BeOS Lives on in the Form of Zeta

DgtlDivide writes "BeOS, one of the pinnacle examples of something really good that died far before it should have, is apparently not quite dead yet. BeOS has continued to captivate a large and devoted community. The Haiku project is working on an Open Source version of the OS and now out of Germany comes Yellowtab's Zeta, a continuation of an unreleased development version of BeOS code-named "Dano." Is Zeta worth the price? Will Yellowtab raise BeOS from the ashes and inflame public interest in the OS?"

Comments

Better, earlier

[Mikey-San]

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/zeta-1.0.ars

Eat me, lameness filter.

BeOS: "I don't want to go on the cart!"

[TheLoneIguana]

"I feel happy! I feel happy!"

Depends on leadership - and public image...

[raydobbs]

It depends - does it have that arrogant SOB Gasse running things? If it does - it's doomed. If not, perhaps they will stand a chance. With Apple now moving to Intel hardware - there is a better chance of BeOS finding it's way onto that hardware.

Having used an older version - it was definitely unique and ahead of it's time. That being said, it will have to have changed a great deal between when I saw it last, and it's next incarnation, otherwise - the current crop of Mac OS X and Windows XP / Vista already does what BeOS did.

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Lord Kano]

Gasse miscalculated one thing, the return of Jobs.

Had Steve Jobs not been brought back to Apple, Be OS would have been the foundation for the "next generation" Mac OS instead of NeXT's.

It would have taken less work, less time and could arguably have yielded a better final result to build a new OS on top of the Be OS compared to the process of porting NeXT's OS from the ground up.

LK

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Anonymous Coward]

That is very much debatable.

While BeOS would have provided the best-of-breed OS technology for the Mac, it wouldn't have helped Apple the least bit as a company.

The way I see it, Apple's comeback was delivered through 4 major factors:
1. Steve Jobs' charisma in bringing people together to work on a common goal. This solidifies Apple into a single-minded company with everybody going in the same direction, instead of many-masted sail ship buffetted by sea winds. Be didn't have Steve Jobs. Gasse would have grounded Apple totally.
2. Mac OS X's UNIX-based foundation, which enables the scientific community and some industries to quickly adopt the Mac as both 'workstation' and 'day-to-day computer' platforms. The familiarity of UNIX infrastructure and the elegance of the GUI represent the best compromise (though separately, they may not be best-of-breeds) for most computing tasks. BeOS was sort-of POSIX-compliant. But, it wouldn't have been easy porting all those UNIX apps to BeOS-based Mac OS.
3. Cocoa. Rapid development, elegant interface, a plethora of built-in features. What else is there to say? This is THE platform which provides Mac users like us with the useful software trinkets we so much love. BeOS did not have anything close to this.
4. iPod. This is Steve Jobs in his best form. Gasse? Well....

Steve Jobs' return to Apple was essential. While I do lust for BeOS' stark efficiency and elegance, they could never have guaranteed the Mac's survival.

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[rodgerd]

Apple's problem has never been technological, they have some ass stomping programmers.

*snerk* Right. The only ass those programmers stomped was Apples, while they fucked Copland up completely.

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Lord Kano]

And without Jobs, there would be no iMac, iBook or iPod to save them.

Without Jobs Apple would still be Apple. It wasn't him that saved the company, it was the legions of faithful Apple customers.

There's an almost religious aspect to the fanaticism with which some people remain loyal to Apple.

In my experience, I took less flack after a religious conversion than I did after a platform change.

LK
(Whoever you are burning up your mod points on me. I have excellent Karma, I can take it.)

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[steeviant]

"Apple's problem has never been technological, they have some ass stomping programmers. Be OS would have been transformed from something cool into something SWEET if they had gotten a hold of it."

Correct. Apple's problem was marketing, they'd spent so many years targetting their marketing at their own customers that the rest of the world was losing interest in them.

Having the world's coolest operating system didn't make half as much difference as having a CEO with a mind for marketing to the masses, the big turnaround for Apple (as far as profits are concerned) was the original iMac which was around before OS X.

"At the time Apple bought NeXT, THEY didn't have anything like Cocoa. Apple built Cocoa from the ground up for the platform that they did have. They could have done it on a Be OS foundation."

