BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X
hackaday.com
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That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen Be over NeXT. The elephant in the room is security: NeXTSTEP, being Unix-based, has some amount of security baked in from the ground up. BeOS didn't; it was more akin to Windows 95 or classic Mac OS on that front. Consequently, I doubt it could have made it far into the 21st century. It would have died unceremoniously in a steaming pile of AYBABTU. Taking Apple with it, presumably.
Does that include the quality and security perspective as well? ;-) j/k
Having never crossed paths with a former Be employee before, __thank you so much__ for your contribution. BeOS was so instrumental to my perspective on computing and operating systems (and potentially the conception of my disdain for what Microsoft did to the world of operating systems around the turn of the century).
From a user perspective, BeOS was nearly perfect. Great UI and utilities, POSIX command line, so fast and responsive. The "install to Windows" option was amazing for trying things out. BeFS was wonderful (it's nice to see Mr. Giampaolo's work continue in macOS).
That's correct, the IPC in AOSP, Binder, is basically borrow from BeOS
I was sore about it at the time, but I agree that Apple made the right decision by choosing NextStep over BeOS. If for no other reason, because that's what brought Jobs back. It's hard to imagine Apple making their stunning comeback without him.
I’d always heard that after Amiga (and Be) many decided to opt for Linux for philosophical reasons.
Can I assume that the quality issues were somewhat related to that? BeOS devs found it no easier to write thread safe code in C++ than app devs did?
Thanks for the memories.
Yes. Except that it wasn’t acquiring NeXTSTEP that saved Apple’s skin; it was acquiring Steven P Jobs.
True, version 1 had been rough and flakey as hell, and honestly really didn’t work all that well.
But Steve 2.0? Damn, that one could sell.
You may have the finest tech on the planet—and that means precisely squat. What counts is putting bums on seats. Your seats. And keeping them there. Limps of tech are just a vehicle for that; to be used, abused, chewed up, and/or discarded on the road(s) to that end.
Apple could have done better; they certainly did plenty worse (Copland, Taligent, the first Mac OS).
As it turned out, NeXTSTEP proved it was indeed “good enough” to fit a pressing need at the time; and the rest was just hammering till it looked lickable enough for consumers to bite. All it was needed was a salesman to shift it—and Steve 2.0 proved to be one of the greatest salesman in modern marketing history.
That’s what made the difference between selling a tech to a million dyed-in-the-wirewool nerds, and selling tech to a billion everyday consumers. And then up-selling all of those customers to completely new worlds of products and services invented just for the purpose.
..
Want to created a whole new device? Hire Steve Wozniak.
Want to create a whole new world? Oh, but that is the real trick.
And Steve Jobs gave us the masterclass.
..
Had Steve started Be and Jean-Louis built NeXT, we would still be in the exact same situation today, and the only difference would be chunks of BeOS as the iPhone’s bones instead. Funny old world, eh? :)
Jobs was obviously talented, but assuming no matter where he went he would have had the same level of success is discounting a lot of luck in how everything lined up,and who was available to help bring all the things to market jobs is famous for. There's no guarantee the hundreds or thousands of people that were also essential to the major successes of Apple would have been around jobs had he stayed at Next. Those people deserve respect and recognition too.
Jobs was an outstanding product manager who sweated all the details for his products. And in contrast to Tim Cook, Jobs was a passionate user of actual desktop and laptop computers. He sweated the details of the iPhone too, but his daily driver was a mac, not an iPad. Cook is less into the product aspect, and it really really shows. Cook is a numbers and logistics guy, but not really into the product.
That's a thing I think Apple has fixed recently with some reshuffling and putting a product person (Jeff Williams) in the COO role. The COO role is also a signal that he'll be the next CEO when Tim Cook retires.
To be clear, I don't disagree that Jobs was a great marketer. But that stemmed from his own personal involvement with the product design of the mac--and later the iOS devices--rather than some weirdly prodigious knack for marketing.
You shouldn't talk about Sun like that.
OSX/macOS/iOS is the latest evolution of NeXTStep/Mach which originated in the Aleph (and other) academic kernels.
(of course OS's evolve pretty far in a few decades...)
Not quite. Everything in Foundation gets the NS prefix because it's in Foundation; only a fraction of it came directly from NeXT.
Neither OS had the kind of security that is really useful today for this usecase, which is per-application.
Personally I don't know Android innards deeply, but when I was trying to backup and restore a rooted phone I did notice that every app's files have a different owner uid/gid and the apps typically won't launch without that set up correctly. So it would seem they implemented per-app separation in this instance by having a uid per app.
Imagine a world where Google had chosen to build on a kernel that had spent many decades with no filesystem permissions at all. Perhaps they'd have to pay the same app compatibility costs that Microsoft did going from 9x to NT kernel, or changing the default filesystem to ACL'd-down NTFS.
Someone else pointed out that BeOS allegedly had "quality and security" problems in general (I myself have no idea), so that may indeed have led to problems down the line, whereas BSD was pretty solid. But I agree with the OP and don't think POSIX security in particular is much of a factor today.
