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Comment by caycep | Hacker News Reader

if I recall, (and someone correct me if I'm wrong), it had deep multithreaded support/design, more so than any other desktop OS at the time, so it could run more simultaneous processes and apps w/o getting bogged down. at least I think there was a demo claiming this.

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This was true at the time, but at the time Linux wasn't preemptive, had bad SMP support and no good threading implementation.

BeOS was designed for SMP hardware, was preemptive and had good threading support, but besides that there is nothing really especial about it. "pervasive multithreading" simply consisted in using threads a lot (for 90's definition of "lot"). Creating and managing the threads by hand. In 90's C++.

Modern operating systems have caught with that and gone beyond of what beos did.

I wouldn't say there was nothing special about it, given the limitations at the time. Having threads spawn quickly, and quickly move between threads so fast as to have no visible user latency was one hell of a feat on BeOS hardware--a 66MHz PowerPC dual-CPU system, IIRC.

But yeah, it's something we take for granted today.

yea it was cool dual CPU hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox those two green lights on the front were CPU load per each CPU. and the geekport reminscent of Raspberry pi only later did they port it to x86, similar to NeXT.

also it looked like Optimus prime, that was kinda cool at the time

I'm not sure it's SMP/multithreading support was anything terribly special; NT4 Workstation had the same capabilities.

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