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)."
And maybe its influence will be felt in the soon-to-be-released Palm OS 6 (Cobalt).
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.
... 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?
Strange attachment to it
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...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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...
I guess you just can't make money selling Batmobiles
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.
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.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
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.
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).
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?
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).
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.
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
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
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? ;)
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.
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"
The Raven
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 :)
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.
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.
--Matthew
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.
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.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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.
...*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.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
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).
"Sufferin' succotash."
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.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
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.
Why did BeOS fail? I dont know all the reasons, but here are my ideas.
.. 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..
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
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..
= Grow a brain...
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..
- Hi I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Lih-nix..
- 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.Ah, this article brought back a lot of old memories... My favorite part:
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.
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.