Comment by helf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by helf | Hacker News Reader

BeFS was amazing.

I miss BeOS, TBH. I ran a heavily customized BeOS R5.05 install that had upgraded bits from OpenBeOS (later, HaikuOS), ZetaOS etc.

I ran it as a daily driver on a Dell GX1 SFF that I swear was designed for BeOS: Max RAM the BeOS kernel supported without hackery was 768MB - The GX maxed out at 768MB; The GX1 had a Rage GPU that BeOS natively supported (Including 3D Acceleration!) which was a very short list; the GX1 had a supported NIC, IDE controllers, etc etc.

I had upgraded the CPU to a 1.4GHz Tualatin-S that, sadly, had to run at 1.04GHz as the GX1 wouldn't run a FSB higher than 100mhz so my 133mhz FSB Tualatin had to bop down a little. Still screamed.

sigh I miss that system. I would still be running it if lightning hadn't fried it.

It sat next to my NeXTstation Turbo Color that I used for way longer than was reasonable as my primary system, lol. The NeXT was a daily driver till 2008.

33mhz 040 w/ 128MB 60NS EDO. OPENSTEP4.2 + lots of ported goodies friends and I did. Even managed to get SSLv3 working and load newer websites! :D

... wish I hadn't sold it.

Oh yeah! I also had a Pre-FCC certification dual 66mhz BeBox. Cool machine. Slow as shit though. The 603e in it wasn't natively SMP capable IIRC. The GLU chip could either run one CPU with L2 cache or dual CPUs with L2 cache disabled. Coherency was done in software. Unless I am horribly misremembering. It was a nasty hack and showed.

My BeBox! https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/albums/7215762193739249...

My GX-1 and my NeXT :D https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/6676203105/in/photolist...

You daily-drove a NeXTstation until 2008?! That's badass! kudos. I always appreciate people using stuff for as long as possible, especially when it's something awesome like a NeXT system, haha :)

Dude.. just found the "for ebay" album on your Flickr profile... omg :(

(Oooh also SGI Onyx2.. nice. I search the term "sgi" on Craigslist every day. All I have is a pair of O2's)

Just curious, how did you find OP's Flickr profile? HN profile is empty.

Are you personally acquainted? Or do people routinely run 3rd party intelligence tools to connect online profiles?

it's linked on another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33605127

thanks

That is indeed incredbible, my graduation thesis was porting my supervisors' particle engine from Objective-C/OpenGL into C++/OpenGL/MFC, because his NeXT Cube was going to be decommissioned. This was still during the 1990's.

I have a non-working Indigo 2 10k that I keep meaning to refurbish, but finding a monitor that supports sync on green that still works is exceedingly difficult.

IIRC many Samsung, EIZO screens from recent past support SOG.

I heartily recommend EIZO LCDs. They are awesome. Support everything. And you can fine tune everything including clocks from their onboard settings.

I wonder if you can convince a dirt-cheap GBS8200 with GBS-Control mod, to convert sync-on-green to VGA. I'm not sure what options are available for pure sync extraction, since the GBS-Control also does color conversion, deinterlacing, rescaling frames to more or less lines, simulated scanlines on LCD displays, etc.

People used freebsd in 2004 with lynx under a 486.

lynx(1) rocks. My favorite browser. 26 bookmark files, used daily. Plus my emacs-w3m-lynx-bookmarkextentsion.el.

My friends had a running joke about me “over utilizing hardware”.

I used a NEC Versa P/75 (pentium 75 (no mmx), 40mb ram, 350mb HDD, 4GB CF card, modded ORiNOCO Gold cardbus WiFi card, heavily modded Windows 95b (not 95c, mind you. No no. Has to be 95b for reasons) for years. Dual battery packs I upgraded. Ram for 10+ hours and worked fine for MP3s, IRC, SSH, etc. :). I still have it. I didn’t stop using it on the regular till probably 2015-2016.

I have a Portege 3110ct that I upgraded to 192mb ram, 64gb ide ssd, usb2.0 pcmcia card, usb WiFi, etc. that I still use off and on. It was my primary mobile system for about 8 years. Runs a stripped down heavily customized Debian based Linux.

If you are mostly doing textual things, you can happily exist on anything made in the last 30 years assuming it has a basic tcp/ip stack and preferably SSHv2 support.

