Antique BeOS Content by Scot Hacker (1996–2001)

Seeing BeOS run multiple videos side by side was cool and all, but it couldn't compete with seeing Quake running on a 3dfx Voodoo, or Quake II on a Riva TNT.

The main target - professional media creators - would have no reason to jump to BeOS when it couldn't run any existing windows/mac/irix software, and any native BeOS app would take ages to get up to feature parity. Also there was no NFS to access say files stored on a big RAID array, hardware support was limited - no fibre-channel, RAID, genlock.

[0] Except perhaps for TuneTracker a radio-automation software originally ran under BeOS, before switching over to running on the BeOS clone Haiku. It's still in business. <https://www.tunetrackersystems.com/about_haiku.html>

- BeOS wasn't really that good. A lot of the hype was aspirational. Yeah, great, media OS! But I still have to use some SDL-based app from the command line to get MPEG videos to play with audio actually in sync. I have to restart media_server every few hours because my audio driver is buggy. Their approach to networking was ill-considered (not compatible with POSIX sockets) and they had to rip it all out and replace it for Dano, the last major version in development that was never released. All this stuff was stable in Windows of the era.

- The choice of C++ for all APIs caused them to start seriously hitting the fragile base class problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragile_base_class . At the end of Be's life, "libfoo2" libraries started popping up as they had to break ABI compatibility in order to modify a base class. They thought C++ was a forward-looking choice but in hindsight it was a poor choice. NeXT didn't have these issues with Objective-C.

- The Application Kit sucked. It was, essentially, just the Win32 API model. Your window has a message pump and you decode messages in your MessageReceived function. It learned nothing from other UI toolkits and it contributed nothing. Just kinda meh. Even at the time I reached for a third party UI library (liblayout). There was nothing special or good about BeOS's UI toolkit at all.

- BeIA was a terrible pivot. I'm not sure we could have expected them to see it coming, but they were dead as soon as they pivoted. I remember getting access to some kind of BeIA beta and it was just a crappy port of Opera, which actually was still the best web browser available on BeOS at the time.

That's the one that Be released for free (basically) at the end of its run in 2000.

BeOS 5 was impressive but still wasn't ready for prime time and general consumer usage. The versions prior to 4.5 and 5 were pretty rough.

In its early days of 95-97, its multimedia capabilities were impressive. If you were like me you were looking at pictures in computer magazines and reading the descriptions of what it could do while your 486 running Windows 3.11 or (slowly) Windows 95 was in the corner, being super inadequate in the face of the MIGHT that was BeOS.

But in the year 2000? Not so much.

A lot had changed in the five years since the early tech demos and its discontinuation.

At the end, Windows (and Linux) had access to 3d accelerators like the Rage 3d and, around the time of BeOS 5, the Radeon and GeForce 256. BeOS video playback and rotating teapot demos that leveraged multithreadedness to eek out performance on slow processors didn't impress because GPUs could do the same thing, better, and faster. All of the organic, baked-in OpenGL goodness in the world doesn't matter if you don't have hardware acceleration.

Its networking support also wasn't great and the internet was exploding at the time. The release notes for every version since the earliest betas all noted "improved TCP/IP support" but it never got to the point of being "good". Even today, for enthusiasts playing around with BeOS, one of the first things they install is BONE, the BeOS Networking Environment, which improves (but still doesn't fix!) networking. BONE wasn't available until after the Be ship had sailed.

Even that link, written in late 2000 says "BeOS engineers are currently replacing the native net_server with a new network stack largely derived from FreeBSD."

That update was never released (some parts were as BONE) and Be was purchased by Palm the following year.

For consumers in the year 2000, Windows 98/Me you got IE, Movie Maker, Media Player, separate accounts for kids, 3d card support, DVD playback and a whole bunch of other stuff. None of those features were available out of the box for BeOS.

For professionals in the year 2000 who had dual-CPU machines that could take advantage of all of the BeOS goodness, BeOS was utterly inadequate in the face of NT 4/2000 and even linux. It wasn't fully-POSIX compliant, had no multiuser support, and very few professional applications.

On top of all that is the same fundamental problem NeXTStep had: poor driver support. You had to be very careful which hardware you selected when attempting to run BeOS.