Of course, that was in back in the days when an entire platform from hardware to userland could be exclusively optimized to utterly and comprehensively smash it in just one very specific and precisely targeted market. Which is, of course, exactly what the iPhone was.
Just as the first Apple Macintosh a decade earlier eschewed not only multi-user, multi-process, and even a kernel; every single bit and cycle its being being exclusive dedicated to delivering a revolutionary consumer UI experience instead!
In comparison, NeXTSTEP, which ultimately became iOS, is just one great huge glorious bodge. “Worse is Better” indeed!
..
Honesly, poor Be was just really unlucky in timing: a few years too late to usurp SGI; a few too early to take the vast online rich-content-streaming world all for its own. Just imagine… a BeOS-based smartphone hitting the global market in 2000, complete with live streaming AV media and conferencing from launch! And Oh!, how every Mac OS and Windows neckbeards would’ve screamed at that!:)
My guess is that by now in 2020, it would have at some point had an OSX moment where Commodore would have had to chuck it out, since both Apple and Microsoft have effectively done exactly that since then. Still, I'd love to peek into Amiga OS 9 descended from continual usage.
If you never evolved account based security, you never built the infra for even evaluating application permissions in the first place.
Separating admin user from non admin user always has advantages and I do it even on Windows.
We used to be able to trust intentionally installed programs not to exfiltrate data. It's sad that we still can't.
For example, suppose five computers have 1 user, 1 user, 1 user, 3 users, 300 users. The median is 1 user.
The claim of "median 1 user" just means more than half of computers has a single user.
I love everything I've read about BeOS but to be honest I must mention I couldn't understand how to use Haiku (I've never used the original BeOS) once I've tried - id didn't feel intuitive at all. And I'm not really stupid, I've been using different flavors of Linux as a primary OS for over a decade.
> That said, I don't think the world would be in a better place had Apple chosen Be over NeXT. The elephant in the room is security: NeXTSTEP, being Unix-based, has some amount of security baked in from the ground up. BeOS didn't; it was more akin to Windows 95 or classic Mac OS on that front.
Some times I miss the days of Windows 95 so much. I wish desktop OSes could be more simple, i.e. without multi-user and file access rights. When it's my own personal computer all I want of it from the security perspective is to prevent others from unlocking it or recovering data from it and to prevent any network communication except that I authorized. Sadly Linux still doesn't even have a decent implementation of the latter (Mac has LittleSnitch).
Windows 9x did pretty well for me - I've never caught a virus, never corrupted a system file and it was easy to fix for others who did.
Have a look into Oberon and its successor A2/Bluebottle.
So while it might not have been quite ready for the median System 7 user's expectations, it was pretty solid.
I was able to do most of the CS course work projects normally done on my University's Sun workstations on BeOS instead. Most of these of courses were data structures, algorithms, compilers, etc projects in C, and not things that required platform specific APIs.
But arguably, BeOS' overall model - a single user desktop OS built on top of but hiding its modern OS underpinnings like memory protection and preemptive multitasking - is far more similar to what eventually became MacOSX than Linux. Which isn't so surprising since it was built by ex apple folks. Remember that consumer OSs before this point had no memory protection or preemptive multitasking.
Linux, though it had the same modern OS features, was far more closely aligned in spirit with the timeshared modern multi-user Unix OS's like what ran the aforementioned Sun workstations (it's "Linus' Unix after all).
Also, let’s keep in mind that Windows95 (released that same year) featured preemptive multitasking on a desktop user OS (albeit not a strong memory protection model), and WindowsNT has been available for a couple of years by then (having first shipped in 1993, If memory serves) and was a fully ‘modern’ OS (indeed it serves as the basis for the latter Windows), albeit with a comparatively large footprint.
I was an avid BeOS user (and coincidentally a NeXT user too) and I was enthralled by its capabilities, but in terms of system architecture it was a dead end.
Unfortunately this meant BeOS was perpetually behind the curve on stuff like the World Wide Web. I had a native FreeBSD build of Netscape long before Be managed to get a decent browser.
Surely it had a cli, UNIX like directory navigation and a couple of UNIX command like utilities.
But good luck porting UNIX CLI software expecting a full POSIX environment.
If I am not mistaken, Haiku has done most of the work regarding POSIX support.
But you have to consider what else was going on at the time: Microsoft was actively moving away from the DOS lineage. OS/2 had been in development since the mid-1980s, and, while that project came to an ugly end, they had also released the first version of Windows NT in the early '90s, and, by the late '90s, they were purposefully moving toward building their next-gen consumer OS on top of it.
Apple needed to be making similarly strong moves toward a multi-user OS with concerns like security baked in deeply. BeOS had the memory protection and the pre-emptive multitasking, which were definitely steps forward, but I don't think they would have taken Apple far enough to allow them to keep up with Microsoft. Which, in turn, would have allowed Microsoft to rest on its laurels, probably to the detriment of the Windows ecosystem.
