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After 8 Years of Work, Be-Alike Haiku Releases Official Alpha
NiteMair writes "The Haiku project has finally released an official R1 alpha, after 8 years of development. This marks a significant milestone for the project, and it also debuts the first official/publicly available LiveCD ISO image that can be easily booted and used to install Haiku on x86 hardware. Haiku is a desktop operating system inspired by BeOS after Be, Inc. closed its doors in 2001. The project has remained true to the BeOS philosophy while integrating modern hardware support and features along the way." Eugenia adds this link to an article describing the history of the OS, along with a review of the alpha version."
I wonder how strict
Their code formatting rules are.
Sounds like a tough job.
After eight long years
The alpha release is done
It took long enough
When I tried out BeOS R4, I was really impressed but couldn't really use it day to day. Ever since then I've been looking for the next best thing but never found it. I've tried Syllable and that seems great, but no WiFi support means I can't connect to the Internet, so it's useless. Haiku should have some support for this, so I might give it a try soon!
Unlike Syllable Haiku also supports Firefox, so I hope Amarok can be used too, that would be absolutely awesome.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
What have they been doing all these years? Seriously guys, you've released it at a time when most people don't even remember what BeOS even is.
Not after 10.6 ;) Macs finally feel like BeOs.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I care, as does anyone who remembers operating systems that were responsive to user interaction first and foremost
I feel in full control of BeOS and Haiku (also AmigaOS) and there's a lot of things that it gets right that Windows, Mac and Linux still fail to do between them. There's something kind of indefinable 'fun' about the OS as well..
If a man empties his purse into his head no man can take it from him. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
This is a good point. To the end user Haiku doesn't appear to be all that different to BeOS back in the day, and it was difficult enough to actually do anything then anyway. In those 8 years modern operating systems, and more importantly the applications that run on those operating systems, have matured massively. IMHO It's unlikely Haiku can gain the momentum that BeOS craved so long ago, especially when there's not a lot that makes it stand out as a better alternative to Linux, for example.
Please forgive my ignorance, but what makes Haiku any different from some other version of Linux?
I read through the Haiku site and I can't seem to find anything that makes it any different from say Ubuntu... With the exception of the BFS, but I'm of the opinion that the standard file system used by Linux works fine. I don't see any reason they had to reinvent the wheel.
I think Linux would be much more competitive if the community came together and developed one definitive version rather then infinitely branching off and rewriting things that already work. It would also be a lot easier to develop software for.
Congratulations to the Haiku team. Back when Be closed its doors, I remember there were several projects to recreate the OS, but most people didn't expect any of them to succeed. This announcement proves that wrong. BeOS was a fantastic OS and with Haiku making strides toward a stable release, the legacy can live on. Although it's taken a while to get this far, writing a full operating system from scratch takes a long time. Even large companies with dedicated teams generally take 5+ years to build a new OS, so 8 years for a group of volunteers to release a working system is quite reasonable. Once again, congratulations and thanks for all the hard work you've put in over the years. Although only an alpha, this release is quite stable and usable. Your efforts have certainly not gone unnoticed.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
i post this anon
because so many exist
but what is one more?
...if Apple hadn't bought NeXT.
But they did, and have been catering to people who want a modern non-MS OS since then.
And now, they have stuff that provides a sensible approach to concurrency, BeOS or a clone of BeOS is a lot less meaningful.
(Actually, pages 9-15 of that review are all about Be's boat having sailed.)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Here it is at last
Looks like Solaris OS
And we need this why?
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
Not after 10.6 ;) Macs finally feel like BeOs.
Really? I can hardly tell the difference between 10.5.x and 10.6.
So when can we expect Debian GNU/Haiku?
It is only an Alpha
It'll be long before the Beta
A 1.0 release might never come
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
64 bits????
Read it here (is in german, sorry): http://www.lelldorin.de/debug/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopi... On September 16th, 2009 in (english:)Colonge/(german:)Köln, there starts at 7 pm a'clock in "Extrablatt" at "Am Alten Markt" a Haiku Launch Party!
