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Comment by qubex | Hacker News Reader

The BeOS kernel is as totally un-UNIX-like as (say) Windows NT/2K/XP/7/8/10, designed from the bottom-up to be “pervasively multi-threaded” at a time when multi-core chips were at least fifteen years away and multi-processor systems were utterly exotic, lacking even the most fundamental UNIX precepts (everything-is-a-file; multi-user environment; GUI mandatory and in-built). It just ‘seems’ UNIX-ish at first glance because it has a POSIX compatibility layer added on top in hindsight (or foresight) to provide a standardised shell and GNU userland utilities, as well as providing the key compiler toolchain (GCC 2-or-3-dot-something, if memory serves).

HAIKU is basically a clean-room reimplementation of the public (and private) framework modules' APIs and as such doesn't even (really) descend from BeOS-proper at all.

(Avid late-1990s BeOS user, dual PowerPC 603e-133 BeBox owner, HAIKU supporter.)

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> dual PowerPC 603e-133 BeBox owner

That's kind of amazing given how rare those were/are. I definitely can't top that, but I had a dual Pentium III machine that ran R5 (and ZETA for a while, which I had problems with) in the early 2000's. That thing seemed faster than the machines I have today. Good times.

Same here. Stuff flew on my little Celeron with 64MB of SDRAM. I could do so much stuff in BeOS that my Windows 2000 installation couldn't, like actually play a DVD full screen. I was so sad to see it go, it breathed life into a system everyone else would make fun of.

According to Wikipedia 800 or so were produced, so they're rare but not unheard-of. Mine was a much-desired Christmas present in 1997 when I was 16.

I also had a dual PIII-450 machine (alias “Mad Cow”) that dual-booted Windows NT/2K and BeOS R5 (but sadly only displayed B&W 800x600 due to lack of display-adapter driver support) and consequentially was nigh unusable.

If the card was VESA compatible, there were a number of display modes to select in the "safe mode" menu, which you could get to by pressing space on the boot screen.

> I also had a dual PIII-450 machine (alias “Mad Cow”)

Did you ever use that machine for BeShare back in the day? Because that name associated with BeOS really stands out in my memory. Or maybe, were you on Usenet back then?

Sorry for the pointed questions, just trying to sort out where I remember you from. I discovered BeOS a few months before they folded, and managed to buy 5.0 Pro while it was still being sold by GoBe. I still have my disc and book to this day along with the BeOS Bible and Be Advanced Topics, and I recently acquired an old Dell P-III system which runs it flawlessly (I just need to round up a PATA hard drive as its original drive died a noisy death a few hours after I powered it up).

I had been active on BeShare, yes. I probably used the ‘qubex’ username though.

Still got my (66mhz) BeBox here .. turn it on every year just to make sure it still boots (it does) but I never know what to do with it. Sure is fun to see the blinkenlights come up, though ..

Hell, the Linux kernel isn't very unix-ish. It's a kernel.

The Linux kernel might not be “very UNIX-ish” but the GNU/Linux integrated system clearly adheres to the basic UNIX philosophy (multi-user, everything-is-a-file, userland shell, non-mandatory non-privileged GUI).

Not all OSes have these same foundational pillars. What I meant to express is that Linux does whereas others (as disjoint as Genera, Windows NT, BeOS Amiga) don't.

In a sense Linux is more "unix" than most, as it seems to expose via virtual file systems what other _nix expose via APIs.

In this sense, plan 9 is more unix than unix....

In that sense the original UNIX kernel was not very unix-ish either. The unix philosophy to a large degree exempts the kernel, as few people will be directly interacting with it during daily usage.

You're referring to /proc and (more recently) /sys I presume. I'm sure you're aware of Plan9 that takes the everything-is-a-file idea to the logical extreme using it as a universal namespace by means of the P9000 (?) protocol (going way off-topic here).

9P? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9P_(protocol)

Yes i am aware, and i suspect the Linux devs were in part inspired by that (Linux may even support 9P, iirc).

Plan 9 was pretty much about taking the "everything is a file" thinking to its logical end point. Meaning that you could even manipulate individual GUI windows via the FS.

I was simply musing that Linux may have taken the concept further than the BSDs while still being "unix". I can't say i ever got the impression that Plan 9 was intended to be posix compatible for instance.

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