Anyways, Windows 10 may have its problems, but Microsoft the company is doing pretty well. Their stock is up about 50% this year (200% over the past 5). And that’s not to mention the fact that they’ve open sourced .NET among many other things.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us
Edit: removed the extra A in the acronym
Instead of competition, Apple survives off marketing medium quality products at high prices.
I'm not sure how that's good for anyone unless they own Apple stock.
And a huge part of Apple's current success is based on the tech and expertise they got from NeXT. That work underpins not just laptops and desktops but phones, tablets, set-top boxes, and more.
Apple's iPod wasn't the first mp3 player, and it for damn sure wasn't technically superior.
The iPhone was not the first smartphone, nor the first phone with a touchscreen, nor the first phone with a web browser, nor the first phone with an App Store. It arguably had a better UX than incumbents, but better UX doesn't win markets just by dint of existing.
The iMac was a cute computer that couldn't run prevalent Windows software and didn't have a floppy drive.
Recent MacBook Pros have an awful keyboard, not just aesthetically but with known hardware problems. I understand at long last they're reverting to an older, better design.
Tech and expertise don't win just because they exist.
The fact that it isn't a net good for users in most cases doesn't mean that it's trivial to do.
Maybe good marketing is really hard and you can't just "copy Apple"?
This seems like a failure of imagination.
I'm not a huge Apple fan, but I lived through the Bad Old Microsoft of the '90s, and grew up on stories of IBM of the '80s.
Apple is nothing like them.
- Pe was a great GUI text editor, competitive with BBEdit on the Mac
- GoBe Productive was comparable to AppleWorks, but maybe a little better at being compatible with Microsoft Office
- SoundPlay was a great MP3 player that could do crazy things that I still don't see anything doing 20 years later (it had speed control for files, including playing backwards, and could mix files that were queued up for playback; it didn't have any library management, but BeOS's file system let you expose arbitrary metadata -- like MP3 song/artist/etc. tags! -- right in file windows)
- Mail-It was the second-best email client I ever used, behind the now also sadly-defunct Mailsmith
- e-Picture was an object-based bitmapped graphics editor similar in spirit and functionality to Macromedia's Fireworks, and was something I genuinely missed for years after leaving BeOS
And there were other programs that were amazing, even though I didn't use them: Adamation's video editor (videoElements? something like that), their audio editor audioElements, Steinberg's Nuendo, objektSynth, and two programs which are incredibly still being sold today: Lost Marble's Moho animation program, now sold by Smith Micro for Mac and PC, and the radio automation package TuneTracker (incredibly now being sold as a turnkey bundle with Haiku). Also, for years, there was a professional-grade theatre light/audio control system, LCS CueStation, that ran on BeOS -- and it actually ran Broadway and Las Vegas productions. I remember seeing it running at the Cirque de Soleil permanent installation at Disney World in Orlando.
At the time Apple bought Next rather than Be, I thought they'd made a horrible mistake. Given Apple's trajectory afterward, of course, it's hard to say that looking back. It's very possible that if they'd bought Be, they'd have gone under, although I think that would have less to do with technology than with the management they'd have ended up with (or more accurately, stayed with). But it's still an interesting "what if."
This made BeOS (and BeBox) a great product in my mind; the ability to use it in unexpected ways.
NeXT hardware also failed but was the rightful choice for Apple over Be due to getting NeXTSTEP and Jobs again. But even after the war is over, we're now all generals.
Why wasn't it called BeBeEdit?!
what's the name of the 2d illustration software that modelled real wet paint brushes and textured pencils? That was unlike anything I'd seen at the time, I remember putting quite a lot of effort into finding a compatible wacom.
(These are fuzzy memories from ~25 years ago. It would be nice if someone could confirm this story or tell me if it's just my imagination.)
The 8-way PIII Xeon was a Compaq someone tested BeOS on before it went into production. I Remember it being posted on some BeOS news site. There should be another screenshot or two with 25 avi files playing and a crap load of CPU hungry programs running at once. Impressive feat circa 2000. Edit: browse the screenshot directory for the other two. Amazing they survived time, internet, bit rot and my memory: http://birdhouse.org/beos/8way/
The BeOS scheduler prioritized the GUI and media programs so you could load the machine down to 100% and the GUI never stuttered and windows could be smoothly moved, maximized and minimized at 100% CPU. Rather, your programs would stutter. And everything was given a fair chance at CPU time.
Very nice design and the OS was built from the ground up for multimedia and threading for SMP. It was a real nice attempt at building a next generation desktop OS. Had no security even though it had basic POSIX compatibility and a bash shell. Security bits meant nothing.
MacOS prior to OS X had the same property: literally nothing else could happen at the same time if the user was moving the mouse, which is why you had to take the ball out of the mouse before burning a CD-R on that operating system.