The MIT License is a free software license
If a man empties his purse into his head no man can take it from him. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
You are more radical than the FSF, they consider (modified) BSD and the like to be free software (but they created the GPL because they felt that it was important that derivatives of free software also be free):
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#GPLCompatibleLicenses
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I remember when Palm bought the Be source code way back when in 2002(?). I heard that some of it found its way into PalmOS 5, but I wonder if any of its elements are used in Palm's new webOS.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
But, does it run on VirtualBox?
This is a
Maybe, if OS X is on a quad-core and BeOS is on an old-style dual-Pentium.
Wow the "troll" mods are out in force ... some strange loyal contingent amongst the /. crowd I only thought was reserved for discussions surrounding Linux.
Yeah, it's kind of funny to joke that Macs "finally feel like BeOS" but in reality it is so far from the truth that it's more troll like than anything I wrote above.
I used BeOS, well, I booted it and played with the spinning cube with videos on each face. There wasn't much else alive in there in terms of hardware support. It did tickle me though and I hope somehow the product can create some space amidst Windows, Linux, OS X, Chrome OS, etc... but I don't think so.
I've been running a VM image built from source from a couple of recent developer's releases, and I've got to say, the OS is definitely usable. Probably the largest missing piece has been a wireless stack (haven't checked the R1 alpha, so for all I know his is already there). This will make an awesome OS for a netbook - lightweight, fast, boots fast, already has a port of Firefox. Can't wait to try out the alpha.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
Installed it in Virtualbox, and it's running just as smoothly as I remember BeOS doing. Even installed in about 3 minutes :)
The built in browser, Bon Echo, seems to be a Firefox derivative, possibly Firefox 2, so it's not all bad.
If the hardware is supported, I think Haiku would make for a very very good OS for a netbook. It's using 60 MB total at the moment and hardly pegging the CPU. In fact Virtualbox is only using 38 MB according to Windows and hovering around 20% on a single core of my 2 GHz Turion x64. Granted, I'm only running the browser, but that's still quite nice.
Google Docs works as well, though I only have a simple spreadsheet to test with. It's a little bit slow to respond, but that is probably down to the browser. Actually now the browser is already using more memory than everything else combined, and I've only had six pages open in total. That's not a good sign. And of course the Haiku website seems to be Slashdotted, so there's no help there either ;)
But I would love to see how this OS runs on a netbook with fully supported hardware.
Haikus are easy. But sometimes they donâ(TM)t make sense. Refrigerator
No one has really answered you so far, surprisingly. I don't really know BeOS internals, but having toyed around with it as an ex-Amiga user looking for a modern equivalent (like many others), I can give you the general idea.
Basically, it's this: unix sucks.
Lol, it's flippant, but for all the greatness of Unix and Linux, especially compared to Windows, there's a definite truth to this. The problem is that unix is a few simple (and strong) principles from the early 70s, upon which nearly decades of evolution have occured. The fact that this was even possible is a huge testament to the flexibility of those core principles. Nonetheless, most of the evolution since is essentially a big hackish attempt to keep Unix up to date. For instance, go to phoronix and search for graphics stack. You'll find a lot of discussion about Xorg, the Linux kernel, graphics drivers, GPUs, libraries, the linux console, and how none of them are really consistent or integrated, and the problems that result. Moreover, Unix was originally designed for many users sharing a huge, expensive computer. It's not really designed for personal computers at all. Arguably, this distinction isn't so relevant these days.
BeOS, on the other hand though, is an attempt to make a modern, coherent, friendly, desktop operating system for personal computers. It's designed to be quick, to have a logical stack of libraries that cooperate (such as for audio and graphics, again, unlike Linux's audio/graphics stack).
Essentially, the point is just to build a modern system, and dump all the old, legacy cruft that just gets in the way. It's an attempt to draw a line under the past, and say, "OK, that's the old way. From now on, programs should use this stuff instead, so everything looks good and runs well, and integrates nicely."
