History and Perspective on BeOS 290
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?
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.
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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.
BeBits (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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.
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:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:A better perspective is... (Score:2, Interesting)
BeOS uses bash as its shell, NT uses the ugly CMD.EXE...
As for desktop use, well I've been using BeOS as my primary OS for a year now, and I'm very happy with it.
It does what I need, I play DivX on my K6-2 350, listen to mp3/ogg files and streams, burn CDs, devel, surf,
Re:I miss the BeBox - it was great hardware (Score:2, Interesting)
Funny thing: interprocessor interrupt latencies were so high that usually the two 603s just ended up stomping all over each other. Try this some time: run one of Pierre's pheonomenal threaded 3D demos in dual-processor mode. Then turn one CPU off. Watch frame rates go up.
If Be had stuck to its original vision, it would still be a small but successful company today. Gassee had to ruin everything in the name of ego.
Re:Not dead? (Score:1, Interesting)
So knowing these three things, can you still explain to me why you think the operating system is "dead"? We're far more active and organized than the Amiga or OS/2 communities. Heck, we even benefit from many open-source projects like VideoLAN, OpenOffice, etc
We're not dead by any means and we really don't care what anyone thinks about us still using it. We're not the type of people who need to know that our operating system is going to survive. Certainly we are going to try and save it (and I believe we will), but we're mainly still using BeOS because BeOS still offers quite a bit that other operating systems don't and never will offer. If you don't know those things it might be a good idea to give Be a second chance.
Never? Hm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Beos might be dead but why? In my opinion that happened because a lot of mistakes were made (and creating Beos was none of them):
1. Be had (and still has) a dead grip on the source code. This is sad, because not only did this scare away opensource guys it was also the main reason for Beos development coming to a stand still. When it was clear (with the economic downturn and blablabla) that Beos couldn't be developed further by one company alone they should have opened the source and a lot of developers would have taken the OS under their wings.
2. Persistence (or the lack thereof). They thought Beos was going to take over the world over night. When this didn't happen they simply packed and gave up, because Be's business model wasn't stable. If someone had taken a 5 minutes break to think about things they would most likely be among the living companies still. (I don't say this because I am a wise ass who don't know shit about business, because when the IT business was beginning to fall apart I founded an IT company even though the people said "don't do this, it's stupid". It succeeded, it was very difficult at first but we persisted. If you just hold on long enough you will change things!
3. Partnerships (or the lack thereof). Be wanted to have the cake all for itself. They must have thought that developers and software firms will be grateful just to develop stuff for Beos. This is wrong. They should have made aliances with software companies to roll out tons of apps (Instant Messaging, multimedia, hardware, PIM, a.s.o.). Why the hell didn't they..?
Sad to see Beos going down, its a great technology. I know I'm going to get flamed for this but when it comes to architecture I prefer Beos over Unix/Linux/BSD/Microsoft anytime.
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).
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Re:Never? Hm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Thus, when the OS didn't catch on for whichever reason, development stopped. If, say, flat panel TVs never become popular, do you think manufacturers will just throw patents to the wind and idealistically hope that someone else will take up the fight? Obviously not. Even if the magical opening of the source would have saved the OS itself, which I doubt, it would have done nothing to salvage Be and, as a result, wasn't worth the ten minutes required to load source code on the Be FTP servers.
Sorry to sound like a jerk, but I get so very tired of hearing about opened source is an all-encompassing savior. No, all it means is that you get something for free.
Lawsuit (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll betcha there's something in the works, otherwise they wouldn't have spent the time keeping the corp running.
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 =)
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from Joe User (Score:1, Interesting)
I'll tell you what tho - Windows is unsatisfying as an OS. I've never compiled a linux kernal, don't know crap about what distinguishes Unix from Linux, and the only programming I know is BASIC from back when I was a teenager using a black and green AppleIIc.
What I read here about BeOS isn't an OS that's all-geeck no-chic; I read about something that appeals to me, an average user, who niether knows nothing about putting up a server nor needs to have telnet or ftp or a bunch of other crap in an OS. I don't wanna recompile my kernal, or design my own drivers like I hear Linux folk do. I want my computer to boot up like my television, to do what I tell it, and to not crash on me.
Since my computer serves as my multimedia playcenter, sending music and video to my home theater blah blah etc, here I am reading about an OS that has everything I could want: a multimedia based OS that's stable, intuitive, user friendly, and stable.
People can claim all they want about XPs enhanced functionality (and yes it does play games well) or Linux'es stability, but for me, Joe User, that's a bunch of crap I don't need.
AFAIC I'm gonna give BeOS a try on my 2100amd equipped system for kicks. If that doesn't work I consider myself lucky to have an older 500mhz with a 3dfx in the closet that I can try it out on. For all I know, this may be just what I need to get over the sluggishness and bloat that is XP. A nice petite OS with blazingly fast speed and great multimedia support sounds like exactly what I've been looking for.