Using BeOS on a Power Mac (2001)
lowendmac.com
lowendmac.com
BeOS was tremendously snappy on that hardware but I ended up missing applications on the Mac.
After giving Bill and Paul their first personal computer gig.
It would seem that the esteemed Dr. Roberts pathway has good company.
It's funny, I just wrote up some experiences with the latest Haiku beta and also ended up missing applications despite the snappiness and amazingly trim fit into much less than 1G RAM. I'm sure many more apps will come soon though.
https://www.friendlyskies.net/notebook/giving-haiku-os-beta-...
It wasn't until version 10.3 in 2003 that OS X rounded into a form that would drive the final nail into the coffin of Classic Mac OS.
In 2005, version 10.4 takes a giant step forward, leap frogs everything else on the market, and becomes a genuinely compelling alternative to both Windows users and Unix/Linux users. This is also the version that adopted arguably the only really compelling feature of BeOS (Spotlight), and the first version to support Intel.
Apple's next release would be iPhoneOS 1.0.
I then used a B&W G3 until it went out of support. It indeed became better with every new release, which was quite impressive.
edit: you can argue with “unusable,” but I never saw anyone use the NeXT Workspace or the OS X Finder pre-10.3. Everyone on those systems used the command line to get around.
They even gave it some of the features of Workspace too.
Guilty as charged. And it is a community.
Mac OS 9’s funeral was in 2002, however
I figured, "let me just buy a Windows machine so I can easily play DVDs and use Office". When I stepped back and realized that was my only criteria, I thought, "why not try a Mac?"
I brought my white G3 600mhz iBook to (2002 tech company) work shortly before starting school, expecting people to make fun of me for buying a Mac ("everyone" used Linux, but Windows was begrudgingly tolerated in the community) and EVERYONE was interested in OS X.
I used that iBook for tons of work stuff in my last couple of months. Popping a serial console on SunFire 6800s, directly connecting via ethernet to them and forwarding X Apps to the Mac, etc. It was a revelation.
Not only that, but you could actually close the lid, put it to sleep, and the battery wouldn't be dead when you came back from lunch.
It was one reason I got it, fast suspension was all over the place on PC laptop hardware on Linux at the time, but on Mac hardware it would Just Work, as long as your OS supported it (which I think amounted to just telling the firmware to initiate suspension).
The other reason being that battery life on PPC was far superior to x86 at the time, that was one of the things that got a bit worse with Apple's x86 transition, and better again now with their new M1 hardware.
I’d argue the most compelling feature of BeOS, one that to my knowledge has still not been replicated anywhere else, was its amazing UI fluidity. Seems like it didn’t matter how bogged down the system got, the UI was flawlessly responsive and boasted latencies today’s desktops could only dream of.
I still miss it.
Be filesystem (BeFS) was terribly compelling, but only after you had lost your first draft of your first book to filesystem corruption.
Or so I'm told.
Meanwhile, my M1 Mini shows me the pinwheel frequently...especially when launching any apps from Adobe Suite or Microsoft Office...
Any direct influence would probably be felt most on the mobile side rather than desktop.
I'd say mostly not.
Sure, you can browse the Internet and play music at the same time on any platform today, but a lot has changed.
Much of what was good about BeOS was breaking with the past and starting from zero based on today's desktop needs, a modern take on the Amiga in many ways.
Existing platforms may be able to steal an idea or two, but that's different from being built from the ground up to solve a specific class of problems.
To begin with, absolutely everything was multi-threaded, there was just no way around it.
Fast file system queries that could be stored as shortcuts were nice, still haven't seen that implemented nearly as well elsewhere.
I wrote some software interfacing the system C++ API's and found everything very convenient, clean and tidy compared to any other platform I've programmed.
NTFS metadata architecture really inspired by BeFS, or at the least, a fellow traveler.
You can tweak the Windows Explorer (the filesystem UI) to operate on arbitrary metadata. Well, I was able to get an email inbox, where each email message is a text file, just using Explorer the BeOS way, on Windows 2000. It wasn't exactly fast.
I cant tell you how often I waste time searching for the lication of a specific file. But never gad this probkem with BeOS/Haiku.