Here's what Be's CEO Jean-Louis Gassée had to say in 2001 about what happened:
We could have had close to 10 years of use out of this really good Be OS in schools, products, and businesses, if not for Microserfs and Microsofters. Apple needs to learn from Be Inc. and clean out the nails Microsofters set in its track while there's still an Apple Computer . The time is over for putting up with promoters of M$, especially those inside other businesses.
Eight years the wiser.
So happy together then?
Don't bend down again.
Be OS was a very good OS so we should see good things from Haiku, too. The niche it filled will be different today for Haiku, but still highly relevant. Netbooks are all the rage now. I expect it will be tried there first.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
"but no WiFi support means I can't connect to the Internet"
Err, have you never heard of an ethernet cable?
It's so much harder to plug an ethernet cable into your neighbour's router without them noticing.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
The link I meant is this one: http://www.lelldorin.de/debug/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=574# Sorry for the broken link in my previews post.
Is there a push from the Haiku folks to get this onto machines? Or is this the equivalent of another hobby linux distro with no publicity and no one that cares for it except those that worked on it to begin with? I mean, finally, they have a product; but what now?
FreeBSD for the impatient.
So, a unix-like kernel with a pretty window manager is modern?
Damn. That's some strong kool-aid.
That's still Free Software by the FSF's and most other people's definitions. What it is *not* is copy left. So yes, you can make non-free derivatives. But the rest of the world will still have the previous, open source releases available. You even have the freedom to create a GNU-focused Haiku release if you really wanted to - it might be worth it, just for the looks of horror at the idea of a GNU/BeOS (I'd use it!).
Honking geese fly south
Cacophonously, just like
Slashdot pedants' posts.
Quite being a douchebag zealot. BSD and MIT are both perfectly fine open source licenses. If Haiku decided to close up their project, another team could take the last OSS release, fork it, and pick up where Haiku left off.
BeOS looked like it had some actual advantages to the end user. I had a BeBox briefly and it's frankly amazing what two 66 MHz 603e chips could do with an operating system designed from the ground up for multiprocessing.
I use BeOS on my PowerMac and it naturally kicked MacOS butt (to the point where OS 8 under SheepShaver was faster than OS 8 on the raw hardware), but that's such a low hurdle to jump: the underlying operating system on pre-OSX Macs would have been considered primitive in 1969... it was nothing more than a set of common I/O libraries, no scheduling or central resource management at all... a single-tasking monitor like something from the early days of the IBM 360. The multitasking on later versions was kludged in through the window system, and programming for it was like writing a device driver... scheduling was handled by having the application call back to the OS to let other apps run "often enough".
Later I got to run it on a Wintel box and compare it head-to-head with Windows (NT4 at the time) and FreeBSD and Rhapsody DR1. It was the most resource-hungry of all four operating systems, which totally blew my mind. There was more memory contention and stalling (even for command line apps) on a PC with 16M (which sounds small now, but it was pretty high end back then).
It's not the kernel and OS design that makes OS X slow, it's the heavyweight window system. Making every window (including subwindows!) its own OpenGL texture simplifies application development somewhat, but it's a massive burden on the hardware. The API is also very MacOS/Windows like with a lot of tight cooperation required between the UI library and the display, coupling the UI to the application and creating an unnecessary bottleneck. Without that overhead it would be just as responsive as BeOS on comparable hardware.
But the most amazingly responsive OS I've used was the one shipped with the Amiga. A very lightweight and efficient kernel, a lightweight window system that ALSO avoided coupling the UI and the application (the input handler for most standard widgets ran completely asynchronously from the app, only passing completed selection and menu events down the input chain). You were impressed by what it could do on two 66 MHz CPUs? Luxury, mate. Try it with a single 7.14 MHz 68000 and tell me how fast it is.
I could have predicted it:
One hour later,
the site is Slashdotted.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I am currently attempting to download the .iso from bittorrent. Aparrently no one (not one!) is seeding. I am downloading from 0 of 0 connected peers. Lest anyone think my network is down, I am also donwloading open solaris 10 from 64 peers...
