Hacker News Reader

Comment by leakycap | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

I remember booting my Performa to BeOS and being amazed how different the same hardware felt.

No kidding. It took until the M1 to make macOS feel anything close to the responsiveness of BeOS on a 150MHz PowerPC.

While M1 - M4 are fast. I still think macOS is relatively slow in terms of responsiveness / latency compared to BeOS even with M series. This probably go back to Early Windows or DOS where everything feels instantaneous.

I agree & still use a PowerBook running actual OS 9 as my "second brain"

Nothing else is as fast, I don't get slowed down by it

Even cursor movement on modern macOS is slow

Windows, instantaneous? Haha. I never used anything older than 3.0 but unless you mean those older versions indeed, nope - it never felt anything even close to “instantaneous”. (Unless you’re talking about how frequently it crashes).

Pre USB peripherals + CRT monitors could have really low input latency by modern standards.

Windows would chug from all sorts of issues, but some things did feel instantaneous.

Loading was slow indeed, even with DMA bound IDE drivers. But once they were in RAM, the latency from a PS2 input was almost nil, as if you were using a kitchen appliance.

Same with ADB. I've yet to feel a USB mouse feel as connected as the old ADB mouses did.

The enraging thing is NeXTstep ran acceptably on a 25MHz 68040 (and okay on the 68030 --- the lucky folks had 33MHz "Turbo" '040 boards) --- the performance Rhapsody promised was amazing, but Adobe reneged on a free license of Display PostScript, and Apple spent 10 years recreating that as Quartz (née Display PDF) --- the transparency and drop shadows are nice, but I'd rather have the performance.

Yes, Mac OS X not only looked like Kai's Photo Goo when it came out, it felt about as responsive.

I had a B&W '030 NeXTStation and it took 5+ minutes to boot and a long time to launch apps, I wish I'd had a turbo!

At that time, I was using similar performance hardware running Windows (a ThinkPad 755c), Mac OS (a Mac w/ a 68040 processor at my workplace --- can't recall which, I was eventually upgraded to a 9500/180MP), and my NeXT Cube (68040 25MHz) --- the Cube was the most reliable and nicest of them all.

> 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.

Oh, I would absolutely love to know more details about this. I'm fascinated by the history of telecoms. Would you consider writing a blog post about it? (Or if you prefer, my email is in my profile!)

>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.

Well iPhone was launched with Cingular, which wasn't AT&T at the time.

Cingular acquired the "old" AT&T Wireless in 2004

New AT&T Wireless bought Cingular later

Reply on news.ycombinator.com