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?
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.
Re:BeOS (Score:2)
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.
mm (Score:4, Funny)
Re:mm (Score:2)
BeOS isn't dead (Score:2)
a) lives on in its music
b) Works at the local 7/11 with Elvis and Osama
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re: (Score:2)
OpenBeOS: not here now, alternatives available... (Score:3, Insightful)
Cheers,
--Maynard
Re: (Score:2)
RT-11 is here (Score:2)
http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ [trailing-edge.com].
However, if it's not open sourced, obviously, it can't evolve much further, so in that sense, operating systems do die.
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.)
Re:Dead or not... (Score:2, Insightful)
What they needed was a market. This seems to be a hard lesson for many technical people to understand.
Re:Dead or not... (Score:3, Insightful)
No doubt (Score:2)
The thing about old OS's is people tend to remember them with Rose-tinted glasses. BeOs had a lot a major problems with it. Yea it was lightweight, and had a few decent multimedia apps, but beyond that it really didn't have much to offer, and still was missing some major functions like proper networking.
I think the one thing it will be remembered for mostly is being able to spin a bunch of teapots at once if you happened to own some of the limited hardware it ran on.
It is funny considering how long ago development stopped on BeOS how the zealots still insist it was the best OS ever.
Re:Are you on crack? (Score:2)
When you don't know what you are talking about, its generally better to just not say anything at all.. but oh well.. I see someone has already modded you as the troll you are so no harm done.
Quick or correct. (Score:2)
I pick correct, because I like having things done right the first time. It reduces the amount of crap I have to put up with.
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:2)
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.
Actually, some people thought the single user model was one of the virtues of BeOS. It had a lot of Unix-y goodness, but it didn't drag in a multi-user Time Sharing enviroment. Time Sharing environments are fine for servers and multi-user machines, but they're a real waste on a single user desktop machine.
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...
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.
My msitake it was PPC (Score:2)
--CTH
Re:I miss the BeBox - it was great hardware (Score:2, Informative)
The original BeBox ran 8 hobbit processors from AT&T, but when they found out they were EOLing the hobbit, they switched to PPC. It also has processor-load LEDs on the front that show real-time CPU usuage.
There's a port of Linux/PPC for the BeOS, and I believe they also had mklinux running on it. I don't know, as I personally run BeOS 5.0.3 Professional on it. There's a lack of software and drivers, but it has Mozilla, Gobe Productive (awesome office suite from the guys that originally did Claris Works, and was recently open sourced
Just some info, and thought I'd clear the air. But BeOS definitely isn't dead as an operating system, only BeOS, Inc. is.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Re:I would run it (Score:2)
It has absolutely everything I've ever wanted
I love BeOS, but man...rephrase your thoughts.
Re:I would run it (Score:2)
And there are clients for all the major IM protocals.
BeBits [bebits.com]
The mail client was pretty awesome, but I'm sure you can get more at BeBits as well. And I have to agree with someone eles post - if gaming is a priority for you, you're not allowed to be picky about your OS. Get a console system.
Oh, and there is a Photoshop for Solaris. I'm sure with a little work someone could get it to run in BeOS. But there are plenty of other editors our there. You could run GiMP for BeOS.
Once again, the OS never really reached maturity. If it had, more people would have been writing software for it. When they chose not to work on a G3/G4 version, they lost the Mac crowd, and that was their biggest market. Adobe would surely not pick them up after that.
~LoudMusic
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.
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:I think BeOS is dead, usefulness-wise (Score:2)
Re:I think BeOS is dead, usefulness-wise (Score:2)
As an on & off user of BeOS when it was still being actively developed, I'd never really kept up with the BeOS news outside of whatever was presented in general tech news (like /.). So, although I'd never heard of this game before, I'm glad that you brought it up. I'm downloading the demo as I type this.
To respond to your question of whether this game is really a port from Windows: On the developer's website [ngent.com] (link obtained from page at another poster's gobe.com link), I noticed that the "Corum III" logo had a Korean subtitle. So, I'm guessing that the reason you can't find info on the Windows port is that it was likely developed in Korea, and the websites with relevant info would have been in Korean.
HTH.
< tofuhead >
Re:I think BeOS is dead, usefulness-wise (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I think BeOS is dead, usefulness-wise (Score:2)
I agree, bootman is the easiest bootloader I've ever seen although I have heard that underneath its just lilo, the gui makes it simple to use. I even use it on systems that don't have beos installed.. Just boot up a cd which has a working beos image on it instead of a installer and you can run bootman and have your booting preferences setup with no problems.