The developer FAQ explicitly states that they do not want contributions under viral licenses like the GPL. They even use the word viral, and they explicitly name the GPL. Their intent to allow closed source releases has been clear for many years. I'd quote their developer FAQ, but it's currently not responding. But yes, the X11 (MIT) license is considered Free by the FSF.
After eight years work,
Be-Alike Haiku released -
Official Alpha.
the original BeOS had a thing called the "psycho-killer" (Qu'est-ce que c'est?) thread to kill processes gone haywire. I wonder if it's still there, perhaps translated to some Cute Japanese equivalent
[ No prescription needed ]
Although from what I read, Microsoft also helped it along, from memory Be died for the same reason that some of the people I've known who died from cancer, did; it was something from a parallel universe where good things actually happen, somehow wound up in this one by mistake, and thus had to be recalled.
Be is one of a long list of non-mainstream technologies which I've seen wither on the vine, again for the simple reason that they were too good. There is a status quo in virtually every area in this world, including computer software. If something shows up which is intelligent, positive, and therefore radical to the point where it exceeds the "just good enough," status quo, it tends to slip back below the surface, very rapidly.
I've often wondered how much more positive the world would be, if all of the things which have been repressed or destroyed because they were too innovative, too positive, or too endangering to a scarcity based economy, had actually been allowed to survive and be used.
Heh funny. Though you might want to use an example of a workplace that generally doesn't have more rj45 sockets around the building than a branch of Maplins.
Bada Boom! I love this one!
Besta é tu si você não viver nesse mundo!
GNU/BeOS?
Pshh, what a newbie OS that would be!
Haiku-based humor
Made me laugh several times
Hopeless nerd I am
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Possibly the best OS news I have had since OS X. Big kudos to the Haiku development team for sticking with it!
I dearly loved BeOS, and after Zeta OS tanked I had my hopes pinned on Haiku - I wasn't disappointed!
Cheers,
Steve
Better to regret something you have done, then something you haven't.
Then you are probably on the wrong site. This is a site for nerds, most specifically the kind that are interested in computers. If you can't tell that the entire set of libraries has been reworked from Cocoa right down to libc (see qsort_b and friends) to support blocks and that run loops are now implemented using libdispatch, which handles thread pools and queues of closures being run in response to events from the kernel, then you are almost certainly not a nerd.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Ubiquitous, indexed, filesystem metadata. I didn't need an address book app, or a music jukebox app with BeOS. MP3 tags were extracted and stored as filesystem metadata and so I could browse my music by artist, album, genre, and so on, from the Tracker. Linux, Windows and OS X all, now, include extended attribute support in their filesystems that make this possible, but they are not used.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I was always impressed with the performance of BeOS on the PowerPC. I installed the preview release on a 6400/200. It was like a whole new machine. I used to think that if Apple turned NeXT's OS into something usable in just a few years, they could have done something really special with BeOS. It's a shame that we'll never find out.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
If any one wonders how does Haiku look in an OS, here is one screenshoot
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haiku_Screenshot.png
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zygz77Zz1i8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VDYdaXApNk
Parts 1 and 2 of the BeOS Demo.
Incredible multitasking capabilities, journaled file system, enhanced thread management; all designed from the ground up to take advantage of multi-CPU computers.
The demo is absolutely incredible. Remember, this is on mid '90s era technology. Dual Pentium with a few hundred megabytes of RAM. No discrete video card.
Some more details.
Apple offered to buy Be first but they declined thinking their valuation was higher than Apple was offering. Palm later bought the Be assets for 11million, about 10 times less than Apple's offer. Which is why my very first post in this thread, now marked troll by some troll, said "loser say what"!?
Apple went on to buy NeXt to build OS X from its core rather than BeOS. Much smarter move IMO. NeXt was light years ahead of BeOS in terms of actual implementations and deployments (as in real shops ran real systems on NeXt tech)
Honking geese fly south
Cacophonously, just like
Slashdot pedants' posts.
I like how the three lines in yours all rendered to the same length, too. :)
bi- no you
konpyutta wa
utsukushii
Bow-ties are cool.
