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History and Perspective on BeOS
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Oct 13, 2002 11:18 AM
from the what-not-to-do dept.
from the what-not-to-do dept.
prepp writes "Avid BeOS user Robert Renling posts his first article
about the Be Operating System." An interesting little article, with the amusing conclusion that BeOS isn't dead after all! Ah Zealots. Aren't we fun?
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BeOS (Score:3, Funny)
Re:BeOS (Score:3, Interesting)
but now on to the topic- BeOS was my first alternate OS. I went from 98 to BeOS 4.52
it rocked. the only problem it had was with my video card, so I had to keep switching in an older one to get it to work. That was also the reason I finally quit using it. If you want to know more about the BeOS, I'd highly recommend reading the BeOS Bible. It was a very well written book for someone who(at the time) didn't know much aobut computers.
Re:BeOS (Score:3, Funny)
Aw screw it. It's hardly even worth it anymore.
If someone runs it... (Score:2, Insightful)
I know it hurts... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I know it hurts... (Score:5, Funny)
With a record like that, can I ask you a favor?
Please start running Windows. Thanks for your consideration.
Parent
mm (Score:4, Funny)
Re:mm (Score:2)
OSes Never Die (Score:5, Interesting)
But whats more about BeOS - its still under development. The OpenBEOS project is doing a fanatastic job re-implementing the OS, essentially from scratch. I have no idea how long it will take, but someday the OS will be re-implemented completely from scratch in an OSS manner.
From there, the improvements will continue.
My advice to future pushers of BeOS? Stay away from mainstream desktops for now - instead aim for vertical markets (*not* web appliances or that stupid stuff). Get some ISV's to write accounting, medical, legal, technical, etc etc programs for it. Focus on the audio/video processing markets. Get them wrapped up nice and tight, and then move to bigger areas. Just my two cents.
Oh yeah? I can list plenty of dead OS's... (Score:5, Informative)
So, on the one hand -- yeah, if the source and tools exist, and if there's enough of a userbase to profit by providing that support, an old application and/or operating environment can survive long after the original vendor bites the dust. But this is a small minority of all the systems that have lived. So you shouldn't expect something like BeOS to last much longer given lack of source and the small business community which invested in the environment. Hell, how long will it be before VMS joins the crowd of relics I listed previously?
Your point about vertical applications is valid, though I given that BeOS is a commodity no different than WinXP, MacOS X, Linux, or any other operating system a vendor targeting vertical markets like you list would provide their customers with a better solution by choosing widely deployed platforms. I honestly think they would be doing a disservice to their customers to recommend BeOS given that it lacks any kind of corporate or large community developer base, never mind original source.
Cheers,
--Maynard
Parent
OpenBeOS: not here now, alternatives available... (Score:3, Insightful)
Cheers,
--Maynard
Dead or not... (Score:5, Interesting)
I stopped using it because it didn't support my NIC, and when i sat down to port the driver from BSD i found myself lost in the lack of debugging documentation and gave up.
Sad. Just sad.
Re:Dead or not... (Score:2)
very very slim
Simple question: so what? How does that help me get work done? Usually the opposite is true: slim means missing features, which means more work in other ways. Boot speed is irrelevent, except at the start of the day (I leave my computer on all the time anyway).
Re:Dead or not... (Score:3, Insightful)
BeOS was/is a slick OS that deserves most of the praise it receives, but what it didn't need was a Linux binary compatability layer or a working implementation of Wine. People who want to run Windows or Lnux apps are already running Windows or Linux. What BeOS needed was some BeOS-only applications that gave the platform a competitive advantage.
BeOS was like a shiny new car, all polished but with nowhere to go.
Re:Dead or not... (Score:3, Insightful)
However, it had some pretty bad nasties:
Re:Dead or not... (Score:4, Insightful)
> I have ever used.
I won't go that far, but certainly Be had some innovations that other
OSes would do well to consider. Even today. No, I'm not talking
about the filesystem.