I recently dug my 386sx40 I grew up on out of storage. It desperately needs a ram upgrade and an FPU. Right now it has a 512k ISA trident video card, NE2000 ISA NIC, 250mb boot drive, 160mb storage drive, 12mb ram.

Runs windows 3.11 with CalmiraXP, Win32s, TCP/IP stack, lots of mods to the base OS (kernel tweaks for the cooperative multitasking functions etc).

… I feel like an old man ranting about the good old days. I’m only 35. I swear. Lol

Those old Toshibas were amazing.

I had a Tecra 750CDM that was incredible - I won it at work… I was like a $5000 laptop at the time and included a detachable webcam.

Damn nice. Yeah I love the old Toshibas. Same with the old NECs.

You remember correctly: the 603 was never intended for multiprocessing. It was amazing it worked as well as it did on the BeBox, but AFAIK it was the only 603-based computer ever to try. The G3, the 603's more-or-less direct follow-on, doesn't support it either. From the BeBox FAQ: "We use the Motorola 105 'Eagle' support chip, which allows for either one processor and an L2 cache or two processors without L2 caches. So, our two-processor PowerPC BeBox has no provision for an L2 cache."

Aha! I am mildly surprised I remembered that correctly as I hadn't thought about it in yeeears.

Thanks for the info :)

Is there any memoir, book, whatever detailing out decisions on the hardware? Like why did they go with the 603? etc?

I really wish there was some deep-dive book on the early history. I can't (well, couldnt. Havent looked in a while) find much info on the original hobbit based system.

The initial BeBox prototypes used AT&T Hobbit processors and DSP’s. When AT&T dropped the Hobbit, they chose PowerPC over a risc system from HP. At that point in time, all these non x86 systems seemed to be gathering industry support. Then WinTel exploded into the market hungry for cheap vanilla systems.

IIRC, there was a big load of details on everything to do with the BeBox and all the decisions made and even a timeline and an interview with Joe Palmer on BeBox.nu. You can probably still read it via Archive.org. I wonder what happened to Andrew Lampert... he vanished off the web. I really miss BeBox.nu and lost touch with a bunch of people when it vanished.

Cale Lewis/Dlazlo - if you read this or if anyone knows him please chime in below ;-) He was like the best guy on those forums. Miss that guy.

Semi-related, I keep wondering how long we'll keep scaling hardware coherency out. I'd like to some 128 core+ chips that act like 2+ disconnected systems, just with high speed fabric.

The 604[e] did have the necessary hardware.

Helf!!! I haven't seen you online in years! Maybe not since the demise of bebox.nu?

I'm still plugging away with BeOS, have a few Macs running the PowerPC version still.

Dude! Ltns! Hit me up on telegram @ressedue !

BeOS was amazing.

At AT&T (the mothership) we inherited a bunch of NeXT machines from the cellular company they invested in.

Me, I had next to my engineering books multiple BeOS boxed OS copies.

Carried them with me to <large U.S. airplane company> where I installed them on every machine possible. Great times. Running a NeXT pizza box one one side and BeOS on a Dell Latitude on the other, and showing off the multitasking made some of my co-workers weep. (Turbo Color on the NeXT side with the frickin' sound box and monitor).

One of the <research scientists/future tech> co-workers was absolutely into Objective-C. Those were fantastic time showing what /could/ be done.

Edit: until 2016.

If you can recall how you got SSL going, please let everyone know!

Edit: also, you're photos made me quite happy. Beautiful machines.

Thanks :) I wish I had kept more of them. I had to move a few times and got married and just didn’t have the space for 2000lbs of furniture sized systems lol.

The IRIS3130 went to a museum, at least!

As for the SSL… I’ll dig through my stuff and see what I have. On it. I have a screenshot of gmail loaded up… lemme find that.

Screenshot of gmail on my NeXTStation Turbo Color. It’s dated 2009 so I think I may actually have been using my NeXT through 2010 and had my dates off.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/3947037084/in/photolist...

My NeXT kit that I sold:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/helfer/albums/7215762370071298...

I also notice the SGI 320, with its friggin' 3.3V PCI slots from hell :)

I played a bit with BeOS on an x86 box back then, and it always felt extremely responsive. The only machine that came close to that was the SGI that ended up on my secondary desk.

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