Make the BeBox great again: TLS 1.2, inetd and more for PowerPC BeOS R5 | Hacker News Reader

Make the BeBox great again: TLS 1.2, inetd and more for PowerPC BeOS R5

oldvcr.blogspot.com

11 pointssoapdog4 comments

Thanks for the history lesson, never knew there was anything besides x86 BeOS, not to mention something called the AT&T Hobbit. Still love BeOS for how fast it was. Probably the most responsive, low-latency UI I ever used.

The Hobbit was an oddball CPU but historically important: indirectly, Apple's displeasure with it for the Newton was what led to ARM.

But, speaking as the author, PowerPC BeOS is criminally unloved.

It was loved at the time! My introduction to Be was through a front-page WIRED article from May 1996, by which time it had already been ported to PowerPC, and BeOS DR8 (which actually ran on PowerMacs!) arrived only a few months later into Mac hobbyists' hot hands.

The pivot to x86 was IIRC initially actually met with some trepidation, given not just the big changes in architecture but the incredibly broad and messy world of x86-compatible proprietary hardware – a problem, as it turns out, that neither Be nor its ecosystem were ever really able to master.

I should have been more specific. At the time, yes, it looked like the future and it was a big bonus that it ran on Power Macs, too. But I think that the x86 pivot, while I agree the hardware diversity was a huge barrier (and Neil Stephenson even agrees in In The Beginning Was The Command Line: "But Microsoft owns the high ground at the moment, because it doesn't have to write its own drivers"), didn't save them mostly because Be the OS and Be the company were just too much of an unknown quantity. I think that's what Stephenson was getting at when he said, "What holds Be back in this country is that the smart people are afraid to look like suckers."

Nowadays, though, and no offense to the OP, no one remembers where BeOS got its legs. And this has translated into what's been preserved. You can find some Intel BeOS stuff in some corners but almost no PowerPC.

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