> If only it had the software/hardware support.
I don't think either was really a problem. It had the stuff that
actually mattered. (Emacs, Mozilla, what else do you need?
It ran fine on my hardware. Now, it has problems with some newer
hardware (USB, 3D acceleration,
development waned and stopped; it was up to approximately current
at the time of the release of R5. At the time, it had better
hardware support in some areas than Linux. (For example, BeOS had
drivers for some software modems before Linux did.) It has rotted
since things fell apart, but that's a symptom, not the problem.
BeOS needed two things. Advertising and OEMs. Oh, and there were
a handful of important missing features, such as the ability to set
colour prefs globally, but the Mac is _still_ missing that one, so
it must not be fatal. Java support was lousy, but there have been
issues with that on the Mac also, as recently as a year ago, so
again, it must not be fatal.
BeOS, like I said, needed two thing: advertising and OEMs. But
instead of trying to sell the system, Be kept trying to sell the
technology (to Apple, to Palm, to embedded markets, to game
developers, and who knows where else that they didn't make public).
I don't know whether they could have successfully sold the system
as a desktop system, but I wish they would have tried a little
harder to do that. AFAIK there was never _one_ TV commercial for
BeOS systems. I know commercials cost money, but look where not
advertising ended them. You have to try something, and the things
they tried didn't work.
> It booted faster than DOS(and I'm not kidding)
Maybe not kidding, but you're exaggerating fiercely. The time DOS
required to boot was dwarfed several orders of magnitude by the
time the BIOS needed to do the POST; to say the same of BeOS would
be a significant hyperbole. It did boot much faster than Windows
or Linux, but as the other poster pointed out, boot time is really
not a big deal to most users.
> It had one of the best browsers I've ever seen
Err, I don't know what you saw in NetPositive. It didn't seem like
a very good browser to me. This really didn't matter though. First,
most users don't care beans about the quality of the browser (hence
the popularity of IE4 in its day, which was nothing to write home
about either), and second, you could download and install Netscape 4
(which at the time was not seeming so ancient; today of course you
can get Mozilla for BeOS).
> and it was very very slim
That really only mattered for dual-boot scenarios. I will say, BeOS
is a multibooter's dream come true. "Plays well with others" could
just about be its official motto. It also had an excellent driver
model, which basically didn't require any changes when hardware was
swapped out -- very user friendly, that. HardDrake is only just now
beginning to approach this. It also had a couple of nice features,
such as having a different res and colour depth for each workspace.
> What they needed is a linux binary emulator
Way more trouble than it would be worth. An X11/GTK+/Qt library
done as a wrapper around the native GUI would have been orders of
magnitude easier to do and gained source compatibility, which would
be plenty good enough. And yeah, I know FreeBSD does it, but OSS
does a lot of things in different ways from how companies do them.
> and a well designed wine-like windows binary emulator
Even harder to do than the Linux binary emulator, because Windows
is more poorly documented (in terms of its internals and ABI).
It would also be more worth doing, but the amount of work involved
could be prohibitive, and performance would probably not be great.
Besides, OS/2 went down this path, and the only reason they didn't
go bankrupt is because IBM has lots of other irons in the fire
besides the OS.
> I stopped using it because it didn't support my NIC, and when i
> sat down to port the driver from BSD i found myself lost in the
> lack of debugging documentation and gave up.
I think Be made a mistake getting out of hardware. They got out
because Apple wasn't cooperating any longer, and they ported to
x86, and as far as it went that was fine, but while offering up
a version that will run on various x86 hardware with an HCL is no
bad thing, I think they still should have sold prebuilt beboxen,
in an x86 variety. And I think they should have marketed them.
Now, I think Palm should come to terms with the realisation that
they aren't going to develop BeOS (unless they _are_ doing so, in
which case great), and get what PR they can out of the deal by
open-sourcing whatever parts of the BeOS source code they have the
rights to. (Obviously there would be some pieces of BeOS that were
sublicensed and could not be released, like there were some bits
of Communicator and StarOffice that couldn't be released with the
rest, but that's a minor complication.)