You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

Apple didn't build Cocoa from the ground up. They took OpenStep and wrapped it up in a pretty compositing window server and tacked on the carbon libraries as a way of migrating 'classic' Mac OS toolbox applications.

They would have missed out on the cross platform compatibility, multi-user abilities, bundles, RAD tools, UNIX base and a host of other things that have been very good for Apple Inc, and OS X users had they chosen BeOS.

I'm sure BeOS would have made a very nice next generation MacOS, but I wouldn't have been as keen to use it as I was to use a revamped version of OpenStep.

"It's unknown if Apple could have implemented a POSIX compliant framework for Be OS and this is one of the big strengths of OSX."

Apple probably could have adapted BeOS to be able to do a lot of the things that OS X is capable of, but OpenStep had most of the very useful qualities that they are leveraging now before Apple ever touched it. As you say, it's just ONE of the strengths of OS X.

The switch to Intel probably wouldn't be happening right now without OS X's OpenStep heritage, which meant that OS X arrived on the PPC platform prepared to concurrently support multiple binary architectures, as OpenStep had for many years.

"What we're seeing now isn't so much the survival of the Macintosh platform as it is the survival of Apple in any form necessary. I can understand that Apple had their reasons for doing so, but abandoning the PPC architecture will change them. Instead of a cool company with uniquely good hardware and an OS with its own strengths they will become what Dell would be if they bought Mandriva or Red Hat."

What utter nonsense, if Dell bought a Linux distributor, they'd just be selling Dells with a Linux distribution installed.

They'd have to hire top knotch industrial designers to make their cases, and some of the leading people in OS research to design a new Linux distribution from the ground up with the desktop in mind, or find another NeXT waiting to be snapped up for a song.

It would take many years and billions of dollars of research to turn Dell into Apple, and in the meantime people who want a seamless desktop Unix would just keep buying Apple, no matter what CPU is inside the box.

"It wasn't really a big deal to pay premium Apple prices for Mac OS on PPC, but aside from die hard Mac fans, who will pay them for the same Intel processors that can be had from Dell, HP, IBM and Gateway?"

Me.

When I bought my PowerBook the G4 was clearly ahead of the game as far as battery life vs. processing power was concerned. Why would I not buy an Intel equipped PowerBook for the same reason?

Re:Depends on leadership - and public image...

[Billly Gates]

Apple was dieing a horrible death before Jobs came back.

Unlike BSD, Apple really was about to go under and Jobs return was a move of desperation. It had no direction or future.

Many Apple investors were even debating closing Apple down and just selling off its IP. I remember old pcworld articles from even windows die hard journalists raising a campaign to save Apple because the pc industry would be doomed to Microsoft.

Jobs gave Apple a direction. Microsoft came out with Windows95 and almost took Apple under. Many businesses put pressure on Apple's customers to move to Windows for photoshop and MacOS frankly sucked. It had no premptive multitasking, no concept of a kernel, and WindowsNT was about to come into popularity.

Jobs
1.) Killed the clones
2.) Needed a quick competitor to NT which became NextStep errr MacOSX
3.) Differentiated his products and created value by coming out with the imac. Imacs looked awesome and made the name Apple actually mean something. People valued a stylish high end system.
4.) Moved into online music and appliances with the Ipod in an effort to save the company if their pc business flopped.
5.) Prevented hollywood from going to an all microsoft format for media from the sucess of itunes and its expanded userbase

Steve Jobs saved the company and in my opinion Apple simply would not be if he did not come back.

slashdot

[eobanb]

news for nerds, stuff from like, a year ago.

And the ewoks sing

[HishamMuhammad]

"Dupe dupe! Eee chop, Dupe dupe!
Toe meet toe pee chee keene, g'noop dock fling oh ah.
Yah wah! Eee chop, yah wah!
Toe meet toe pee chee keene, g'noop dock fling oh ah...." (rest goes like the Ewok song)

And so the new Slashdot theme song is born.

Rejoice!

BeOS Lives? Truly???

[null etc.]

Wow, way to go with the TIMELY reporting! I liked this story better when it was submitted June 19th:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 6/19/1742245&tid=87&tid=189&tid=190&tid=8

Single user OS

[misleb]

Does the world really need a single user OS? I understand many of BeOS's merits, but that is a pretty serious limitation that makes it very undesirable in most situations. You wouldn't run your computer as root, right? Isn't that basically what you are doing when yoiu run BeOS?