From wikipedia: "Haiku typically contain a kigo, or seasonal reference, and a kireji [lit. 'cutting word'] or verbal caesura."
A haiku is more
Than five, seven, and five words.
Fuck you, it's autumn.
It's summer, fool!
Bow-ties are cool.
Ok then, how about this?
BeOS never became unresponsive. No matter what you were doing and no matter how many programs were running, the operating system itself always remained quick and responsive. Windows, Linux and Mac OS X constantly become unresponsive for seconds and even minutes at a time during everyday activities. Think about every time you see an hourglass cursor (a concept that didn't even exist in BeOS) or every time a menu lags or every time your hard drive starts thrashing.
BeOS has a highly advanced journalling file system that never required defragmentation and would never lose data on the drive, even if you pulled the power plug in the middle of a write operation. It also supported meta data of any type for any file, even using another file as the meta data (ie. add a text file, image, audio file, video file, etc. as a file attribute for any other file).
On a 400MHz Pentium II PC, BeOS was capable of running 10 MP3s and 10 videos simultaneously (maybe even more), without lag or stutter. Windows, Linux and Mac OS X would have a difficult time pulling that off on a modern PC.
Sliding title tabs on windows. This allows a user to stack windows and align the title tabs next to each other for quick and easy access to every stacked window. BeOS was the first and possibly the only OS to apply this aspect of the "file folder" metaphor.
From pressing the power button to useable desktop, the boot time for BeOS was about 10 seconds (on a Pentium II 400MHz).
Fewer (no?) viruses. I realise that this has a lot to do with how popular an operating system is, but if Mac and Linux users can throw this around as a selling point for their respective OSes, then the same can be done for BeOS.
Fi-re-fox, A-ma-rok.
More like "fa-i-ya-fo-k-ku-su" and "a-ma-ro-k-ku". Each can be a line on their own.
Bow-ties are cool.
That about matches what I've read of the whole affair. Didn't know that Palm bought Be for so little though; that's been a harsh lesson for someone I'll bet.
Does anyone happen to know why Apple only wanted to pay about $115M for BeOS, when they eventually paid something like $400M for NeXT? Did they just think NeXT was worth more (that they'd need to spend a lot more developing BeOS maybe), or did they just run out of options and get desperate by the NeXT stage, I wonder?
three words:
kernel mode setting
Three more words:
bicycle cheese starfish
Bow-ties are cool.
BeFS.
There's something kind of indefinable 'fun' about the OS as well..
I've sent this in to Linux developers as a feature request.
Dear developers,
Please make Linux more fun. You know... like... fun. I think it could use 15-20% more je ne sais quoi. Then it would really rock.
Thanks!
Greenguy
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
haiku da ne?
sore chigau no yo
shinjin sou na...
Bow-ties are cool.
Haiku-based humor
Made me laugh several times
Hopeless nerd I am
tatakau ka?
kiite kudasai
ore no uta!
Bow-ties are cool.
If any one wonders how does Haiku look in an OS, here is one screenshoot
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haiku_Screenshot.png
So, it looks like the Be theme in KDE?
Kind of a joke there, but also a bit of a serious comment, too: can't tell much about an OS from a screenshot like this.
Bow-ties are cool.
Imagine a Haiku cluster
Something like beowulf
that would be nice
tsuyoinda
haikutachi de wa
kakkoii!
Bow-ties are cool.
How the hell do you get a linux desktop to become unresponsive? I have used Linux on my desktop for many years, and have newer seen my desktop become unresponsive for even a single second*. Some applications(Hi firefox) may be unresponsive, but X and linux always respond.
*With the exception of when Kde/Plasma crashes. If they do that most thing become unresponsive a few seconds until the reload is complete.
Geeks so love cute names
If we must go Japanese
I say bukkake
I once saw a guy wearing one of those sports jersey shirts and the name across the back said Bukkake. Must have been from one of those places where you can get your own name on the team jersey of your choice. I figured he did it so he could tell from the snickers behind him how many people spent too much time on the net.
bukkake ka?
otoko sugi no yo!
shibari suki.