Parent
Re:Dead or not... (Score:3, Insightful)
BeBits (Score:5, Interesting)
Why Be Failed (Score:4, Funny)
Apparently it's missing a spell checker.
I miss the BeBox - it was great hardware (Score:3, Interesting)
Has anyone got Linux or some other OS going on a BeBox? I would expect most of the stuff ported for YellowDog would run without much work, although you might not get load balancing on 68k processors without a bit of kernel hacking
--CTH
Re:I miss the BeBox - it was great hardware (Score:3, Interesting)
When I looked at BeOS it was a good start. I'd have stuck with BeOS if it would have been closer to unix. Something seemed terribly broken to me logging into a machine that has a shell prompt and automatically being root.
I can sort of understand that for their target market they were worried about making it look too unfriendly, but you can always have an option of being wide open, but even then I'd prefer to have two tiers of users: administrator and everybody else. I can imagine the world of hurt when the average video production guy got rid of all those files he never used to make room for more video.
Re:I miss the BeBox - it was great hardware (Score:3, Informative)
I miss my BeBox more than I can convey in words:( I'm going to get all bleary eyed if I continue this post, so...
My msitake it was PPC (Score:2)
--CTH
Why are you so surprised they abandoned it? (Score:5, Interesting)
While I loved BeOS as an OS, I hated Be, Inc. as a company. They abandoned every product and customer that they ever had. They abandoned the BeBox hardware and even stopped supporting it in later revs of the OS. They abandoned the Mac users that ran BeOS on Macs. They abandoned BeOS users and developers to pursue the (idiotic) network appliance market. Not surprisingly, the network appliance makers were not eager to jump into bed with a company that might abandon them next.
Be was a perfect example of what happens, and what should happen, to a company that abandons its customers and supporters.
Parent
Re:Why are you so surprised they abandoned it? (Score:5, Informative)
While we did stop making it, we never stopped supporting it. I remember doing installs and testing of 5.0 (the last release) on BeBoxen.
They abandoned the Mac users that ran BeOS on Macs.
Not our fault, Apple's fault. Apple refused to release the specs for the G4, and we didn't have the resources to reverse engineer it. We kept supporting PPC 601-604 Macs until the end.
They abandoned BeOS users and developers to pursue the (idiotic) network appliance market
That was a last ditch effort to survive. We were losing $20 million a year on $2 million revenue selling BeOS to the desktop, with no prospects for improvement in the year we had left before running out of cash.
Not surprisingly, the network appliance makers were not eager to jump into bed with a company that might abandon them next.
Perhaps, but several (including Compaq) did sign on to use BeIA, only to switch to WinCE under threats [beincorporated.com] from microsoft.
Parent
Re:Why are you so surprised they abandoned it? (Score:3, Interesting)
The BeBox platform was not even mentioned in the BeOS Pro Edition 5.0 User's Guide the documentation, so I don't know what kind of internal testing was done, but if there was support for the BeBox, it was well-hidden.
Not our fault, Apple's fault. Apple refused to release the specs for the G4, and we didn't have the resources to reverse engineer it.
But Linux was ported to it by a people working in their spare time.
That was a last ditch effort to survive.
And it was transparent to BeOS customers and vendors alike.
We were losing $20 million a year on $2 million revenue selling BeOS to the desktop, with no prospects for improvement in the year we had left before running out of cash.
But still Be continued to lie to BeOS 5.0 purchasers. One need not have looked any further than the "Registered BeOS User Area" for proof that Be, Inc. had no interest in supporting BeOS customers. Months and months went by and there was never anything released via that worthless page. No drivers for new hardware. No updates or new software. Nothing. On the page, users found the lie "we will be adding additional features in the near future." The new networking layer, BONE, was never released. The OpenGL support was never released. Updates for new hardware never appeared.