You’re only partially correct about classic macOS: you could definitely hang the OS by holding down the mouse button but this wasn’t a problem for playing music, burning CD-Rs, etc. in normal usage unless you had the cheapest of low-end setups because a small buffer would usually suffice. I worked with a bunch of graphic designers back then and they didn’t get coasters at a significant rate or more than their Windows-using counterparts, and they burned a lot of them since our clients couldn’t get large files over a network connection faster than weeks.
Among these chips was one called "OS chip" you had from the very beginning. If you'd try to replace that or simply exchange it for another one you "died" instantly and were greeted by the end-credits.
??
I wish we had more options today. On modern x86 hardware, you pretty much just have Windows, Linux and maybe FreeBSD/OpenBSD if you replace your Wi-Fi card with an older one (or MacOS if you're feeling Hackintoshy .. or just buy Apple hardware). I guess three is kinda the limit you're going to hit when it comes to broad support.
http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/WindowManager?...
What technically enabled this on such limited hardware? Was there lack of security/containerization/sandboxing that made os call much faster and context switches better?
Be had well written multi threading and preemptive multitasking implemented on a clean slate - no compatibility hacks required. That meant it worked well and was quick/responsive. There were still limits, and the OS didn't have many security protections that would get written in today.
That depended _very_ heavily on your graphics card at the time. In 2001, I could get X to crash on my work computer if I shook my mouse too fast. At home on my matrox card, yes, it was rock stable.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_accelera...
And it still happens occasionally, while my Windows 10 userspace drivers just reinitialize instead of locking the OS.
No comment in regards to the 9x line. ;)
But did video formats back then use delta frames?
Of course that might have changed if they added more system services, but from POST screen to a usable desktop was easily under 15 seconds.
That sounds just as good? Compared to quad-booting Win98/Win2000/BeOS5/Slackware, today you could quad-boot Win10/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Ubuntu. Actually, depending on what you count as different systems and what exact hardware you have, you could have 2 laptops sitting on your desk: a pinebook running your choice of netbsd, openbsd, freebsd, or some linux (https://forum.pine64.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=107), and an x86 laptop multibooting Windows 10, Android, Ubuntu GNU/Linux, Alpine Busybox/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Redox (https://www.redox-os.org/screens/). That's 2 processor families in 2 machines running what I would count as 4 and 8 operating systems each.
I think we're doing fine.
By the time the Pentium came around, the future looked like a completely monotonous stretch of Windows NT on x86 for ever and ever, amen. No serious hardware competition, other than Intel being smart enough to not kill AMD outright for fear of antitrust litigation, and no software competition on the desktop, with OSS OSes being barely usable then (due to an infinite backlog of shitty hardware like Winmodems and consumer-grade printers) and Apple in a permanent funk.
We were perpetually a bit afraid that Microsoft/Intel would pull something like Palladium/Trustworthy Computing [1] and lock down PC hardware but good, finally killing the Rebel Alliance of Linux/BSD, but somehow the hammer never quite fell. It did in the cell phone world, though, albeit in an inconsistent fashion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi...
Microsoft and Intel really seemed permanent back then. I wonder if that's how people felt about IBM back in the 1950s.
https://www.osnews.com/story/681/be-inc-files-suit-against-m...
Desktops are now a niche product, where buying cards has to be done mostly online, with most malls having only laptops and 2-1 on display.
Servers are away in some cloud, running virtualized OSes on top of a level-1 hypervisor.
I agree that phones are more locked down than desktops/laptops nowadays, but it's worth pointing out that neither Microsoft or Intel are really winners in this area. They both still are doing fairly well in the desktop/laptop in terms of market share though.
A few years earlier things were a little more bleak.
BeOS was always a very tasteful design. And well documented! I learned so much about low level programming from the Be Newsletters: https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/index.html. The BONE article is a great introduction to how a network stack works: https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue5-5.h.... I still have a copy of Dominic Giampalo’s BeFS book somewhere.
BeOS was very much a product of its time. (Microkernel, use of C++, etc.) What would a modern BeOS look like? My thought: use of a memory and thread safe language like Rust for the main app-level APIs. (Thread safety in BeOS applications, where every window ran in its own thread, was not trivial.) Probably more exokernel than microkernel, with direct access to GPUs and NICs and maybe even storage facilitated by hardware multiplexing. What else?
Haiku. (0)
But if you change your question to "What would a modern OS look like?"
Fuchsia. (1)
The only relationship that they have is that a kernel engineer called Travis Geiselbrecht designed NewOS (Haiku's modified kernel) and Zircon (Fuchsia's Microkernel).
That's the premise of Jason Scott's project launched in 1998 :) http://textfiles.com/
There's a bit of BeOS in Android. Binder IPC is much like BMessage. And nowadays everyone puts stuff like graphics and media in a separate user space daemons, which was unusual for the time. Pervasive multithreading basically happened in the form of pervasive multiprocessing.
I still remember how incredible it was the rotating cube demo where you coud drag and drop images and videos on the cube faces... it worked without a glitch on my pentium.