Re:I think BeOS is dead, usefulness-wise (Score:2)
Re:I think BeOS is dead, usefulness-wise (Score:2, Informative)
Sounds like your dated hardware requires you to make boot disks.
Re:I think BeOS is dead, usefulness-wise (Score:2)
Nice troll, but if thats they only clue you have, you better keep looking as its extremely easy to make a bootable cd from the free version assuming you know how to use cd burning software, and the pay version comes on bootable cds and has boot floppys for the small minority that don't have bootable cdrom drives.
Re:I think BeOS is dead, usefulness-wise (Score:2)
None of the Intel releases of BeOS required the install floppy. I can say this pretty conclusively, since I was in the developer program and installed all of them from CD.
At risk of being a little curt, when you start off by announcing to the world Hi! I've never used this product!, there are volumes being spoken, all right--none of them are about BeOS, though.
As for what Be can do that other systems aren't doing better, I still miss the "live query" aspect of the system that let you make virtual folders. You could have a folder on your desktop that contained all C source code files you'd modified in the last 24 hours, or all unread email messages from your boss, and they'd always be current (leave the folder open and its contents would change as appropriate). That's a small thing, but most of what I miss about BeOS, ultimately, are small things that few other people seem to have picked up on. OS X is inching there, with things like the systemwide address book and the new search functionality, but it has a ways to go.
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.
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:A better perspective is... (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want to take it a step further, you can say that most, if not all modern operating systems are somewhat "Unix-like" in that they all implement features from Unix libc.
AmigaDOS was not designed to be "Unix-like" (Score:2)
AmigaDOS was actually created as a masters thesis project in operating systems at a university in England, IIRC (it could have been a different country.)
It did not have Unix-style commands, APIs, or underpinnings. There were a lot of add-on programs created to give it shell-like functionality, and it supported ideas like process parentage and priorities, but no one who has ever done systems programming on a *nix system would confuse it with a *nix core.
The Amiga died due to Commodore's pathetic marketing. Period.
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.
Re:My Experience with BeOS... (Score:2)
It wasn't really clear? Going to preferences from the Deskbar and selecting "Network" wasn't clear? Wow...
Dinivin
Re:My Experience with BeOS... (Score:2)
The criticism of BeOS not supporting enough hardware is actually a good way to point out the effect of the Microsoft monopoly on competitors like Be. By preventing OEMs from putting BeOS on their machines, Microsoft killed off the possibility of BeOS getting enough traction to get started.
Companies write drivers for Windows because of its market share. If OEMs had started including BeOS there would be more developers writing software, which would mean there were more people ready to buy BeOS, which would mean companies writing drivers for their hardware.
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 :)
Re:OSS != Magic Fairy Dust, and BeOS is dead. (Score:2)
Why? You have almost every driver you'll ever need available in source form under the BSD and GPL licenses from Linux and BSD kernels and X. Take them, and stick them into your kernel, just like the GNU Mach guys do.
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:Lots of innovation (Score:2)
threading and typing in Linux (Score:2)
Linux doesn't try to optimize interactive responsiveness--and most of its users wouldn't want it to. Linux aims for having a compromise between good interactive performance, good batch performance, and good multiuser performance.
However, with the new kernel thread implementation (run 100000 threads if you like) and the preemptible kernel, I suspect that Linux actually would match BeOS if you chose to configure it that way.
BeOS stored the MIME type of a file in an attribute
The designers of UNIX chose 25 years ago to keep the file system as simple as possible, and their choice has proven to be the right one for UNIX and Linux applications. If you want something like an attributed file system under UNIX, you stick the content and the attributes together into a directory; a UI can treat the directory as a single entity. That's what Mac OS X does, and it works very well.
For files in particular, file type identification based on fingerprints, as used in UNIX, is more robust and, if anything, simpler from the application programmer's point of view.
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.
Re:threading and typing in Linux (Score:2)
Well, no wonder that he wasn't satisfied with that: that's a lousy implementation because the two can become disassociated. A better implementation is to stick both the content and the attributes into a single directory and treat the directory itself as a single document in the GUI.
For my day job, I work with millions of files, each having dozens of attributes. A set of special-purpose APIs would be an enormous headache. I run into this occasionally when I use platforms that do have attributes.
Linux will support [attributes] through a common API
A lot of junk has been dumped into Linux, much of it not very widely used. If the majority of Linux software ever started relying on such features, Linux would cease to be a UNIX-style operating system. UNIX was designed by people rebelling against nonsense like ACLs, file attributes, etc.; it was a deliberate choice.