Third-party Be developers were also left hung out to dry. like Wildcard Design and Thunder Munchkin Software close their doors, horribly in debt and sometimes in legal trouble, due to the conscious decision by Be, Inc. to abandon them. I thought that the following excerpt from a letter by Todd C. Brett, CEO of Thunder Munchkin Software, summed up the situation well:
Perhaps, but several (including Compaq) did sign on to use BeIA, only to switch to WinCE under threats from microsoft.
And others, like Netpliance, went with OSs like QNX. Was Be actually surprised that Microsoft pressured companies like Compaq to use WinCE? This is the same company that sabotaged Digital Research's DR-DOS by purposely making Windows beta installs fail with vague claims about (non-existent) compatability problems.
Of course, all of this is just a moot point. As I predicted in my e-mail to JLG, the Internet appliance market was a non-starter and, even had every vendor of those devices used BeIA, it would have made little difference. It's just a shame that Be could no go out of business on a high-note, supporting their loyal customers and developers to the end.
Re:Why are you so surprised they abandoned it? (Score:3, Informative)
Until late last year I was working with a team using the Compaq "Clipper" devices running BeIA on a B2B project. While I'm no MS fan, in fact quite the opposite, I'm sure the pressure from the Beast of Redmond wasn't the only reason for the switch.
The BeIA OS, while impressive had serious bugs until the point we abandoned it. Calls and emails to Be went unreturned for months on end, and updates to fix bugs were few and far between. The main problem (or one of them) that we had was with the Opera browser and OS constantly leaking memory until the device would reset - losing any information in other apps. This meant having to add code to constantly save state to the flash RAM, severely shortening its life.
Curiously the browser would crash after loading 15-20 pages, then be killed and restart, but the user would be oblivious to this, since if it was running fullscreen (the default, and only option on a locked machine) then the old image of the browser would stay in the display buffer, then replaced when the browser restarted - which I thought was a cool trick!
It was far more suitable than WinCE, there's no doubt about that, but QNX was probably a more efficient system still...
I would run it (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows has absolutely everything, and games.
Linux has everythign I need, or a good equivalent of what I need, and it has tools for developing software.
So I run windows and Mandrake. I would LOVE to run BeOS, it's got everything I've ever wanted. But no software. Sorrow!
Obligitory link (Score:2, Informative)
I think BeOS is dead, usefulness-wise (Score:4, Insightful)
My major clue is that the install process seems to still require the making of a 1.44" boot floppy. That is, if you want to run it by itself, outside of another OS.
To me this speaks volumes about just how old it really is, and probably indicates it is never going to be updated to modern hardware. Also, what makes it relevant in this day and age? Can it do anything another system cannot do better? If the answer is no, or even an extravagantly technical yes (which would never matter to most users), then the world has passed it by.
The impact of BeOS was probably like Ross Perot in the 1992 presidential election. He lost, but got a large enough percentage of the vote to scare the mainstream politicians into sharpening up their act. I think this is arguably one of the factors for the prosperity of the 1990s. If I am correct, we can thank BeOS for encouraging other software makers to improve their quality/performance. Therefore BeOS benefits us even now, but we do not get the benefit from actually using it.
The latest vers don't require a floppy (Score:4, Informative)
I do agree about the Ross Perot thing though: it made a few people wake up to features they could provide and raised the bar for speed and responsiveness, but just like with Perot, as soon as Be became a non-issue the OS vendors relaxed and continued as before.
Parent
Re:I think BeOS is dead, usefulness-wise (Score:4, Interesting)
As an aside, does anybody know what happened to Corum III (It was a secret of manaish game that was going to be released). I loved the demo, but was not going to pay for it on many month preorder, the company claimed to go gold, and yet never released their product. I could not find any references to the series on the net, and the only references to the 3rd one were for BeOS. Was this not really a port? I really wanted to play this game.
Parent
A better perspective is... (Score:3, Informative)
Example?
