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Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

Ok, so this is the big BeOS thing I've heard.

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?

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Other people mentioned the real preemptive scheduling — and the general overall better worst-case latency — but another factor was the clean design. The other operating systems tended to be okay in the absence of I/O content but once you hit the capacity of your hard drive you would find out that e.g. clicking a menu in your X11 app did a bunch of small file I/O in the background which would normally be cached but had been pushed out, etc. A common mitigation factor in that era was having separate drives for the operating system, home directory, and data so you could at least avoid contention for the few hundred IOPs a drive could sustain.

Yes. This always amazed me with BeOS. It would play 6 movie simultaneously making my PC very slow but still responsive. As if the framerate just went down.

Bear in mind that resolutions back then were much lower than now, and not all computers had 24 bit color frame buffers. Video cards ran one monitor for the most part, with no others attached.

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.

I mean maybe. I was running 1600x1200 on my monitor back then.

Some people were, but it wasn't too common. Workstations had far higher resolutions long before this, but home PCs running non 3d accelerated hardware were still mostly 1024x768-ish.

The BeBox itself was vastly different hardware than a standard PC as well, so it could break a lot of rules as far as smooth concurrency and multitasking... kinda like the Amiga did.

Also we had actual 32bit colour, not this 24 + 8 alpha. You could actually look at a rainbow gradient without banding.

2048x1536 was already a thing as well.

Yup, had a 22” Mitsubishi monitor that could do that resolution in ~2002. Everyone would pick on me about the text being so small, but I’d let them sit at my desk squinting and I’d stand ten feet back and read the screen with ease as they struggled. The monitor was a beast though, around 70lbs if memory serves.

Edit:

Pretty sure this is the monitor: https://www.necdisplay.com/documents/ColorBrochures/RDF225WG...

1280x1024, not so far from 1920x1080.

That was more the exception than the rule. Besides, 1080P is about 45% more pixels per frame than 1280, and likely at a higher frame rate. Big difference in hardware load.

I think it was their thread/process scheduler. It had a section of priorities which got hard realtime scheduling, then lower priority stuff got more "traditional" scheduling. (Alas, I don't know too much about thread/process scheduling so the details elude me.) That way the playback threads (and also other UI threads such as the window system) got the timeslices they needed.

Isnt giving near real time priority scheduling to audio/video how Windows handles things those days? I think I read that somewhere last week under Linux kernel scheduler behaviour response discussion.

Real pre-emptive multitasking? I seem to recall that was one of the huge differentiating factors of it against Mac / Windows.

Amiga did this in 1985. It's just that for compatibility reasons Apple couldn't do this. Even funnier: the fastest hardware to run old MacOS (68k version) on: an Amiga computer.

A non-Apple computer? Was "Hackintosh" (presumably under a different name) a thing back then?

You didn't need to build a Hackintosh. You could buy legal, officially-licensed Mac clones back then.

Ah yeah I still have my PowerComputing PowerTower Pro! At the time it was a current model, its 512mb of RAM was insane and my friends & classmates were jealous! hahah :)

Check out this video[0], basically an Amiga with an accelerator card potentially makes for the fastest environment to run 68k-based Mac OS (System 7) ...

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph0gxzL3UI

Whoa, the Amiga is faster even though it's running in a VM!

Well, it's more akin to something like Wine where it's not exactly a virtual machine, since the processor instructions are the same. Tho that's about the extent of my understanding.. haha

I sometimes used my Atari ST with an emulator called Aladin. "Cracked" to work without Mac ROMs. But wasn't really useful to me because of lack of applications (at the time).

IIRC there were solutions like this for the Amiga too.

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