Just found out the demo video shows the application with a GL wave surface playing a video over it: https://youtu.be/BsVydyC8ZGQ?t=1074
The responsiveness of the UI was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Unfortunately BeOS fell by the wayside, but I have such fond memories I keep meaning to give Haiku a shot.
When Be wrote that demo the situation is that the other operating systems you might plausibly choose all have working video acceleration. Even Linux has basic capabilities in this area by that point. BeOS doesn't have that and doesn't have a road map to get it soon.
So, any of the other platforms can play full resolution video captured from a DVD for example, a use case actual people have, on a fairly cheap machine and BeOS won't be able to do that without a beast of a CPU because it doesn't have even have hardware colour transform acceleration or chromakey.
But - 1990s hardware video acceleration can only play one video at a time, because "I want to play three videos" isn't a top ask from actual users. So, Be's demo deliberately shows several different postage stamp videos instead of one higher resolution video, as the acceleration is no help to competitors there.
And then since you're doing it all in software, not rendering to a rectangle in hardware, the transform to have this low res video render as one side of a cube or textured onto a surface makes it only very slightly slower, rather than being impossible.
Audiences come away remembering they saw BeOS render videos on a 3D surface, and not conscious that it can't do full resolution video on the cheap hardware everybody has. Mission success.
2D acceleration was more than enough.
http://rudolfs-place.nl/BeOS/NVdriver/3dnews.html
On Linux you didn't need OpenGL, just Xv.
Source: I was there, with an Athlon. Playing DVD's.
"Would Tim Berners-Lee have used a BeBox to run the world’s first web server instead?"
The BeBox didn't ship until 1995. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first version of the web in 1991. So nope, that wouldn't have happened.
For this hypothetical scenario to ever had been possible, BeOS would’ve had to time travel, as TBL wrote WorldWideWeb on a NeXT machine in 1990[0]. BeOS was initially developed in 1991 per Wikipedia[1] and the initial release of BeOS to the public wasn’t until 1995.
Crushed by Microsoft's anti-competitive business practices and sold for scrap to a failing company who was unable to actually do anything with parts they wound up with but who never the less made damn sure that no one else could either.
From what I can see from using Haiku for a bit, it has the bazar community element from the open-source culture with its package management and ports system from Linux and BSD whilst being conservative with its design from its apps, UI, and SDK like macOS. Although I have tired it and its surprisingly "useable", the driver story is still a bit lacking. But from a GUI usability point of view compared with many Linux distros, it feels very consistent unlike the countless confusing interfaces coming from those distros.
Perhaps BeOS lives on in the Haiku project, but whats more interesting is that the real contender who learned from its failure is the OS that has its kernel named 'Zircon'.
I feel like if they launched a better experience for existing Windows users, it would have done much better.
- So was Opera
That's a hell of an understatement right there. It still doesn't have any capability for accelerated video, does it?
Unfortunately that's the story for any OS these days that isn't already firmly established. Which is a huge shame since they all suck in their own ways.
Maybe because we're coming at this from the wrong perspective?
I love the theoretical idea that I could build a generic x86 box that can boot into any OS I feel like using, but has that ever truly been the case? We certainly don't pick software this way—if you're running Linux, you're not going to buy a copy of Final Cut and expect it to work.
Well-established software will of course work almost everywhere, but niche projects don't have the ability. Unless you use something based on Java or Electron, which is equivalent to using Virtualbox (or ESXi) in this comparison.
It's long been said that one of Apple's major advantages with macOS is they don't need to support any hardware under the sun. Non-coincidentally, the recommended way to make a Hackintosh is to custom build a PC and explicitly select Mac-compatible hardware.
Now, if an OS doesn't for instance have support for any model GPUs at all, cherry picking hardware won't help. But perhaps this is where projects like BeOS need to focus their resources.
Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if we weren't constrained by real world requirements? If I were to write an OS today, the hardware I'm targeting may become quite rare and/or expensive tomorrow. Or it may just go out of fashion. Regardless, very few people are going to buy new hardware just to try out an OS they're not even sure they want to use yet.
We do not. But that (and proper power management) basically all that's missing at this point; the rest are "just bugs".
That is to say: WiFi, ethernet, USB, SSDs, EFI, etc. should all work on the majority of hardware, both current and past.
But ultimately the deathblow came from Apple which, after struggling with low sales and poor quality software, almost chose to buy BeInc's tech but dropped it so they could bring in Steve Jobs. So it was more like vendor lock-in (Windows) and corporate deals (Apple) as well as failing partners (Palm).
> Apple's due diligence placed the value of Be at about $50 million and in early November it responded with a cash bid "well south of $100 million," according to Gassée. Be felt that Apple desperately needed its technology and Gassée's expertise. Apple noted that only $20 million had been invested in Be so far, and its offer represented a windfall, especially in light of the fact that the BeOS still needed three years of additional expensive development before it could ship (it didn't have any printer drivers, didn't support file sharing, wasn't available in languages other than English, and didn't run existing Mac applications). Direct talks between Amelio and Gassée broke down over price just after the Fall Comdex trade show, when Apple offered $125 million. Be's investors were said to be holding out for no less than $200 million, a figure Amelio considered "outrageous."