Not-quite-Unix
BeOS had a powerful command line and Unix-like underpinnings that could compile and run POSIX compliant software. Every Unix-like operating system has failed in the marketplace except Linux (which is free, and for all intents and purposes it is Unix). The Amiga Operating System was developed with similar goals in mind, and that particular operating system withered and died as well. Being able to compile POSIX compliant software is not a marketable advantage (even Windows NT can do it).
It's an interesting article, and I think it sums up why BeOS really failed. I truely liked BeOS, but not for my main desktop.
mmm... troll food (Score:2, Funny)
Not dead, but probably dying. And a couple of hundred trolls are willing to prove it to you. In related news, Natalie Portman was recently found to naked and petrified pour hot grits down the pants of a beowolf cluster.
This is probably a good time to check the "No Score +1 Bonus" button.
My Experience with BeOS... (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyhow, I played around with it for a day or two, then nuked it. Why? Two simple reasons.
It did not detect or configure my network card. And it wasn't really clear how to do that. Linux installers do that, and have done it for years.
It didn't detect or configure my video card. And when I followed the instructions on doing so, the BeOS wouldn't boot.
So that was it for the BeOS. Maybe the full version would configure everything during it's installation; but why would I pay to find out?
So yeah, I do feel sad when people go on about the death of the BeOS. But I have much more compassion for the OS/2 users. That installed right (mostly), and I lived with that for 4 years.
It's Too Bad, Really (Score:3, Insightful)
As the article says, it was well designed from the beginning, and well thought out through the end. The same can not be said for any other recently modern OS, really, save for maybe OSX (and this requires one to look at OSX as a "new" OS).
Windows certainly doesn't qualify, and even Linux (which I use and love a great deal) was never initially designed or thought out to be the OS it is today. It's been hacked together over the years to add features like the ones that were in the BeOS from the start (not that the hacks haven't been good...they have...but they're still hacks)...In a way, I'm quite disappointed that Be lost out. There's still always the hope that Palm might do something fun with them, but they'll probably just screw it up...
I dunno about BeOS (Score:2)
BeOS is not dead... (Score:2, Funny)
\o/ [clapcrest.free.fr]
OSS != Magic Fairy Dust, and BeOS is dead. (Score:2, Insightful)
I am a long time BeOS user, I bought every application and every version of BeOS since it was released on Intel hardware (Doh!). I am even posting this from NetPositive under BeOS now. I love BeOS, and I hope it eventually makes some sort of comeback, however.....
One major thing that the Open Source BeOS efforts are forgetting to look at is Open Sourcing a failing project or piece of software doesn't mean that its going to rise from its ashes, it just means that the source code is now available to everyone.
In an effort to replace BeOS, all the Open Source efforts have not looked at the issues that caused Be, Inc's OS to fail, these boil down to :
o Hardware Supporto Application Support
o Commercial Support
o Small User Base
By producing an Open Source version of BeOS that uses a new kernel harware support is still going to be limited. Limited hardware support leads to a small userbase. A small userbase leads to no commercial support and few applications.
I have to agree with ex Be Engineer Daniel Switkin [osnews.com], that perhaps an effort should be made using the Linux kernel and modifying that to match as best as possible BeOS's requirements, and working on adding BFS, OpenTracker, OpenDeskbar and all the *_servers on top of Linux and addressing all of the BeAPI shortcomings, along with all of Linux as a desktop OS shortcomings in the process. This is a still different to the way the B.E.O.S [blueeyedos.com] guys are doing it.
This will give the OS massive hardware support, and may even offer some sort of interest from companies who have invested in Linux and are interested in a total-user-oriented desktop version, like IBM or Sun.
Now I just need to sit back and wait while someone else writes my wet-OS-dream :)
Lots of innovation (Score:4, Troll)
Be's most exciting innovations that other systems are just starting to add support for (according to the article):
Multi-threading
Stability
MIME Types
Being able to open JPEG files
Biggest downside:
Doesn't support USB.