-matthew

Re:Single user OS

[DRobson]

I havent booted BeOS for a month or two now, but IIRC everything had the same style posix permissions as every other *nix you've layed your hands on. Only difference was that there was only ever one user (named 'Baron'). I think most of it is just waiting for someone to write the backend.

The Anti-Linux Factor???

[digital-madman]

Alright, disclaimer here. Normally I don't bother to comment on any offbeat anymore but i got something to ask...

What is the target market for this product?

Lets face it.. BeOS or Zeta (doesn't really matter what you call it) can not be a mainstream desktop OS. Just like Linux it faces the same problems, plus some. No Games, migration factors, software software software?? You could port alot of linux software to the OS. But what?s the point.

You offer all Linux software on BeOS it could be another anti-Linux migration barrier. (Although portable code aside.) For general user base, its to confusing. (That sounds a little lame i know.)

A quote from Futurama stuck in my head after that thought: "Your average voter is still as drunk and stupid as they were in 1980". Well... your average joe six pack user is just as drunk and stupid as they are in windows.

Also, where's even a niche market for this product??? Its not like the BSD's which have great server and datacenter applications. Hell, even OS/2 survives on SOME ATM machines. Where's the niche? or even market?

The only useful thing I could see this is for... is a ultra secure webserver at tops. (Security through obscurity). But mostly as a novelty for uber geeks.

In the end this will mean nothing or be a confusion point for joe six pack user looking to switch from windows.

-Digital Madman

Re:The Anti-Linux Factor???

[Lord Kano]

I HIGHLY doubt that the Yellow Tab folks expect joe sixpack to even hear about this.

It'll be a cool toy for geeks to play with, and it might even be a good OS for a "Smart Appliance" or other embedded applications.

LK

Will it make it as an OS?

[Coryoth]

Well it seems Zeta has been kicking around for some time. The earliest of those being from 2002 when it was first announced that yellowTab had picked up some rights to BeOS. I gather (from comments in those many stories) that Zeta has been on sale, at least in Germany, for quite some time now, and went 1.0 in July. The reviews have been lukewarm, and it really hasn't raised much (if any) mainstream attention.

Will Yellowtab raise BeOS from the ashes and inflame public interest in the OS?"

I find that rather doubtful. BeOS was a fine OS in its day, but while the rest of the world has been improving (MacOS, for instance, now actually has something decent to offer) BeOS has been mostly treading water as yellowTab try and modernise it where possible and get support for modern hardware. It's not that Zeta is bad - it looks like quite a nice OS - it's just that it certainly isn't revolutionary or particularly interesting for any reasons other than BeOS nostalgia... and these days you need to manage to stand out in some way or other as an OS to attract enough application developers. Without applications your OS is just going to slowly stagnate and die unless you can find and fill a niche. Given that Zeta is aiming at the general desktop... I just don't see them managing to get enough strng application support to really pull that off.

Jedidiah.

Re:Will it make it as an OS?

[misleb]

Zeta/Be has one serious, and ultimately fatal, flaw. It is single user. Nobody in their right mind is going to put anything important on a Be box. Maybe single user (and no meaningful file permissions) would pass in the days of Mac OS 9 or Win 95, but the world has moved on. Security is a real issue for everyone. No matter how much developer and hardware support Zeta gets, it will always suffer from that one fatal design flaw.

-matthew

Re:Will it make it as an OS?

[jsebrech]

Well, as the vast majority of OS installations in existance run as single-user installations, that doesn't sound like too much of an issue.

Maybe "single user" is the wrong term, maybe "horribly insecure" is better. Anything you run on beos has root level power. That's a lousy design, and apart from windows (in practical situations) all operating systems have long since abandoned it due to all the security problems it causes.

Pervasive Threading Ahead of Time

[tjstork]

BeOS was ahead of its time because it was built on the premise that the future computers would be massively parallel. Then, Intel and AMD got into the megahertz race and it seemed like BeOS guessed wrong.

Now of course everything is going towards multiple cores and multiple processors, but BeOS is dead for the most part. Had BeOS come out later, or had multicore chips come out earlier, who knows what might have been.

Re:Pervasive Threading Ahead of Time

[jd]

BeOS also chopped-and-changed who it supported, which didn't help. It was originally for the PPC, then switched to Intel, dropping all the PPC users. Arguably, it would have done better to support the entire userbase and kept the chip-specifics confined enough that you only needed a few programmers to deal with that.