> ...With Be playing hard to get, Apple decided to play hardball and began investigating other options.
(Though I could be totally wrong on this, and welcome a correction.)
MacOS probably does a similar thing too.
I am a mobile dev and use a plethora of iOS and Android devices all the time, often on many different software versions.
It’s not unique to any platform, and seems to be most often affecting the keyboard input, but occasionally seems to affect the rest of the UI as well.
Software updates will oscillate between breaking and fixing these things on and off between different devices.
I’ve been doing app development since iOS 3 and the first version of the App Store and used an ADP1. There’s no method to the madness I can see. Especially with the keyboard input.
Lord help you if you happen to be using a 4S or 5 or iPad 2/3. I often wait for up to 10-15 seconds for text input to catch up to itself, only to catch up to itself all at once - I can type whole sentences knowing by the time I wait for them to finish it’ll be the same 10-15 seconds to wait as if I’ve typed a single character.
I run Haiku on my ThinkPad E550 (2015), I know some of the other devs run on Dell XPS 13, HPs, etc. And the same is true in towers (Ryzen is becoming a popular pick.)
GPU acceleration drivers are the one real kind of driver we lack at this point.
Also POSIX would be even less relevant, and very few would be buying BeOS X for doing Linux coding.
I think in your alternate universe it’s likely we’d have seen something entirely different emerge.
GNUStep still looks much like to the on the same state it used to be when I was using WindowMaker in the late 90's.
I regretted the time I once spent on the GNUStep room at FOSDEM, as the only subjects of relevance seemed to be the theme engine, as if there wasn't anything more relevant to get working properly.
Though it's entirely possible Jobs would have tossed the BeOS tech along with Quickdraw GX, Newton, etc.
I don't think I'd enjoy a GNU userland/glibc/Linux monoculture, quite honestly. I'm glad POSIX exists to have a slightly less moving target.
The only successful UNIX desktop is OS X.
And it isn't at all relevant on mobile OSes.
C++ in a non-standard version as compiled by gcc 2.96 release! Awesome.
In fact, Haiku does support more modern toolchains and the BeOS R5 is only kept around due to ABI issues with binary only BeOS software.
It seemed clear to me that Android would be a bust for smartphone manufacturers (nobody has really made money off of Android except for Google and Samsung, the latter of whom accomplished this by dominating that market).
If Sony, for example, had gotten ahold of BeOS and tried to vertically integrate in a manner similar to Apple, they could have been a contender.
Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning Was the Command Line has quite a lot of interesting observations about BeOS during its prime. http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html
We will all come back to this comment in 10 years to find ourselves running Fuchsia on our phones, tablets and our new Pixelbooks.
Ironically the only good (IMO, obviously) Outlook client is Android.
Really curious how the Surface Duo turns out. Weird form factor aside, Microsoft embracing Android on a branded device is interesting.
I found a (very bad) recording of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQW-q2vp6W4
I just checked the discs and it's the same "Deluxe Edition RC2" as in that home shopping video. I think my copies were bought as special advance preview builds for third-party Zeta developers, though. And I don't think I paid as much as 100EUR...
This book was a great read back in the day of what goes into a "modern" filesystem design
https://archive.org/details/practical-file-system-design
https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/qnx621
(I know that QNX was and still is widely used - the "tech demo" bit refers to its use as a primary desktop OS, not the usual embedding scenarios.)
I had a Passport for a while. A lovely phone, and the OS had an Android runtime so _some_ Android apps worked... but like other OSes that let you run non-native apps, it resulted in BB10 never attaining a critical mass of apps.
Had to order a USB CD/DVD burner off of Amazon to write the ISO to a CD as I didn't actually own any hardware with a CD/DVD burner anymore :D
It's been interesting. The browser isn't quite all there yet but might be considered serviceable, and you can sort of get a working dev environment going on it (not many modern runtimes, though, nor a way to run Linux binaries that would let me do Clojure).
It's certainly worth keeping an eye on, although there were some weird decisions - for instance, I remember a thread on ARM support where whomever was tackling that was completely dissing the Raspberry Pi, and yet today, if I were to install it permanently on any machine to tinker with, it would almost certainly be a Pi...
The pi is such a great device for this. If I were working on any niche operating system (or building one from scratch), I'd target qemu first, and the pi second. It may not be the nicest hardware out there, but it is a single platform that loads of people have, that allows trivial disk swapping (upside of no onboard flash -> everything on swappable SD card), and is dirt cheap.
Apple saw this, so didn't want to pay as much as they might have if it were selling well on it's own.
So Apple ended up going with NeXT "instead of plan Be" as it were.
OEMs had an option, yes they would had to pay more for licenses, but no one pointed them a gun, or did visits mafia style to forbid them to sell other systems.