I don't know what he was using for a comparison but I would assume something console based from MS, circa 1988.
Re:Lots of innovation (Score:3, Informative)
Doesn't support USB.
Thats not quite correct considering that my usb input devices work fine under beos without any added configuration. It might not have supported every usb device, but basic ones were supported.
Re:threading and typing in Linux (Score:3, Informative)
2) Sticking attributes in a directory is a bad idea. Giampalo, in his book about the Be file system., talks about how that was his original implementation (each file has an associated atttribute directory) but the GUI's need to access several attributes (timestamps, filetypes, etc) for each file necessitated including a shortcut mechanism at least for certain small attributes. And attributes are a *good* idea. Moving forward, both XFS and Reiser4 will have them, and Linux will support them through a common API. As for filetyping, UNIX's "fingerprint" mechanism is only half a solution. Most files have no detectable fingerprint and this will only become more common as more text-based formats (XML) proliferate. BeOS includes a registrar daemon that uses file fingerprinting to recognize files and attach to them an attribute identifying the type. These attributes can be edited by the user for increased flexibility.
Down but not out... (Score:5, Informative)
OpenBeos [sourceforge.net]
Blue Eyed OS [blueeyedos.com] (B.E.O.S)
YellowTab [yellowtab.com]
and BeBits [bebits.com] gets updated regulary with new applications for the BeOS.
the BeOS is down, but not out...the Be community is still very strong!
When will people learn? (Score:4, Insightful)
The operating system is TOTALLY irrelevent when it comes to most users. There are only three things that matter: 1) Applications, 2) Hardware support, and 3) Applications. You can have the worst operating system in the world (Windows 3.1) and utterly destroy a clearly superior operating system (OS/2) simply because you win the hardware and application battle.
Be was dead before it started, because the ONLY hope for a new operating system is compatibility with the current application base. What I don't understand is how Be deluded themselves into thinking that application developers are going to spend valuable resources porting to a completely new operating system without any users just because it's "new and cool".
No one cares about operating systems. Say it three times.
Dead? (Score:4, Funny)
(The owner does not respond.)
C: 'Ello, Miss?
Owner: What do you mean "miss"?
C: I'm sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint!
O: We're closin' for lunch.
C: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this OS what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
O: Oh yes, the, uh, the BeOS...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?
C: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it!
O: No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting.
C: Look, matey, I know a dead OS when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
O: No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable OS, the BeOS, idn'it, ay? Beautiful GUI!
C: The GUI don't enter into it. It's stone dead.
O: Nononono, no, no! 'E's resting!
BeOS is why I'm using OS X (Score:4, Interesting)
I was fortunate enough to have an external USR modem, as well as a VooDoo 3 graphics card; no problem with compatibility, in fact I had the perfect system. Aside from the OS being incredibly fast, it more or less worked the way it was supposed to. I also thought the GUI combined the best of both Windows and MacOS. For those that say it lacked applications, that's true - but at the time it wasn't really any worse than running Linux. There was a decent office suite, Opera for a Net+ replacement, and a couple different mail apps to choose from. I can't remember which one I settled for, but I remember using a hex editor to remove its unregistered tagline
As Be the corporation started dying, I was seeing less and less work put into the OS. In r5 Pro OpenGL support had been removed for some reason, and to my knowledge never returned. It started to become clear that the OS was seeing its last days, and I didn't really want to be like the Amiga zealots who still exist today, so I went searched for some alternatives.
The thing is, using Be showed me that using my computer could be kind of fun again; maybe not fun, but at least enjoyable. I started toying with Linux on an old Pentium box, only with the intention to make it into a firewall for the box that was running Windows and Be (since Be had no firewall). Eventually this led me to install Redhat 6.2 on another partition on my main workstation (the box running Be), and I was using Linux as my primary OS for maybe a year or two.
