Using BeOS on a Power Mac (2001)

https://lowendmac.com/2001/using-beos-on-a-power-mac/

by rdpintqogeogsaa • 5 years ago

112 77 5 years ago

lowendmac.com

cable2600• 5 years ago

HaikuOS on a PC: https://www.haiku-os.org/

blunte• 5 years ago

Question for you OS geeks: did we take the good things learned from BeOS and implement them in Windows/Linux/macOS?

pavlov• 5 years ago

A lot of BeOS veterans ended up at Android.

Any direct influence would probably be felt most on the mobile side rather than desktop.

microtonal2• 5 years ago

Dominic Giampaolo, who made BeFS (the modern BeOS filesystem) works at Apple and is one of the main designers of APFS.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Giampaolo

pjmlp• 5 years ago

Unfortunately the mess of Android APIs lacks any proof of BeOS influence.

codr7• 5 years ago

I ran BeOS off and on from the Intel transition to the end, I still regret not joining the party early enough to experience their custom hardware.

I'd say mostly not.

Sure, you can browse the Internet and play music at the same time on any platform today, but a lot has changed.

Much of what was good about BeOS was breaking with the past and starting from zero based on today's desktop needs, a modern take on the Amiga in many ways.

Existing platforms may be able to steal an idea or two, but that's different from being built from the ground up to solve a specific class of problems.

To begin with, absolutely everything was multi-threaded, there was just no way around it.

Fast file system queries that could be stored as shortcuts were nice, still haven't seen that implemented nearly as well elsewhere.

I wrote some software interfacing the system C++ API's and found everything very convenient, clean and tidy compared to any other platform I've programmed.

watersb3• 5 years ago

Fast file system queries that could be stored as shortcuts were nice, still haven't seen that implemented nearly as well elsewhere.

NTFS metadata architecture really inspired by BeFS, or at the least, a fellow traveler.

You can tweak the Windows Explorer (the filesystem UI) to operate on arbitrary metadata. Well, I was able to get an email inbox, where each email message is a text file, just using Explorer the BeOS way, on Windows 2000. It wasn't exactly fast.

tambourine_man• 5 years ago

Not much, unfortunately. File system metadata query and responsiveness is something that I haven't seen matched still. The latter is an exhilarating feeling that I'll never forget. Also, the UI had a “fun” but still elegant feel to it that I was very fond of.

Veliladon• 5 years ago

This. The filesystem has yet to be duplicated in terms of sheer metadata functionality and probably never will be again.

bitigchi• 5 years ago

Haiku is still alive, no need to look for other things in other OSs. :)

tablespoon• 5 years ago

Question for you OS geeks: did we take the good things learned from BeOS and implement them in Windows/Linux/macOS?

Somewhat of an aside, but I wish there existed a kind of "encyclopedia" of operating system features (both UI and otherwise, with a special emphasis on "dead ends" like BeOS), that pulled together demos and documentation into one exhaustive reference.

It seems like a lot of good ideas get lost is the sea of lowest common denominator solutions, and an ecyclopedic reference would make it easier to resurrect those ideas.

thequux• 5 years ago

I tried to start a talk series last year about these dead ends, but only https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-525180-what_have_we_lost actually made it out. Perhaps I'll pick up the thread later, because there are a lot of dead ends that had some amazing ideas that it either wasn't the right time for (BeOS, DomainOS), bad business decisions (Genera), or particularly insular communities where they were used (OS/400, TRON)

yjftsjthsd-h• 5 years ago

https://archiveos.org/ is kind of a step in that direction, although not exactly the same

hackmiester• 5 years ago

Try this: http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html

wmf5• 5 years ago

Most of what I learned from BeOS was what not to do (endian-specific code, C++ ABI, proprietary toolchain, messages on top of byte streams, forced multithreading, etc.). I still don't understand where the responsiveness came from.

fault1• 5 years ago

I still don't understand where the responsiveness came from.

personally, I thought it was because it was macos, which was riddled with a lot of legacy code, for example 68k emulation in the innards of the kernel, and tacked on cooperative/preemptive multitasking.

I remember playing with a leaked version of Copeland/Gershwin. It felt way more modern in a different way than BeOS, but I can't remember how complete it was.

laumars2• 5 years ago

The multi-threading was probably part of the reason. SMP was quickly becoming more and more common place with even Power Macs having a second processor despite Mac OS 9 and it’s predecessors not supporting SMP (applications had to specifically be written to support it).

Likewise on Intel, you had Windows 9x that didn’t support SMP so you were stuck with the NT line if you wanted multi processor support. I recall NT4 being pretty poor for desktop usage due to patchy driver support but Windows 2000 was amazing. Linux and BSD weren’t really desktop ready either.

So BeOS was basically a workstation class operating system designed to be running on lower footprint hardware (the comparison someone else made to Amiga is pretty apt).