Jobs was able to squeeze Microsoft. In a way I don't think any one else would or could.
Referring to Microsoft outright stealing Apple's IP and Gates' subsequent settlement. The $150m investment. The commitment to maintain Office on Mac. Forever license to all of Microsoft's API, enabling Mail.app to have pretty great integration with Exchange, for example.
BeOS was probably the better tech. But Jobs had the better strategies and the better team.
Compare this to Jonathan Schwartz cotemporaneous mismanagement of Sun's amazing IP, snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. Schwartz just wasn't a bare knuckled brawler like Jobs.
All conjecture. Had I finished my Java port (BeKaffe), the world would run on BeOs :).
The real win was a mobile future sans Microsoft. I doubt smart phones would be what they are today if not for the iPhone, and the iPhone required huge resources and a maniac cracking the whip. Would Jony Ive leave a failing Apple and work with Steve? If not, would we even have the iPod let alone the iPhone?
On the plus side, Nokia might have still been around.
Fans think they're helping. If there's a hardware product then as a fan I should buy it right? Well, no, that's a subsidised development toolkit. Every unit that ships is VC sunk in the hope you'll write like Photoshop or Mosaic or 1-2-3 or something and create a market for this new system. When you instead compile two demo apps, call the support line to ask how to plug a mouse in, and tell all your friends to buy one as well, you are in fact not helping.
This is also because Be's original plan says competing with Windows is suicide (it was). They're going to build a system which is NOT a competitor for Windows, it's a whole separate environment. Maybe you have a Windows PC to do billing and surf that new Web, but in your studio you have a BeOS system and it doesn't matter that it can't print because that's not what it's for.
Be shouldn't have made it to the turn of the century, nowhere close. In 1998 the investors should have said we're sorry, there isn't money for this to continue Jean-Louis, better luck next time, and turn off the lights. BeOS gets sold off to whoever is in the market for pennies. But they got "lucky" they were in the right place at the right time. In 1999 you could raise an IPO for a dog turd so long as the offering paperwork said "Internet" on it and you were based on the US West Coast. The institutions got out, those fans who'd squandered the company's money and opportunity years earlier got in to replace them, and they all lost their shirts. In the process Be Inc. bought itself an extra couple of years runway.
(Edited to fix name)
tiBook was bonkers. Suddenly, I didn't really need to sit in the room, surrounded by boxes, but rather could go to the park and access the room from under a tree.
If Be had managed to capture that, I think it would have been an amazing time. Imagine if SGI had pulled off the first titanium, unibody laptop, designed specifically for 3D. Would Alien-ware?
If there had been a BeLaptop, things might have been a lot different in 2000/2001, when things started to look very, very interesting.
I mean, the fact that Apple shipped a Unix laptop when all the other 'super-' vendors were unable to pull it off.,,
More info for the curious: https://www.macworld.com/article/2918513/the-powerbook-g4-ti...
That was the time period when ordinary users could be persuaded to pay money for their operating systems and major upgrades.
We also had a NeXT tower, three SGI machines running IRIX, a Mac upon which someone had installed Mac OS X Server 1.0 (NeXT innards, UI looked like classic MacOS).
I kind of miss the diversity of systems we had back then. In many ways we've gone forward – tinkering is much easier now with the preponderance of cheap, fast dev boards and systems like the Raspberry Pi, but it does feel like actual user-facing stuff is now largely locked down, without as much innovation and competition.
Android, iOS, Chrome, Facebook - everything is monopolized nowadays. Governments should really consider supporting alternative OSes, browsers and social networks for sake of national security as the monopolies enjoy too much power over the whole humanity nowadays.
Perhaps with this idea the only companies able to do this are Apple, Microsoft and Google. Every other OS aiming to be a new desktop OS has essentially failed. Including the Linux desktop community and everyone else.
The desktop OS market only has room for 2 or luckily 3 and always requires at least a billion-dollar (in profit) tech company with such resources to even plan for years to do such a thing. Hence the fierce competition in this space, some may ask themselves why bother.
> but that probably won't work either since people are a lot less likely to try out your OS if they need to buy a new computer to do so.
The exception to that is Google with ChromeOS (Laptops) and Android (Mobile) which they're probably both replacing with Fuchsia. I'd expect Fuchsia running pixelbooks and phones to arrive in this decade. Which will make the desktop market as Windows, macOS and Fuchsia OS.
Unfortunately they all have perverse incentives that run counter to everything that makes personal computing valuable.
> Apple’s decision to go with NeXT and Jobs was doubly perilous for us. Not only would we not be the next MacOS, Jobs immediately walked third party Mac hardware makers to their graves. No more Mac clones for BeOS. With tepid BeBox sales and no future on the Mac, Valley VCs weren’t keen for another round of funding — and the 1995 round was running out.
I know it’s not universally loved but OSX/nextstep for me is really everything I could have wanted from an operating system.