Most files have no detectable fingerprint and this will only become more common as more text-based formats (XML) proliferate.
XML files are supposed to identify what the XML represents. Dumping bits of XML into a file and determining its type through file attributes is contrary to everything XML stands for. Other text files encode their type as part of their file name (usually, an extension).
Re:threading and typing in Linux (Score:2)
>>>>
You didn't even understand the implementation. Who cares about your opinion of it? The directory was to be a hidden one accessed through a pointer in the inode of the given file. There is no way the two could become disassociated.
A better implementation is to stick both the content and the attributes into a single directory and treat the directory itself as a single document in the GUI.
>>>>
The problem with the orignal implementation was not disassociation, but performance. Instead of taking one disk access to display a file, it took several. That killed the speed of the file browser. And your implementation is really annoying to the user. I really hate OS X in the way it represents things differently in the GUI than in the actual OS. What if you don't use the GUI for file browsing? You go and modify bash to handle the hack too? With the attribute implementation, the only tools that need modification are those that deal with directories directly. It is much closer to the standard UNIX file semantics and the user's idea of what a file is.
A lot of junk has been dumped into Linux, much of it not very widely used. If the majority of Linux software ever started relying on such features, Linux would cease to be a UNIX-style operating system. UNIX was designed by people rebelling against nonsense like ACLs, file attributes, etc.; it was a deliberate choice.
>>>>>>>
ACLs and file attributes are just different implementations of metadata and security. I bet you think that utime and the rwx bits are nonsense too? As for being a real UNIX, ACL's are supported in most commercial UNIXes and file attributes come directly out of IRIX.
XML files are supposed to identify what the XML represents. Dumping bits of XML into a file and determining its type through file attributes is contrary to everything XML stands for. Other text files encode their type as part of their file name (usually, an extension).
>>>
Extensions are an anarchronism. Just because they're popular doesn't mean they don't suck.
Re:threading and typing in Linux (Score:2)
Well, I took you at your word. Maybe you should have described it better.
As for being a real UNIX, ACL's are supported in most commercial UNIXes and file attributes come directly out of IRIX.
I have no idea what "real UNIX" is. All I'm saying that the original designers of UNIX didn't act out of ignorance; they excluded ACLs and attributes from the design by choice. I think that choice is still the right one.
Extensions are an anarchronism. Just because they're popular doesn't mean they don't suck.
Actually, it seems to me that BeOS is the anachronism, because it doesn't exist anymore. Certainly, reviving decades old ideas like attributes and ACLs didn't make BeOS modern.
What I can't figure out about Be zealots like you is--why don't you just use Windows? Windows has all the features you pretend to like so much: it has a fully attributed file system, it supports ACLs, and it has a library-based graphics API, just like BeOS.
Re:Lots of innovation (Score:2)
Re:Lots of innovation (Score:2)
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.
Re:When will people learn? (Score:2)
Re:When will people learn? (Score:2)
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.
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.
Get a clue (Score:2)
Nothing in the GPL forces you to offer your binaries, source-code, or ISO's available for free download from the net. It only requires that you (at least) allow those who want the source to get it at the physical price of delivering it.
You can, for example, sell a CD with only the binaries and an installer on it, along with an offering to deliver the source code at the cost of shipment. Alternatively, you can include the source on the CD you sell.
The important point from a business point of view is that you neither have to offer the source nor the binaries on the web for download; though, in most cases, offering the source for download will not hurt business (though offering the binaries for download probably will).
Most people who are your target customers do not want to compile something from scratch. They probably don't even know how to do it. So offering the source for distribution under the GPL has little if any effect on your business.
So in short, the point is that if you do things right, you can have a viable business model based around GPL'ed software. For the most part, this means NOT offering the binaries for download for free on the web. As for the source, that's largely a non-factor from a business standpoint; though it may be best to offer it for download on the web for public relations.
OSI-compliant and FSF-compliant software may not be an all-encompassing savior for businesses. But if implemented right, it can hardly hurt.
And once again, neither Open Sourced Software nor Free Software means you necessarily get something for free. Most things which are Open Sourced Software or Free Software *happen* to be free as in they can be downloaded for free; that does not mean that OSS or FS software *must* be free as in downloadable for free.
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).
There was plenty of software for be (Score:2)
All that killed Be was crappy hardware support.When Be came out, it supported about 5 or 6 network cards from 2 manufacturers (3com and intel) 1 scsi adapter from adaptec, and 3d support was mostly written for the 3dfx chipset. Why wouldn't they support a adaptec 29160??? Pretty standard stuff if you ask me.
