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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

Some useful bits from IRC:

[16:21] <ocdtrekkie_web> Why's it public (mirrored to GitHub even) but not announced or even documented what it's for?

[16:22] <@swetland> ocdtrekkie_web: the decision was made to build it open source, so might as well start there from the beginning

[16:22] <lanechr> ocdtrekkie_web: things will eventually be public, documented and announced, just not yet

[16:23] <@swetland> currently booting reasonably well on broadwell and skylake NUCs and the Acer Switch Alpha 12, though driver support is still a work in progress

[16:24] <@travisg> yeah and soon we'll have raspberry pi 3 support which should be interesting to some folk

Sidebar comment: I wonder how much more activity this thread would be getting if the subject line had "by Google" in it. LOL

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Hmm, Travis Geiselbrecht of NewOS, Danger and BeOS fame and Brian Swetland of BeOS fame as well? Interesting.

I did also work on this Android thing that shipped on a few phones over the years, as well as on Danger/HiptopOS.

(Not that I'm not proud of my BeOS work, but that was almost 20 years ago now...)

Travis should get credit for work on iOS and WebOS too, if we're keeping score, I suppose!

Hehe, sure, and you could say Android is HiptopOS-the-next-generation. FWIW, I've also omitted Travis's Jawbone work. I mean, it was very public where Travis worked after Be, but I didn't really know what you have been up to, sorry that I didn't know more.

BeOS stands out to me, and I honestly don't care how long ago it was. WebOS was nice, but Android and iOS don't even register on my personal radar of cool tech. I hope you're not offended by that. For instance, while it was possible to do low-latency audio on BeOS in 1998, it's only possible with a lot of trickery on Android. You can do low-latency audio on Linux and Windows too, but again it needs special tooling and config, though not as hard as on Android's Java-based stack.

Think of it like this: people will remember artists for certain work during specific periods because it touched them in a special way. BeOS was that during my formative years, and you could say it was the Amiga of the 90s. Sadly, there's nothing that replaces the innovative features of it, even though we've improved other parts of the stack.

It's just such a shame that BeOS is locked in some IP locker in Japan (Access Ltd) now.

Not at all offended. BeOS did a lot of neat stuff and was ahead of its time in many ways. It had its warts too and sadly did not survive, though the Haiku folks have been working hard to re-create it over the years. Much of that has surfaced in other platforms since then (node monitoring and a true device filesystem were big features of BeOS I liked a lot that are available in Linux today, for example).

BeOS got me out on the west coast and doing OS development for a living. I learned a ton of stuff while working at Be and got to work with a bunch of amazing people (some of whom I still work with today).

Pink = mobile, Purple = PC

Warm?

Any chance you could write the OS in Rust, while it's still in its early stage? It could avoid a whole lot of security issues down the road, which I think even Dart's VM won't be immune against (at least from what we've seen with Android - like the dozen+ stagefright vulnerabilities).

Travis is on it!?!? Oh boy now I'm interested..

I was just think of the BeOS connections too.. very interesting indeed.

The original title of the thread was indeed "Fuchsia. (a new operating system from Google?)"

I came here through the RSS feed, and likely would have ignored it without the "Google" mention.

Aha! Dart Flutter Go ... it's going to be interesting for sure.

Cannot wait for rpi3 support!

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