What I would like to see is BeOS and Plan9 (now Inferno) hook up. Inferno makes a great low-level environment, as it makes the entire network seem like a single system. However, the front-end isn't that great and there are very few user applications for it.

BeOS has plenty of user apps, but sucks at clustering and handling distributed resources. It also doesn't have much in the way of "serious" server applications. As such, using BeOS as a user-side OS and Inferno as the server-side, would seem the obvious match.

Why are you so wrong? Mod parent down...

[Tezkah]

BeOS already runs on Intel hardware. It has been running on x86 for over 7 years now...

Due to Apple's aggressive moves and the mounting debt of Be Inc, BeOS was soon ported to the X86 platform with its R3 release. Through the late 90s, BeOS managed to create a niche of hardcore followers, but the company failed to become solvent. As a last-ditch effort to increase interest in the failing operating system, Be Inc. released a stripped-down, but free, copy of BeOS R5 known as BeOS Personal Edition (BeOS PE). BeOS PE could be started from within Microsoft Windows or Linux, and was intended to nurture consumer interest in its product and give developers something they could tinker in.

- from Wikipedia

That being said, it will have to have changed a great deal between when I saw it last, and it's next incarnation, otherwise - the current crop of Mac OS X and Windows XP / Vista already does what BeOS did.

The only way that Mac and Windows and Linux are now able to do what BeOS was doing is that we now have 3GHZ processors in our computers, while BeOS was providing the same speed and responsiveness on much slower machines. The threading of BeOS is one of it major strengths, and windows is JUST NOW (with vista) starting to implement the idea in full.

That said, the story doesn't give us any new information... oh... Zeta!? I had never heard of this product before on slashdot...

old news?

[timmarhy]

how many of this stupid beos advernews stories do we need. this rubbish about beos being raised from the ashes by zeta has been on twice before. in fact i think maybe they used the same words almost

The Haiku Project...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean that the sourcecode will be rewritten in haiku form?

/*
  * Mempointer far null

  * Size T chunksize lots,
  * far allocated size.
  */
memptr far = NULL;
size_t chunksize = LOTS;
far = malloc(chunksize);

Or is it just the system messages that will be rewritten?

Fatal error. All data
have disappeared. Screen. Mind.
Both are blank.

Vista does with BeOS did? How is the future? Warm?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Vista ain't out yet. For someone as old as me this is becoming very repetetive. People comparing OS'es that are out with things that MS absolutly swears are going to be in the next version.

XP comes nowwhere near, OSX does a bit but in many ways BeOS is still ahead of its time. It is just suffering from lack of applications, but what it mostly suffers from is idiots like you comparing its features with things MS marketing hype.

Re:Buy to Try

[sonicattack]

[...] and costs nearly $100 to boot?

Boot manager menu (please type in credit card number and expiry date, then press listed key to boot):

F1 Windows XP ($10)
F2 Debian Sarge ($1)
F3 Zeta ($100)

Money will be drawn from your account upon successful boot. Reboot due to system crash within 3 minutes comes FREE OF CHARGE (Only applies to key F1)

Do these OSes EVER get revived?

[Broken Bottle]

"Will Yellowtab raise BeOS from the ashes and inflame public interest in the OS?""

I read this sort of story on Slashdot every month or so. Some company or user group is trying to keep their 0% market share OS alive, like Newton OS, Amiga, Be, OS/2, and I'm sure there are others. Has there ever been a success story? Has anyone ever managed to resurect an OS and give it a respectable application base and user base? With all respect to the supporters, I just have to roll my eyes everytime I read something like this because I've never seen anyone succeed at keeping an OS viable. Maybe it depends on your personal definition of success...

Chris

No, Beos will not be a major player

[jandrese]

Back when Be was still making BeBoxes (best name ever) they were already doomed. My roommate had a Be system and I got to play around with it a bit. It was extremely nice, especially with the way it handled media (you could play multi channel audio back when even getting full duplex working on OSS was a major pain in the butt).

The problem was that it was somewhat difficult to port applications to the box. The networking in particular seemed to cause lots of problems. This ment that in 1996 (I think) there were still no decent webbrowsers for Beos. That sort of problem was endemic with Beos too. Unless you were willing to port the applications yourself, about the only thing you could do with the OS was give people impressive multimedia demos and explain how cool the filesystem is. Granted, there was a community around porting applications to Be, but they weren't well organized from what I saw.

