Haiku Project Announces Availability of Haiku R1/Alpha 1
haiku-os.org
haiku-os.org
Sure, most apps were lightweight and, like allenbrunson said, the pervasive multi-threading model made it harder to develop sophisticated applications, but they must have been on to something because the responsiveness was so good that it felt like you all of a sudden had a computer from the future, where _real_ multitasking was finally solved. It really was something else.
The quality of the file system and the way its advanced capabilities were fully utilized throughout the OS was also novel. Here is part of an old article written by Scot Hacker, who also wrote the BeOS Bible, which explain some of the advantages: http://www.osnews.com/story/421/_I_MacOSX_Week_I_Tales_of_a_...
Much of what the BeOS had going for it is now available in other OSes, in various shapes or forms, but what made the BeOS such a joy to use was how it all came together in a unified way. The Tracker, for example, which is the equivalent to Finder on Mac OS X, treated attributes as first-class citizens, making it very natural to set up views like the example in the article above, focusing on Category, Title etc.
Another thing that really stood out was the quality of the icons and the look of the window manager. The icons are everywhere on the web today, and while the UI might not be considered sexy by today’s standards, the yellow tabs that could be dragged along the top of windows were cute as hell. Other little touches, like the built-in desktop switcher that allowed different resolutions and color depths for each desktop (excellent for web development), are not commonly found today, afaik.
It will be interesting to see what the experience is like now, after so many years with Mac OS X. Will definitely install.
"The 80186 would have been a natural successor to the 8086 in personal computers. However, because its integrated hardware was incompatible with the hardware used in the original IBM PC, the 80286 was used as the successor instead in the IBM PC/AT."
I never had a chance to use it, but it looked like there was something special about it. Did anyone here own a BeOS system?
BeOS had a lot of good stuff going for it. A database-like file system, media frameworks, pervasive multithreading, a way-ahead-of-its-time file typing system, and so on. But the main reason I chose it over linux was that it was a lot easier to set up and maintain.
It's gone a bit too far underground for me to keep following it, however. After I got laid off from Be, I switched to Mac OS X 10.1, which had recently been released.
macosx has mostly surpassed beos. in my opinion it's more pleasant to use today than beos was in its prime. having said that, there are some things about beos that will likely never be recreated.
that database-like file system, for instance. that wasn't just a bullet point feature. the big thing that got me hired at be was that i wrote a usenet newsreader for their operating system. i made heavy use of bfs indexes. my program could search through hundreds of thousands of message files in a microsecond to find the one i wanted. there still isn't such a thing on the mac today, or any other os. when i ported my newsreader to the mac, i had to think up workarounds for all the places where i could no longer use bfs indexes. at least a couple of weeks' work for a substandard implementation, compared to the beos way.
another one is multi-threading. for beos programming, it wasn't just a suggestion, it was mandatory. every beos window runs in its own thread, whether you like it or not. so if you came to beos kind of ambivalent about multi-threading, it sucks to be you, because you were forced to learn it. i'd say that's the biggest long-term boost to my career i got from beos: i'm better at multi-threading than any other programmer i've ever worked with.
the macosx threading model is anemic by comparison. you run the user interface in the main thread, and if you want secondary threads, you launch them yourself. since it's not used much, nobody learns how. and now they've introduced this grand central thing, in an effort to make multi-threading easier. having learned how to do it the "hard" way, grand central doesn't look like much of an improvement to me. yes, multi-threading is hard, but not that hard. it just requires more discipline than many programmers possess.
another really great thing about beos was the absence of legacy. i had earlier spent a lot of time programming for windows, and my god what a mess that is. there are things in the windows api that are weird and stunted due to decisions made in 1980. i didn't realize what a giant burden that was until i was free of it.
to its credit, macosx seems largely free of this. apple has added a ton of stuff to cocoa over the nine years i've been using it, but it still seems fresh and approachable. i think a large part of that is that apple is not afraid to toss stuff out when it gets stale and dated. microsoft, on the other hand, values backward compatibility above all else, so their apis stink to high heaven.
how close does Spotlight get you?
i've examined the spotlight apis from time to time, and it does look like it solves a lot of the same problems. having never really used it, i can't say if it does as good of a job as bfs indexes do or not.
i can say that the beos file system is much more amenable to database-like usage than the mac file system. bfs has indexes implemented as a first-class feature, just as important as filenames or metadata. indexes are managed by the file system itself. spotlight was kind of bolted on top of hfs+. its indexes are in user-level files.
One, Spotlight is just a search tool. They run a daemon in the background that monitors reads to the FS and updates an index [1]. In Haiku, indexing and querying is a feature built into the filesystem.
Secondly, Spotlight does full-text search and indexing whereas Haiku only indexes the attributes you attach to files.
Metadata plays a very important role in the Haiku world. You cannot fathom the extent of their power unless you use the OS. This is not a "feature" that was tacked onto the OS as an afterthought, the entire OS was built around this feature.
[1] I'm actually working on a tool like Spotlight for Haiku (http://code.google.com/p/haiku-beacon/), though development has been stalled since my PC went kaput.
EDIT: Read articles 24 and 25 for a sneak peek into BFS's more powerful features: http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/
Boot and shutdown are really really fast.
Here it is, pasted for posterity:
So, Be fans, what makes BeOS so special?
BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper.
He yanked the plug on the box.
Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened.
Damn.
out of curiosity, how can you tell if the apps skipped a beat? It's hard enough when you have to focus on 2 audio streams, I can't image how you can deal with 2 dozen?
Perhaps there was some code monitoring dropped frames and such
Hopefully I'm wrong, and somebody can enlighten me?