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Comment by mcritz | Hacker News Reader

I keep hearing that Apple acquired NeXT over Be because of every reason aside from quality of the technology.

Was BeOS worse than NeXTSTEP?

There is a lot of emotion people have in a question like this.

I think the best answer is BeOS wasn't as complete as NeXT. Specifically it had a fairly poor network stack (it was being retooled around the time BeOS became part of palm, no idea if it was finished)

It lacked the kind of print support MacOS and NeXT had. It lacked the same caliber of internationalization. All fixable stuff but also all stuff requiring some investment.

It also remains to be seen how well BeOS would actually scale, it was an RTOS with a UI, it could absolutely do sexy stuff on low powered machines of the day, that doesn't mean it could run a 12core dual i7 machine well. Maybe it could, we really don't know.

iZ Corporation's RADAR runs on BeOS. It's a DAW system of exceedingly high quality. We can only guess how well it'd scale, but Be looks to me not to be the sort of software that helps sell hardware.

Almost nothing runs great on that many cores.

Certainly not Xnu.

Worse is subjective. It was 'less ready for prime time'.

It was amazing technology. It is still the most reliable desktop I ever had. It could play more videos/music etc at once with my 32 megs on a dual 66 ppc than my macbook pro w/ 4 gigs on memory and some 2.8ish dual core processor does today. Anecdote-

I used to blow people ( including myself away ) by downloading large video and music files from the internet and then launching them and playing on a loop. I got up to play in the 20-30 range at once without any lack of responsiveness and with no stutter etc.

BeOS was a real time OS, all other client operating systems were not, and still aren't, real time. The responsiveness of BeOS and its multimedia capabilities were due to this design choice.

It felt better when you were using the GUI, and maybe this is all that matters to most users, but the implementation was significantly poorer compared to NeXTSTEP.

A real time OS has some advantages as a desktop OS, everything is instant and without lag, but the total throughput of the system is significantly lower. To make a stupid car analogy, a RTOS is a Ferrari while a conventional OS is a massive off-road vehicle. Personally I think a RTOS is the way to go for a desktop OS.

Good points. No wonder QNX feels so snappy on the playbook.

I sometimes don't understand people's hate for the playbook, it is a wonderful tablet. IMHO it is a much better tablet than kindle fire (which is inspired heavily by the playbook btw), with TAT integration and two extra cameras and an active bezel. I time and time again feel that Google should buy rim and integrate QNX and Android.

Do you have any recommendations for a current real-time OS to use? I'd like to try one out on a desktop...

Windows CE, apparently... ;)

But there seem to be some other interesting examples, like QNX: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_real-time_operating_sys...

Linux can be configured as RTOS too, but I doubt that it would improve desktop responsiveness.

RTAI and Xenomai can be considered real time Linux and both require application support. Applications don't just become real time, they must be programmed that way. Common Linux desktop application are not programmed this way.

RTLinux is more widely used than RTAI or Xenomai, but it's a completely different model, it's more like a hypervisor. Again, it doesn't help. While the OS provides the serivices, applications must be programmed specifically to use it.

"Real time" can mean many different things.

And how "fast" and "real time" a desktop feels usually has little to do with the technically real time (or lack of thereof) of the kernel.

That said, Plan 9 has an interesting implementation of real time capabilities: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/real_time/

BeOS is not a realtime OS. It's scheduler is just optimized for multimedia tasks and GUI responsiveness. The popular realtime OS from the BeOS glory days days was QNX (and it's Photon graphical interface), but it certainly never "felt" faster than BeOS on the same hardware.

BeOS was definitely a real time OS. BeOS had two scheduling classes, threads with a priority level between 1-99 were time shared threads where the quantum was proportional with 2^priority_level, threads with a priority level between 100 and 120 were real time threads, they could preempt any other thread, including any kernel thread, they were locked to a CPU and never preempted. And when a real time thread was created, it preempted any time shared thread immediately, the scheduler run at creation, it wasn't only added to a scheduling queue like time shared threads.

QNX is a still very popular realtime OS in the embedded world today. Btw, the OS run by the BlackBerry devices is QNX. Usually you'll find QNX in control systems like avionics.

From what I've read, "realtime" threads with higher priority could preempt other realtime threads, meaning they could be pre-empted.

That's true of every other RTOS out there, in fact, it's required to be this way in order to provide deterministic latency.

Most people at the time felt that BeOS was the better choice. BeOS was ready and could have replaced MacOS the next day, it was already being marketed as a replacement for MacOS and I think that is why Gassée tried to kill the deal, I think he truly thought that people where going to buy a Mac and switch to BeOS. The only thing that BeOS was missing was apps, had he been able to convince more flagship app makers like Photoshop to develop their apps for BeOS he may have succeeded, it really was the only thing that was missing. Meanwhile NeXT was reworked over the next couple of years just to get it running on the hardware and then the first versions of OSX where horribly slow. So Apple spent lost 2 years and had a slower product by going with NeXT when BeOS was ready to go, most people at the time did not see the logic. Today history has plaid out and the truth is they where not just buying an OS they needed much more.