Bow-ties are cool.
X is seriously deficient in graphics performance, but OpenGL isn't. So much so that Java under Linux is using OpenGL for graphics acceleration over just plain X. I am thinking things like OpenGL, available under the gamut of OS's, are a better answer than porting graphics-intensive applications to a specialty OS.
So when can we expect Debian GNU/Haiku?
debian wa
ningyou sou
gannuu no
Bow-ties are cool.
Here it is at last
Looks like Solaris OS
And we need this why?
zokuuke wa,
Bii no koto, naze?
wakaranai.
Bow-ties are cool.
What advantages does that offer the OS and what are the downsides (lack of binary future compatibility when the compiler changes?)
tomorrow HURD!
In 8 more days it will be autumn in the Northern Hemisphere.
And the weather's already broke here in southern California. Trees are shedding leaves like mad.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Be happy!
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Uhh, it's the middle of September, dude. You might want to get a calendar.
You might ask yourself,
On what date does summer end?
Do you see my point?
Bow-ties are cool.
The strategy of clean-room cloning BeOS certainly made more sense when the project was begun, since the apps for it weren't dated yet, and the then-current user base was much larger. But even with it taking as long as it has so far, Haiku OS 1.0 will debut with more apps available for it than any all-new OS would, and with a larger interested user population as well, both of which make it more viable than any other "underground" OS. Will there be a niche for a new(ish) OS of the type exemplified by Haiku in the ecosysystem of 2010? I don't know. But if there is, Haiku has a better chance of surviving to fill it than a completely original OS would.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I used and loved BeOS, and AmigaOS, and I still don't care about Haiku.
BeOS was amazing because it was written by a group of dedicated developers with a razor-sharp vision of how to design a great OS.
Haiku is an attempt to copy what those guys did a decade and a half ago.
One is really a lot less exciting than the other.
How the hell do you get a linux desktop to become unresponsive?
Run any app that gobbles up all the memory it can find, such Firefox when it goes out of control. Locks up my Linux machine *solid* for fifteen-twenty minutes until the OOM killer finally manages to run and kill the process.
A haiku is more
Than five, seven, and five words.
Fuck you, it's Spring!
BeOS was indeed impressive to play with way back. But I think a read of Ars Technica review of Mac OS X Snow Leopard might give you reason to adjust this view. There is mention of BeOS and its limitations in the discussion on Grand Central Dispatch, that might have led to a M$-like bottleneck in terms of paradigm.
A fast "media OS" with Amiga-like response? Sounds perfect for PVRs. MythTV on Haiku should beat the shit out of MythTV on Linux.
Except Intel is way behind on their decoding drivers. AMD is even further back. Aha: Nvidia's VDPAU works. Oops, except it's closed and therefore nobody can port it to anything.
So your PVR will decode using CPU.
What a shitty situation.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Ya damned pirate.. you know only pirates and terrorists use p2p
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I understand the issues and why they didn't, but its too bad they couldn't continue the PPC line for those of us about to be abandoned by Apple. Be was really cool on power PC and i still have my old CDs.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In 8 more days it will be autumn in the Northern Hemisphere.
And the weather's already broke here in southern California. Trees are shedding leaves like mad.
Fair enough...
In any case, I absolutely love the last line of that haiku... XD
Bow-ties are cool.
Senryuu mo
Haiku no uchi ni
Haitteru zo
=P
Too many moras... "senryuu" and "haitteru" are each five on their own... :)
Vega tatsu
Shoryuuken!
mata ochiru.
Bow-ties are cool.
I am wondering of they will send VMWare a virtual appliance. Nice
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
For all these years, I have held onto the Spellswell source code, and kept it safe, knowing that someday the Phoenix of Haiku would rise from the ashed of Be, Inc. (Or rather, I just don't like to ever throw anything away.)
I also still have all the protocol specification documents. I just gotta organize them and throw them up on the web again.
