The BeOS file system: an OS geek retrospective | Hacker News Reader

The BeOS file system: an OS geek retrospective

arstechnica.com

62 pointswhalesalad12 comments

BeOS and QNX remain to this day some of my favorite OSs, in terms of being designed rather than grown (people often say this about BSD, but BSD is based on Unix, and Unix was grown) and complete (ie, packaging, window management, all tools implemented with accompanying control panels, etc).

Yep. I've used many of the operating systems throughout computing history, and BeOS still remains my favorite, in terms of its design and usability. It's a damn shame it died such an early death.

I keep hoping that someday modern operating systems will catch up to it. ;-)

BeOS and QNX both featured work by Dominic Giampaolo. He now works at Apple on their file system and Spotlight.

And I’m frustrated every day that several years after he started at Apple, BeOS still does a much better job w/r/t user-extensible metadata than OS X does.

The history of filesystems produced by Ars in 2008 is a good read: http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/03/past-present-fu...

> Even though it was written at a time when systems typically had only 8MB of RAM and a mere 9GB of disk storage

Is that right? I remember upgrading to 8MB with a 120MB disk which cost a fortune (and using hundreds of floppies for programs... well games :) )

Wasn't something around 2GB a bios-level limit for disk space in those times?

In 1997, when the article says BFS was created, I had a Pentium 100 with 8mb of RAM and a 8gb disk.

EDIT: For comparison, the iMac G3 that I bought a year later had 32mb of RAM and a 4gb disk

The computer my family got in 1996 had 8 MB of memory and (I believe) 512 MB of disk space. Some IBM beige box running windows 3.1, if I recall correctly.

Edit: I also remember that upgrading it to 16 MB of memory cost us a couple hundred dollars. Fun times.

While we are are looking back, my first computer was 166 MHz K6 (I think), 32 MB of ram and 1.6 GB HDD. Probably wasn't that good of deal even then.

Mine was an Atari 520ST. First DOS computer was a 286-12, which we upgraded to 286-16. Yes, 4mhz was an upgrade!

I sometimes wish I was about five years younger (I'm 29) - when I first got into making stuff on computers the languages were too much effort for even the tiniest result.

Mine was a Sinclair ZX-81 clone made by a Brazilian company called Prologica.

I was about to jokingly say "beat that" but someone here must have had a vanilla ZX and this one came with a whooping 16K.

My PC I had for University, bought in late 1994, had 16MB RAM (which was huge), typical PC in that era ('92-94) was 4MB RAM, which was considered the minimum to run Window 3.1. I think the 8MB figures are a little wide of the marque, by 1997 most machines I saw were already hitting 32MB upwards, by 1998 many were hitting 128MB at the upper end to run Windows NT 4.0.

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