The Great Illusion: When We Believed BeOS Would Save the World

Former Be employee here who ended up at Apple eventually. BeOS was way, way behind NeXTStep in so many ways. We also had fragile base class problems and had a lot of kernel issues. BeFS was cool but Dominic ended up at Apple (and is still there) so I feel Apple got generations of BeFS evolution. Jean Louis wanted an unrealistic price and Apple spent the smartest 400 million dollars that I can think of by buying NeXT. Apple got Steve, Avie, Bertrand and so many others. Many Be people ended up on board after journeys with Eazel and others. Some never made it to Apple due to their Danger/Android/Google paths. This saddens me even to this day.

> Haiku OS, the open source project trying to recreate BeOS, was (and still is) proof that some dreams are too beautiful to die. It will never be the same as the original, but at least it tries. It’s like listening to a Beatles cover band: not the same thing, but it warms your heart.

I'm not an expert on Haiku but I feel like this is needlessly dismissive of a lot of hard work from some smart and passionate people. 25 years later and the hardware is different and more varied, the things people do with their computers is wildly different, and concerns around things like security and compatibility are very different.

Making an analogy that suggests it's a janky BeOS is just wrong. It's not worse, it's different. It might not be the original nostalgic vision the author wants, but that's what two decades does.

I was a Mac fan when it looked like BeOS was going to be the next Mac OS - some Mac magazines even sent bootable BeOS CD-ROMS. I remember booting my Performa to BeOS and being amazed how different the same hardware felt.

After OS X, I worked on a backend team for AT&T. Their entire mobile network at the time - billing, backend, customer service notes... ALL of it was in NeXTStep being streamed from centralized servers out to basic PCs running Citrix.

It was wild to know NeXT had made inroads so many places. I imagine that is why Steve had any sort of relationship with AT&T when he pitched the iPhone and got them to do it. They already saw he could deliver for them on a B&W NeXT-based product used well into the 2000s.

I did use BeOS on a PC of that era. I was impressed, but it was a bit under-cooked.

In more recent times, I boot up Haiku-OS every time a new alpha version comes out. It certainly continues the tradition. But to my eyes it hasn't materially improved upon the decades old promise and fails to sufficiently take advantage of current hardware.

With due respect to the Haiku-OS developers, I think that too much valuable effort is expended on trying to port all and sundry apps to Haiku. I would have thought that making a decision to port a single product and doing it well would be far more effective. It isn't that hard to learn a different product. For example, I have with minimal effort made the transition from MS Office, to Apple Page, etc to LibreOffice. As long as I can do what I require, I'm willing to adopt whatever is the standard.

Unrelated to my other comment, who owns the rights to BeOS these days? Palm seems to have sold it off to a company called ACCESS? But they don't seem to have any intention of doing anything with it, and I can't imagine the source is worth much to them. How reasonable is it for a company to push a two decade old project into the public (after taking the basic steps of deleting any licensed code and employee details)?

Is this entire post just an AI summary of a popular HN thread?

I love that BeOS/Haiku is still doing its thing, but I don't know what its thing is.

The only "killer app/feature" I know of for Be/Haiku is https://www.tunetrackersystems.com/status.html a radio station automation program, and it's in a weird state where they can't provide hardware that works reliably.

Tbh, today I'm kinda glad that BeOS hadn't "won". Using C++ for operating system APIs wasn't a great idea in hindsight, and even though BeOS' usage of C++ is quite sane it is unclear whether they would have resisted the pressure to move to 'modern' C++ with all its design warts.

Or in an alternative universe, maybe if Apple had bought BeOS, C++ might have developed into a different direction and look very different from the modern C++ in our universe.

I fondly remember running beos5 PE on a computer with a amd k6 processor and ati tv wonder card. I think it was 400Mhz, maybe 600 and 192MB ram. Watched in awe as it purrr'd editing DVs from firewire and the turner. It was a glorious multimedia OS. BeDepot was awesome too! The ports for winamp (BeAmp), zsnes and genecyst/dgens were top notch. the hw support was great too. never had an issue with MS Sidewinder gamepad (gameport and usb versions).

There are many features of BeOS I loved, but for some funny reason the one that just thoroughly won me over from day one was the three-second boot time on my crusty Mac. Might've been a bit of a cheat. You'd never know it. It was just glorious performance for the impatient.

Of course, that version of the OS didn't do a whole lot. By the time R5 rolled around, the boot time had grown quite a bit. It was still damn fast though.

>No decades-old Unix cruft, no Mach kernel heavy as an elephant, but an operating system born for multimedia, elegant as a Lamborghini and fast as… well, as a Lamborghini.

>Windows still with that thirty-year-old architecture dressed up as modern? Check. macOS accumulating cruft since Bush Sr. was president? Check.

said the man nostalgizing about a decade-old HN thread about a then-17-year-old operating system demo.

Nice image, but what in the world is "muitithreabring"?

This is an obvious AI SEO spam site. Kinda interesting how AI has "innovated" here by making it viable to make SEO spam sites about extremely niche topics because generating the slop articles/pictures costs pennies.

What an interesting site. News and history about Haiku and Beos only! Who would have thought?

But nothing about the recently mentioned https://cosmoe.org ?

Or their former port to run it atop of Linux, like hosted AROS, or plan 9 from userspace?

I think it has the prettiest UI of the era, including Apple’s.

Someone where I worked got a BeBox.

After a couple demos showing the CPU leds, it just sat there for years, doing nothing but consuming power.

for the windows and mac users the lack of preinstalls and lack of apps might have been what killed beos, but for the linux users who might have been tempted to experiment (i was one!) it was the lack of drivers that delivered the death blow. i was perfectly happy to install the os myself and use it for whatever i could, but it did not support my network card and that was that.

This article is pure ChatGPT. Hits all the same beats and too many frequent uses of headings and text formatting.

“Muitithreabring”

Nice article!

So much great tech has been lost to aggressive business practices of entrenched companies it would have disrupted.

The theme has been repeated... repeatedly: VHS vs Beta being maybe the typically cited archetype of business model vs technical specs.

To me the dominant example in the world today though, is that s/w engineers continue to use windows 8-(

C:? Does anyone ever stop to think about the abstraction of a file system directory hierarchy? The whole point is to remove the specifics of the h/w implementing it, and provide a logical abstraction of nested "directories". Explicitly specifying drive "letters", is the opposite of that. The only reason it ever existed was because the primordial DOS didn't have the horsepower to manage something like a unix mount. But why do we still have it in 2025?

Business triumphs over technology.

One aspect of the article that didn't track my experience was the description of linux in 2015. By that point I had long ago settled onto the fluxbox window manager, because I didn't like the constant churn of "desktop environments". It all just seemed too much like windows.

In 2025 I'm still using it, and it's still exactly the same, which to me is one of it's greatest features. Personally, I don't want the latest brainchild of some UI engineer at Canonical disrupting my workflow.

This veto power of equity over technical possibility is the story of modern tech development. Cory Doctorow cites this 2014 article in his post today:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

tl;dr US political policy making is 100% controlled by large financial equity stake holders. The support, for or against, a policy by the overwhelming majority of the population has a 0% effect.

This is also true of corporate decisions. "Innovation" is pursued if and only if it benefits equity, regardless of potential advantages to users, or the progress of the tech itself.