Slashdot Mirror
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)."
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).
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.
This is a boring sig
So BeOS DIDN'T settle a lawsuit with MS concerning dual-booting?
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
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.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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.
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 :-)
- AtheOS is no longer developed, and the codebase has not been updated in several years.
- Syllable is our community-driven fork of AtheOS, which was started two years ago.
- 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.Syllable : It's an Operating System
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.)
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.
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... ;)
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.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"