... But no programs that I wanted ran on it! As cool as BeOS was, without programs, it was little more than a demo or a hobby.
Within a year I tried Windows NT and Windows 2000, and then forgot all about BeOS. Windows 2000 did everything that BeOS did for me, didn't crash, and ran all the programs I wanted to.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/eku19u/du...
(first POST should have gone to slashdot really, ah well.)
Dev tools.
Remember Steve Ballmer's "Developers! Developers! Developers!" dance? https://youtu.be/I14b-C67EXY?t=10
He was right. Without developers for a new OS, you are dead in the water. Which is my MS has fought so hard to keep compatibility.
Apple had to switch OS. That meant it had to persuade all its devs to switch OS. That meant it had to offer the devs something very special, and that something was NeXTstep and Interface Builder. NeXT's dev tools were the best in the software business and _that_ offered trad Mac devs a good enough reason to come across.
Be had nothing like that.
BeOS was wonderful, but it was not a replacement for NeXTstep as a replacement for MacOS.
But there was another company out there.
BeOS was a natively multiprocessor OS, when that was very rare. One of the reasons is that in fast x86 computers, the x86 chip is one of the most expensive single components in the machine, and it puts out most of the heat.
Especially at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, the era of big fat Slot 2 Pentium IIIs and worse still Pentium 4s.
But there was one company making powerful desktops with the cheapest, coolest-running CPUs in the world, where making a dual-processor machine _in 1998_ was barely more expensive than making a uniprocessor one.
That company's CPUs are the best-selling CPUs ever designed and outsell all x86 chips put together (Intel + AMD + Via etc.) by well over 10 to 1.
And it needed a lightweight, SMP-capable OS very badly, right at the time Be was porting BeOS from PowerPC to x86...
Pretty cool BeOS still lives on in the audio/video/broadcasting industry.
However, all these years later, I'm very glad that BeOS wasn't selected.
Also, NeXTStep became Cocoa, which knocked PowerPlant into a cocked hat. That may not be as compelling an argument. I heard that the BeOS framework was damn nice (never tried it, myself).
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Mike Crawford RIP: Wrote spellswell: https://github.com/ErisBlastar/spellswell
and word services: https://github.com/ErisBlastar/wordservices
It was taken from one of his old sites before he lost control of it.
If you clicked the page of the book and dragged it around, it simulated the page turning and the video deforming, without skipping a frame.
I may've only been 12, but that demo has stuck with me since.
Edit: I would love to lay eyes on that demo again if anyone has an idea of where video of it may still exist.
Without taking anything away from actual new things introduced in BeOS, preemptive multitasking and dual CPUs were not "brand new". Computer system had been doing these for a long time before 1995, or even 1991 when BeOS was initially developed. Heck, minicomputers were doing this stuff in the 80's!
Of course you lost in a battle or even a campaign does not mean you just lost the war.
The world is better with Steve, Microsoft with competition ...
Now we even have Microsoft having GitHub and linux running on windows.
Not if it is BeOS.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/d8e54k/window_mak...
I appreciated that the OS didn't coddle you.
Had JLG not fucked up the deal, they would have picked up BeOS and not NeXT.
When I worked at a dot-com 1.0 failed startup in 1999 one of our big wigs was a former exec at Be, and he was like the coolest dude I knew at the time. Still up there.
Even IBM with OS/2 couldn't surmount the juggernaut network effect of Windows. By 1990, this was apparent to many. It's odd that Gassée and company thought they could succeed where IBM had failed.
Indeed, the BeBox should have looked like this to succeed: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Ap...
That computer made Apple cool again, and paved the way for their recovery way before the iPhone skyrocket.
The iPod was 2001, 3 years after the first iMac.
Maybe Microsoft's ties to the PC industry would have killed it anyway but IBM was kinda lost on what it meant to sell an OS to consumers.
The problem I think was that Microsoft competed hardest in the enterprise space, which was supposed to be IBM’s roost. Apple went after creatives. It’s not clear what was left for a hypothetical third place contender.
John Thompson doesn't want to be in the "kitchentop" business... Dumb ass.
I spoke to him years ago. If I recall he worked for Be before moving to Sidekick…
I don't miss the segfaults that I experienced time after time and strange stateful consistency errors from when I was programming in the BeOS, and I don't miss biting my knuckles when having to recast data as (void*) in order to send it to another thread, now that I'm programming in ERTS. I do however strongly appreciate the experience, because it was a hell of a lot of fun, and, importantly, I learned that you can't use a buffered matrix mult to save on memory allocations, because you don't know that your preemptive kernel won't kick you out midway through the matrix mult and start filling the bins with data from the other thread.
I would say that half of the reason why I am really adept at identifying race conditions in erlang is that I've seen them all, and worse, in BeOS.
And the BeOS runtime does not have half of the resilience and fault isolation properties that Erlang has, which is what I mean by "half hearted and primitive".
[0] https://depot.haiku-os.org/#!/pkg/rust_bin/haikuports/1/36/0...