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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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.)

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."

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

[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.

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...

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

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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: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: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... ;)

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.