> BeOS was ready

BeOS was arguably less ready than NeXTSTEP, lacking a network stack and printing (as has been pointed out elsewhere), and had very few apps and very few users, whereas NeXT was already deployed and in use by a lot of people.

> and could have replaced MacOS the next day

Not at all. One of the main points that MacOS had to support Mac application. There is no way that Apple ever would have released a Mac operating system (be it Copland, Rhapsody or MacOS X) without a "yellow box" MacOS System 8 layer.

Didn't happen with NeXTSTEP either -- a lot of stuff, like QuickTime and Finder, had to be ported over first.

"yellow box" was more or less the NeXTStep stuff, the Classic emulation was the "blue box".

http://lowendmac.com/musings/boxes.shtml

Originally, Carbon was not in the plans at all (the yellow box corresponded to what is nowadays referred to as Cocoa). Adding that was a substantial additional task, but probably well worth it.

Yeah, sorry, I meant blue box.

On this thought I left out the classic runtime because it was needed with either direction, my point was many at the time saw BeOS as the shorter path to a modern OS. Because NeXT needed and got a reworking from the ground up. It is now apparent that that was the plan all along but from the arm chair quarterbacks, back then it seemed like a foolish move, a fair percentage of Mac users back then where rooting for Be because it had almost mystical quality for the time, it was like Amiga in it's day. I am not saying Apple made the wrong decision, just that back then most people including myself could not understand the decision. If you can find any of the old Mac User or Macworld rags from that period there where articles and articles lamenting over how they could not choose such an advanced OS as Be.

And the "yellow box" stuff had already been ported to run on top of Windows NT, which probably suggested those layers were pretty loosely coupled to the rest of the NeXT OS, and might be easier to integrate with Mac OS or whatever they came up with.

I do not remember BeOS lacking networking, it may have lacked TCP/IP at one point, but so did MacOS at the time, you had to get it and a PPP app via a third party application. My memory could be failing me on this one, but I don't seem to recall not having networking in BeOS. My point though was not to compare BeOS to now, but BeOS to the Mac OS that was shipping in which case, besides for a few items and apps, BeOS was ready and would have been a huge improvement with little investment in development. They would have needed to provide a virtulization environment for the old OS, printing support as well as a few other odds and ends. Remember most OS's of the time where not multiuser, security was not at the forefront and most where on dial-up. Comparing what OSX became to what they where trying to accomplish at the time is a little bit of apples and oranges. They where touting shared memory and symmetric multiprocessing. It was still at that basic of a level that the old MacOS was so far behind on. To many observers BeOS fit the bill perfectly and would have had the users on a modern OS in short order. In the end they made the better choice but many, I would dare to say most of us just did not see the logic at the time.

> I do not remember BeOS lacking networking, it may have lacked TCP/IP at one point, but so did MacOS at the time, you had to get it and a PPP app via a third party application. My memory could be failing me on this one, but I don't seem to recall not having networking in BeOS.

BeOS had a networking stack at the time; the problem was that it was notoriously buggy and incompatible with the standard POSIX APIs.

Be was working on a replacement to it when they were sold to Palm, known as BONE. You can find a bit of information about it here: http://wiki.bebits.com/page/WhatIsBone

At the time period we're talking about, it was clear that the writing was on the wall about the internet being the future, and the poor networking stack on Mac OS was going to be a major problem going forward. NeXT had a mature stack based on BSD; BeOS had an immature stack that was in dire need of being ripped up and rewritten.

On that front, NeXT's networking was a clear step forward, and Be's barely a step sideways.

On that front, NeXT's networking was a clear step forward, and Be's barely a step sideways.

I am not saying they made the wrong decision, quite the contrary I am saying they made the right one, but I was just adding some historical context to the discussion that many of us at the time thought Be was the better choice. History has proven that we where wrong, but none the less a lot of us thought Be fit the bill. I no longer hold that position given what the future became, but I would be lying if I said, I and many people saw the logic back then.

Memory's pretty hazy here, so someone correct me where I'm wrong

One of the major deficiencies in Apple's OS at the time was lack of real multi user capabilities; like Windows pre XP. NeXT, coming from BSD, had this built in but BeOS was pretty much a single user OS

No the problem wasn't multiuser support it was multitasking (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_multitasking).

As well as Multiprocessor support, cooperative memory management AKA lack of OS controlled memory management and a host of other issues. Remember OS7 shared lineage from the original OS1, some sins that they hacked to make it work back then, where hard to remove after the fact. While they where technical marvels at the time (1984) they became handcuffs later on.

I have (fond?) memories of using Get Info on various applications and setting how much memory they would take from the OS, and then going to About This Macintosh to check how much memory I had left over.

Incidentally, up until version 7.6, the Mac OS was simply called "System", as in "System 6" and "System 7". (Systems 1-5 were rapidly iterated through and forgotten--even System 6 still ran on a Mac Plus). Mac OS 7.6 was the first version that was designed to run on clones, hence the change from generic "System" to "Mac OS".

The one thing I seem to recall, and this is fuzzy, is that BeOS had issues with large applications, like Firefox. I don't know if that was true or not.

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