Meanwhile, I was toying around with the old Pentium firewall more and more, and making it do some really great things under Linux - as a server. On the other hand, getting day to day tasks done in Linux on my workstation box was a new issue every day. I kept Linux running on my server (where it's still running) and axed both Linux and Be on my workstation, opting instead to Windows 2000 Pro. I hated how Windows looked and felt, and didn't much like the company who made it - but things more or less worked . . . at least for six months or so, then something breaks for some reason and a format is necessary.
Last year I acquired an old Macintosh Quadra 700 with OpenBSD on it. This little Mac, alongside the interest I already had in OS X, really nudged me even closer to putting down the money for a Power Mac G4, and so I did this May. OS X is most of the things I loved in BeOS (a nice, logical GUI) and consistency (it generally does not require reinstallation after 6 months, for no reason at all). At the same time, it fills the gaps that Linux did. It's UNIX, and works nicely alongside my BSD and Redhat boxes; when I'm not sure how to do something the 'Apple way' I can just open up a terminal and do it the way I would on any other UNIX box. On the more evil side, Office and Photoshop are there, so I don't have to reboot just to get something done. And if worse comes to absolute worst, Virtual PC can be used for any Windows-only app I might encounter (but it hasn't really occurred yet).
One processor per person _is_ enough (Score:5, Informative)
One thing missing from the above discussion is one of Jean Louis Gassee's original design goals for the BeOS: symmetric multiprocessing. During the early BeOS days he would frequently repeat "one processor per person is not enough." That's what convinced them to build their early AT&T Hobbit-based multiprocessor machines, and eventually the BeBox, the dual PowerPC machine designed by Joe Palmer and beloved by many hackers. They did it because there was no cheap multiprocessor hardware available at that time. The goal, said JLG, was a multiprocessor machine that you could "lift with your credit card."
But JLG was wrong. He thought that people would have a never-ending desire for more processing speed, and that the right way to meet that need was to build computers with multiple CPUs at the price-performance sweet spot. And in 1990 that seemed true. But through the 90's CPU speeds increased to the point that word processing, e-mail, Internet access, and 2D graphics editing became fast enough for ordinary use on even the cheapest hardware. Suddenly there was little benefit to an intentionally-not-backwards-compatible OS.
Doing symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) well is difficult. To do it right requires a lot of thought about which parts of the system can be threaded and how to avoid threads locking on shared resources. Be's solution to this problem was to rewrite the whole system from scratch -- from the kernel to the filesystem to the GUI. And they didn't care about backwards compatibility; it always seemed like the POSIX layer was an afterthought (remember how many versions were released that didn't support select()? )
So once the performance benefit of BeOS (at least for most desktop users) vanished, what was left? Little hardware support, given their small development team and no vendor support. A not-particularly innovative GUI, since they decided to closely follow the predominant Windows/MacOS design. A beautifully designed API and highly modular system, but unfortunately not one that had any end user benefits.
It's ironic to think about what would have happened if Apple had purchased Be. True, they would have lost Steve Jobs, and perhaps the company. But a MacOS X-class OS would have shipped four years earlier, and had outstanding multiprocessor support in the core. Apple didn't bite, Be had nothing left, so they died. Sad.
BeOS 5 PE Max Edition V2 (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.vasper.net/main.php
BeOS 5 PE Max Edition V2 Release Notes
http://www.vasper.net/rnotes2.htm
to go down in history (Score:3)
unfortunately I'm afraid beos will, like os/2, go down as being the os we wished that was.
I've used os/2 and beos and at least 30 other OSs and those two I miss most of all.
Re:She was good (Score:3, Interesting)
Funny you should mention that. Next release of Windows is trying to do just that. Putting a database at the core of an OS. Just like BeOS.
Afterall, Microsoft = Innovation.
BFS is superior to the other file systems due to several factors. One is the ability to represent multiple media devices as a single partition or volume. It has advanced caching methods. It greatly optimizied multimedia applications (well, in theory because there wasn't much to play with on BeOS) and was portable, meaning it could be moved between different hardware platforms easily.
But I'm sure MS coders will fix that =)