Be 5 they added a little more hardware support, but again it was very limited.
Now back to my original bitch about people bitching there was no software.
Be had word processors, (and excellent printer support, sort of a oxymoron compared to the rest of their hardware support)
Be had (has) some of the best console and arcade emulation support EVER! Mame games that take a 700mhz cpu in dos can do just as good with a 350.
Their sound editing tools were the best, Be's sound drivers concentrated on low latency which meant the real time effects processing on be kicked ass.
As far as M$ killing be, well M$ did tell OEMS you beos no windows. Lets not forget palm though, who bought it all out and has kept all the source for their palm os sort of like a junkyard parting out a car (sad to see it end like that) The palm thing is kinda sad because it forever dooms Be to run on slow hardware.
All in all though, be was excellent. My band uses it on a 200mhz pentium for recording jam sessions and it works great. Only 2 ppl in our band are computer savvy and Be is simple enough where the other guys can sit down and use it.
Well enough ranting about the whole be fiasco for today...it's sunday, time to pray to a dead god.
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.
death by greed (Score:2)
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.
Re:One processor per person _is_ enough (Score:2)
Doubtful. Apple would have had to integrate existing Mac OS technologies (QuickTime, Java, AppleScript, etc) and create a Carbon-style compatibility layer for BeOS the same way they did for OpenStep. It probably wouldn't have taken any less time, and they would have ended up with a not-quite-Unix system and an API that, while good, doesn't compare to Cocoa.
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.
Not terribly accurate, wishful thinking (Score:2, Insightful)
1. "BeOS is fully POSIX compliant" -- not correct; it would be more accurate to say "mostly" rather than fully. I could quote from the Be FAQs on this point, because I wrote the original FAQ (I worked at Be for three years).
2. USB & FireWire support -- the article states that the USB support is not very complete, and shortly thereafter implies that FireWire is supported more fully. It's really more the reverse, though I doubt if the USB code would work with much of the built-in USB hardware being released these days (you never know, though; we got the original stack from Intel). At any rate, if you happen to have a BeOS retail box, you'll see USB listed (along with the Intel credit), and no FireWire (though my most current box is for R4.5, not R5).
3. Design of the kernel -- I can't comment on a technical level, but my recollection of conversations with kernel engineers was more that the kernel was monolithic (and that we thought that was a good thing). The design inspiration was from the XINU operating system ("XINU" is "UNIX" backwards), I'll leave it to operating systems connoisseurs to determine whether that compares with the Hurd or L4, as the author asserts. Perhaps the author is thinking of a new kernel being written for the "not dead yet" OpenBeOS project(s).
In all, the article reminds me altogether too much of the many articles about the Amiga OS that I read while I worked at Be. Sad, but true. I wish those projects luck -- I miss Be and BeOS -- but I consider them wishful thinking. I've moved on to Mac OS X, and don't plan to go back.
Maybe the team now at Palm will change my mind -- I hope so!
Re:BeOS for the Mac (Score:2)
that would boot on them.
the PPC version was getting less and less suport once the G3's came out
Re:BeOS for the Mac (Score:2)
Re:She was good (Score:2)
I loved beos, it was a great little OS super fast loading with hardware detection each time it loaded, a fast responding GUI, possibly the best File system ever, but one thing it lacked that really killed it was the fact that there was never any good software for it, the included web browser (net+) was the best you could get for the system and it dint support java/java script/flash or anything else. because it lacked hardware OpenGL there was never any games for it. and the apps that were available such as newsreaders and email clients were basic at best and tended to crash. even with all that I would still be
running it if it wernt for the fact it doesn't support my hardware anymore, but thats what happens when a company goes under
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 =)
Re:Not dead? (Score:2)
That said...
I call such systems "dead" because, at their most basic level (OS support), they have ceased to exist. It doesn't matter *how* many 3rd party developers support it if, in five years, it doesn't have any support for the latest and greatest hardware.
Take my specific mention of the Amiga - Yeah, I would agree 100% that, even compared to "modern" GUI-based OSs (Except possibly Darwin), it rocked. Good luck finding replacement parts if the break, though, and don't even *think* about using the latest-and-greatest parts. And hey, it can play Quake - at 10fps.
Re:dead like dirt (Score:2, Informative)
granted the sshd build is a bit flawed but not unsecure.
http://www.bebits.com/app/2894
http://www.bebi