how to install hardware or do much else properly. However, a friend down the hall in my dorm convinced me to give it a try, so i did. That OS was amazingly simple and easy to use. However, it didn't play Counter-Strike, the bane of my freshman year, and for that it lost out.

Why does it always seem that I'd love to use some alternative OS, but the few games i play come in the way?