It's possible Be has changed in the time since I saw it last, and now has a compatability layer that lets it compile stuff written for Linux right out of the box (does it support X apps yet?), but even with that it's hard to see why I would want to use it.

Will Yellowtab raise BeOS from the ashes

[Gax]

Will Yellowtab raise BeOS from the ashes and inflame public interest in the OS?

Magic-8 says "Don't bet on it".

Sorry Be is cursed...

[WareW01f]

And before modding me as flaimbait, let me explain. Disclaimer: I've coded (and been paid to do so) on Mac OS 7/8/9/X, DOS, Win 95/98/2000/XP, Palm OS 3/4/5/6, Linux, HPUX, Solaris, etc... Basicly I'm a Rodney King of OSs, they all have merits and they all suck in some way. Open your mind and code a bit before you flame an OS

I had a friend years back that actually *owned* a BeBox, in all it's blue blinking glory. At the time, we were Mac coders. We marvled at the twin LED cpu load meters on the sides, we watched the wicked kewl graphics demos that really should not have been possible at that time. And we were in awe...

Then they dropped the hardware. Understandable, they were Years Ahead Of Their Time(TM) on case mods, and hardware leads to actual loss. (Where as software, short of your cost in printed packaging and plastic CDs is slim.) Fine, it ran on a Mac, there where UMax clones to be had, and all was good...

Then Jobs came back. Good for Apple, bad for any clone vendor or anyone trying to make an OS *other* than MacOS run. (And lets face it folks even if you are a Mac zealot, you have to admit that OS 7/ early OS 8 (basicly OS 7 *skinned*) sucked pretty hard. Be ran circles around it. Hell even my cheap Linux laptop with X was doing painted window drags as opposed to the "outline" window move) Fine, Be went to x86, and some of us where like "kewl", but by then the alternate OS crowd was all about Linux and all the hot stuff was for Linux, so it was still just a toy. The other kick in the head was the rumors that Apple was about to buy Be (knowing the OS was damn kewl) but Job (again) stepped in and said, no, we're going to take my failed company Next and use that. (Any one else here about the Steve Jobs/Star Trek link of every other company/movie sucking) So another strike. I was able to play with "Rhapsody" way back then and the Yellow Box/Blue Box world of the Mac of tomorrow. (Ribbing the Mac people that they were bending to the POSIX side of the force.)

So be goes limping along. They beg vendors to install Be dual boot with Windoze *for*free*. No go. In the mean time, *some* of us got over the fact that Jobs killed the Newton, got a Palm III (which was finally, in our eyes, a viable, hackable platform) and being the MetroWerks people that we were and oh so familiar API for the Palm, switched over. (The GCC port was a big help to.) All was well.

I switched over to the dark side for a few years and did some Windoze coding (for food), still dabbling in Mac coding and Palm. OS X (finally) arrived. I moved my cheese to be able to get paid to code for the Palm. All was good. And then came the faithful PalmSource where we all learned that some of the essence of Be had seeped into Palm and OS 6 (Cobalt, that damn blue again) It was deva vu all over again. Watching the rotating cubes (again) and all of the other fun things I was seeing again for the first time. I was overjoyed... but with that same nagging feeling that this was not going to end well. Even as we partyed with Skyy Vodka and all of the other glowing blueness... the curse was there....

And here we are, PalmSource axed the BeNess of Cobalt and is going Linux (and was just bought out.) And someone is going to even *try* and hint that Be will "make a come back". I for one will be staying the hell away from it at all costs.

I expect to hear of some freak meteor accident with a key developer in the near future.

Re:Vista does with BeOS did? How is the future? Wa

[pherthyl]

True, I remember that demo. But when you get down to it, what is that good for in real life? Do I ever play 6 videos at the same time on a cube? Do I ever watch a DVD while at the same time moving the video window around the screen like a maniac?
Hell no. Any sane person watches one video at a time and that person won't notice the difference between BeOS or any other system.

I tried BeOS back in the 4.5 days and sure it booted ridiculously quickly, but when you got there all you could do was twiddle your thumbs and sit around (albeit sitting and twiddling very fast).