Some examples:
Every email received was stored as a file. All metadata about the email (sender ,subject, headers, etc) were stored as attributes.
Tracker, the file manager application, could display any arbitrary attribute. I seem to remember that instead of an email application's window, my inbox was a simple Tracker window showing the specific attributes required to know about my emails.
My music collection was stored and displayed the same way.
Everything was searchable but also usable. File attributes weren't hidden behind CLI commands and flags like xattr, they were part of the GUI and every application using the SDK would know/understand them.
This was, at least in part, how Microsoft's "Internet News and Mail" worked. Not sure where it kept metadata, but the initial implementation seemed like an Windows Explorer extension, which was a very clever approach, IMHO.
I wish Gnome did an e-mail client like that, synchronizing a local folder with a remote IMAP mail store, or presenting a remote IMAP storage as a mounted folder under an IMAPFS sort of thing. Arguably, that's easier to do with POP3. Same thing with an outbox, where writing a properly formatted file would send an e-mail.
> File attributes weren't hidden behind CLI commands and flags like xattr
This is a design choice in the UI, not something intrinsic to the OS.
Somewhat of an aside, but I wish there existed a kind of "encyclopedia" of operating system features (both UI and otherwise, with a special emphasis on "dead ends" like BeOS), that pulled together demos and documentation into one exhaustive reference.
It seems like a lot of good ideas get lost is the sea of lowest common denominator solutions, and an ecyclopedic reference would make it easier to resurrect those ideas.
personally, I thought it was because it was macos, which was riddled with a lot of legacy code, for example 68k emulation in the innards of the kernel, and tacked on cooperative/preemptive multitasking.
I remember playing with a leaked version of Copeland/Gershwin. It felt way more modern in a different way than BeOS, but I can't remember how complete it was.
Likewise on Intel, you had Windows 9x that didn’t support SMP so you were stuck with the NT line if you wanted multi processor support. I recall NT4 being pretty poor for desktop usage due to patchy driver support but Windows 2000 was amazing. Linux and BSD weren’t really desktop ready either.
So BeOS was basically a workstation class operating system designed to be running on lower footprint hardware (the comparison someone else made to Amiga is pretty apt).
As much as I typically hate Windows and prefer Linux and FreeBSD, Windows 2000 was pretty solid release and particularly when you place it in its era where only BeOS really competed with it in terms of performance and stability on commodity hardware.
You can get a lot of snappiness from prioritizing GUI processes and lowering the priority of everything else. In modern machines, with lots of cores, you can also try to increase affinity of different interactive processes with a set of cores so that they avoid migrating and losing caches. Finally, Apple is placing low-priority process in the efficient cores and leaving interactive code on the performance ones.
I thought it was interesting, including the UI being so different from what I’d seen otherwise (Mac OS 8 or Win3.1/95) but didn’t appreciate what it really was or why it would be appealing.
In retrospect I’m of two minds. Competition is great, and having more than a duopoly of operating systems wold really put the pressure on to keep competitors honest. That said, I remember the dark days of the single short aisle of Mac programs at EggHead software, and how frustrating it can be to have few options. Really the only thing that makes ChromeOS possible is web applications
If memory serves me right, it was still possible to install BeOS from that booted OS image file onto whole partition, at the same time wiping existing Windows installation.
Also I've run around Be FAQ site:
> Will the BeOS run on the "iTanium" processor?
Was that CPU really named with "i-thing" fashion back then?
Not really, the actual name was Itanium.
NeXT gave Apple a mature platform which has withstood the test of time, underpinning multiple architecture changes and adaptation to dramatically different devices. And more importantly, it gave Steve Jobs back to Apple, who orchestrated its recovery from a decline into irrelevance.
I've never heard someone say this before. What's an important missing feature that other OSes had at the time?
Which at the time would have been super super duper important for the just-hanging-in-there Mac user base. (I was one of them. It was just hanging in there.)
The Mac’s professional niche was printing. Prepress. Big press runs. QuarkXPress. And BeOS could barely print, and had no color management to speak of.
It’s unlikely that Apple needed to strip much out of DisplayPostscript in order to rename it DisplayPDF (and then Quartz).