As much as I typically hate Windows and prefer Linux and FreeBSD, Windows 2000 was pretty solid release and particularly when you place it in its era where only BeOS really competed with it in terms of performance and stability on commodity hardware.

rbanffy2• 5 years ago

I still don't understand where the responsiveness came from.

You can get a lot of snappiness from prioritizing GUI processes and lowering the priority of everything else. In modern machines, with lots of cores, you can also try to increase affinity of different interactive processes with a set of cores so that they avoid migrating and losing caches. Finally, Apple is placing low-priority process in the efficient cores and leaving interactive code on the performance ones.

catb0t• 5 years ago

https://www.haiku-os.org/ is the open-source successor to BeOS and runs on amd64

natas• 5 years ago

I wish apple had bought Be instead of NeXT

scelerat• 5 years ago

Hard to imagine Apple today without the Second Coming of Jobs. Incredible, aquihire. Hard to imagine JL Gasee leading Apple in the same way.

Apocryphon• 5 years ago

Would’ve been interesting if a post-return Jobs Apple had bought Palm in the 2000s, after Palm had acquired both Be Inc. and Handspring.

aaronbrethorst• 5 years ago

‘Posted from my RIM BlackBerry’

404mm• 5 years ago

Till this day I still miss the hardware mute/unmute button.

simondotau2• 5 years ago

Heck no. BeOS was a tech demo that looked great because you couldn’t do anything complex with it. The list of missing features is endless. The longevity of the platform is unknowable. And there is no reason to think the injection of BeOS would have abated the steady decline of Apple’s relevance.

NeXT gave Apple a mature platform which has withstood the test of time, underpinning multiple architecture changes and adaptation to dramatically different devices. And more importantly, it gave Steve Jobs back to Apple, who orchestrated its recovery from a decline into irrelevance.

laumars2• 5 years ago

I did run BeOS for a period and it felt a pretty decent system to me. In fact it was my preferred platform for a good while.

nerdponx2• 5 years ago

The list of missing features is endless.

I've never heard someone say this before. What's an important missing feature that other OSes had at the time?

thought_alarm• 5 years ago

It's worth noting that at this point in history (2001) Mac OS X is still a turkey; visually unique, but very slow and incomplete. It would have only been of interest to the freaks and geeks in the Unix/OpenStep community. I can only imagine there was much hand wringing in the old school Mac community about whether Apple was on the right track or not.

It wasn't until version 10.3 in 2003 that OS X rounded into a form that would drive the final nail into the coffin of Classic Mac OS.

In 2005, version 10.4 takes a giant step forward, leap frogs everything else on the market, and becomes a genuinely compelling alternative to both Windows users and Unix/Linux users. This is also the version that adopted arguably the only really compelling feature of BeOS (Spotlight), and the first version to support Intel.

Apple's next release would be iPhoneOS 1.0.

wmf5• 5 years ago

FWIW I preferred OS X to Windows 2000 and Mac OS 9 and used it as my daily driver starting with the public beta. But maybe I wasn't a very demanding user since I mostly used the terminal, OmniWeb, and Mail.

grecy• 5 years ago

I did too, though I have to say it was painfully slow on my Beige G3, and only became actually usable at about 10.3 or 10.4 as the comment above said.

selestify• 5 years ago

What was so revolutionary about 10.4?

ianlevesque• 5 years ago

It's all subjective, but I'm not sure why they drew the line in the sand at 10.4. 10.2 was the first release that had hardware accelerated 2D graphics, which dramatically improved the UI responsiveness of Aqua. By 10.2's release Apple had also discontinued the development of Mac OS 9.

kergonath2• 5 years ago

Every release had a ~2 factor in performance improvements between the public beta and Tiger (10.4). Performances degraded a bit with Leopard (but improved again with Snow Leopard). That’s why Tiger is a bit of a high water mark for PPC machines. It was very useable on a G3 from 1999, albeit with a more recent graphics card for Quartz Extreme and quite a bit of additional RAM over its initial specs.

cgufus• 5 years ago

10.4 brought Spotlight 10.5 introduced Time Machine 10.6 cleaned everything up and added some stuff like Exchange Support. IMO the peak of Mac OS X. From then on, Focus was put on Social Media integration and data collecting services. Seems I‘m getting old an nostalgic.

ianbooker• 5 years ago

10.4 was also the first release for Intel Macs and therefore was the first version for the majority of modern day MacOS users.

mattl3• 5 years ago

10.4 was the first time I felt like my NeXTStation was slower than my eMac.

https://mat.tl/img/emacnext.jpg

mattl3• 5 years ago

It would have only been of interest to the freaks and geeks in the Unix/OpenStep community.

Guilty as charged. And it is a community.

mattl3• 5 years ago

It wasn't until version 10.3 in 2003 that OS X rounded into a form that would drive the final nail into the coffin of Classic Mac OS.

