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

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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!".

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.