Word Services actually still works on Mac OS X, but not yet with Spellswell. We never did Carbonize it. Eventually Working Software was dissolved, and we all went our separate ways. But I expect I'll release an OS X-Native Spellswell at some point as well.
Some things never die... Spellswell was originally published by Green, Johnson Inc. before Mike Green and Dave Johnson split up into Cassady and Green and Working Software. My understanding is that it could check Microsoft Word 1.0 documents on the 128k Mac. It was a huge hit, before Microsoft added a built-in speller to Word.
A lot of that code from 1984 is still in there, for example an incredibly elaborate dictionary file format that provides compression while at the same time being editable.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Oops, embarrassing, I always thought it was. Perhaps I just picked up the wrong idea somewhere - Google found me a whole raft of people who thought BeOS was a microkernel.
I'm actually a bit disappointed, in a way. I'm a fan of variety in operating systems and being a hybrid kernel (which I'd generally count as a different way of structuring what I'd call a monolithic kernel, though people seem to vary on their uses of these terms) is less different to the current popular OSes than a microkernel would have been :-(
Do you have a link for that FAQ btw, I didn't have much luck finding it on their newly revamped site. It's be really nice to see some more general architectural documentation about their kernel, which I should perhaps go hunting for. I grubbed around in their kernel code for a while recently but I just got an overview of what the APIs generally looked like and what filesystems were there.
It's so much harder to plug an ethernet cable into your neighbour's router without them noticing.
A lot of access points used to support what's called a station mode; i.e. you can plug a wired device into them, and they'll take care of that pesky wireless connection to the neighbour's open access point. It was intended as a way to allow wired devices to participate in wireless networks e.g. ethernet printservers, game consoles etc.
I know my crappy old Minitar mnwapb does this, and 11b from something in my roof would be LOTS better than a *really* flakey 11g connection from something on my kitchen table. Not that I'd do that sort of thing, of course...
"but no WiFi support means I can't connect to the Internet"
Err, have you never heard of an ethernet cable?
It's so much harder to plug an ethernet cable into your neighbour's router without them noticing.
Not if you garotte them with the ethernet cable first.
I am anarch of all I survey.
I made the same mistake when I read about Haiku, since I stopped following BeOS after Be went out of business.
I used to use BeOS R5 exclusively for awhile, and then I kept it around some time after that with the patches (like the BONE net stack which was in development at Be Inc and which got leaked).
Then there were all these projects that sprouted up... BlueEyedOS, OpenBeOS, YellowTab Zeta... as well as questions about what Palm might do with BeOS. And of course there were a ton of Mac, Linux, and Windows themes to mimic BeOS. At first, I think BlueEyedOS seemed to have the most going for it since it was based on Linux and had a head start.
Years later and I hear about Haiku, and didn't realize this is what used to be OpenBeOS which was not based on Linux at all. I think a lot of people who have been out of the loop for so many years might, like me, be thinking Haiku is based on Linux like BlueEyedOS was.
From BIOS to GUI in 5seconds!! IN THE 90's!
That experience chaped important parts of how i view software.
From that day i have the 5 second barrier for deciding what's slow
and what's fast.
Forever spoiled.
Imagine if BeOS was alive today on 2009 monsters we got now,
It would bring up the GUI before we finished depressing the
Power-button :D
I've tried Haiku builds in VMWare and VBox now and then. Frankly, I get the feeling BeOS was 90% marketing hype and 10% fanboys hype. Maybe back when it started out it had a shot at being relevant, but that fell away when they failed to make any market headway in any direction. Haiku is cute and it's nice to see all these people claiming that it's so responsive, etc, etc, etc but honestly, it's not as though there are any running instances of Haiku at the moment loaded up with more than a trivial set of software. My Linux work system, on the other hand, is busy running multiple web-browsers, multiple database servers, a full-text search engine and VirtualBox without breaking a sweat. it's easy to think your horse is fast when it's not loaded down with anything that impedes its movement.
It was my first post Windows non-Windows computer (if that makes any sense) and I loved it. I completely forgot about it since it's taken forever but I will definitely be looking into this.