Mac OS 9’s funeral was in 2002, however

rconti• 5 years ago

I was a Linux sysadmin and was quitting my job to go to college. I had been using Linux on the desktop since 1995. I thought I'd buy a laptop, and why waste my time trying to worry about hardware compatibility with Linux when I already have a Linux desktop?

I figured, "let me just buy a Windows machine so I can easily play DVDs and use Office". When I stepped back and realized that was my only criteria, I thought, "why not try a Mac?"

I brought my white G3 600mhz iBook to (2002 tech company) work shortly before starting school, expecting people to make fun of me for buying a Mac ("everyone" used Linux, but Windows was begrudgingly tolerated in the community) and EVERYONE was interested in OS X.

I used that iBook for tons of work stuff in my last couple of months. Popping a serial console on SunFire 6800s, directly connecting via ethernet to them and forwarding X Apps to the Mac, etc. It was a revelation.

Not only that, but you could actually close the lid, put it to sleep, and the battery wouldn't be dead when you came back from lunch.

avar• 5 years ago

I had an iBook G3 that I used with Linux PPC. I'm not sure about your model, but I think that entire line had hardware suspension, so it had little or nothing to do with OSX.

It was one reason I got it, fast suspension was all over the place on PC laptop hardware on Linux at the time, but on Mac hardware it would Just Work, as long as your OS supported it (which I think amounted to just telling the firmware to initiate suspension).

The other reason being that battery life on PPC was far superior to x86 at the time, that was one of the things that got a bit worse with Apple's x86 transition, and better again now with their new M1 hardware.

Scramblejams• 5 years ago

arguably the only really compelling feature of BeOS (Spotlight)

I’d argue the most compelling feature of BeOS, one that to my knowledge has still not been replicated anywhere else, was its amazing UI fluidity. Seems like it didn’t matter how bogged down the system got, the UI was flawlessly responsive and boasted latencies today’s desktops could only dream of.

I still miss it.

watersb3• 5 years ago

arguably the only really compelling feature of BeOS (Spotlight)

Be filesystem (BeFS) was terribly compelling, but only after you had lost your first draft of your first book to filesystem corruption.

Or so I'm told.

luckman212• 5 years ago

That's exactly what I remember about it too! No spinning beachballs there.

Meanwhile, my M1 Mini shows me the pinwheel frequently...especially when launching any apps from Adobe Suite or Microsoft Office...

pndy• 5 years ago

This version has some special software that allows it install without repartitioning a Windows PC’s hard drive

If memory serves me right, it was still possible to install BeOS from that booted OS image file onto whole partition, at the same time wiping existing Windows installation.

Also I've run around Be FAQ site:

Will the BeOS run on the "iTanium" processor?

Was that CPU really named with "i-thing" fashion back then?

emteycz• 5 years ago

Was that CPU really named with "i-thing" fashion back then?

Not really, the actual name was Itanium.

jploudre2• 5 years ago

Whoa. I’m a physician now. I never never have guessed my article from 20 years ago would make the front page of HN!

BeOS was tremendously snappy on that hardware but I ended up missing applications on the Mac.

stillicidious• 5 years ago

Awesome career twist, potentialy more interesting than the article :) Did you go from professional -> professional, or not much past hobbyist tech?

jploudre2• 5 years ago

I’ve always been a hobbyist on tech. I follow it like some people follow sports.

classichasclass• 5 years ago

Ha, made the same jump myself. Computers are much more fun as a hobby than as $DAYJOB.

watersb3• 5 years ago

Ed Roberts decided to stop playing with toys full-time, so he moved back home and became a dentist. Small-town doctor and mayor.

After giving Bill and Paul their first personal computer gig.

It would seem that the esteemed Dr. Roberts pathway has good company.

emodendroket• 5 years ago

I thought so and didn't pursue it in school. After answering phones for a living for a while I changed my mind.

themodelplumber• 5 years ago

Congrats on your big life changes.

It's funny, I just wrote up some experiences with the latest Haiku beta and also ended up missing applications despite the snappiness and amazingly trim fit into much less than 1G RAM. I'm sure many more apps will come soon though.

https://www.friendlyskies.net/notebook/giving-haiku-os-beta-...

sircastor• 5 years ago

I had a friend who was very excited to show me BeOS running on a PowerMac 7600 back when we were in high school (1997 probably?)

I thought it was interesting, including the UI being so different from what I’d seen otherwise (Mac OS 8 or Win3.1/95) but didn’t appreciate what it really was or why it would be appealing.

In retrospect I’m of two minds. Competition is great, and having more than a duopoly of operating systems wold really put the pressure on to keep competitors honest. That said, I remember the dark days of the single short aisle of Mac programs at EggHead software, and how frustrating it can be to have few options. Really the only thing that makes ChromeOS possible is web applications

Using BeOS on a Power Mac (2001)

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