[HN Gopher] Using BeOS on a Power Mac (2001)
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Using BeOS on a Power Mac (2001)
Author : rdpintqogeogsaa
Score : 73 points
Date : 2021-12-26 06:21 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lowendmac.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lowendmac.com)
| pndy wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > Was that CPU really named with "i-thing" fashion back then?
|
| Not really, the actual name was Itanium.
| natas wrote:
| I wish apple had bought Be instead of NeXT
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| 'Posted from my RIM BlackBerry'
| 404mm wrote:
| Till this day I still miss the hardware mute/unmute button.
| danieldk wrote:
| What do you mean? iPhones have a hardware button for
| mute/unmute?
| Underphil wrote:
| I have a OnePlus 8T which also has a hardware mute
| switch. They're there, you've just gotta look around.
| simondotau wrote:
| 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.
| laumars wrote:
| 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.
| nerdponx wrote:
| > 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?
| jandrese wrote:
| A decent web browser was the most obvious problem for a
| long time. Be was different enough that it was hard to port
| anything that expected a Berkley socket interface, which
| was all internet applications.
| sf_sugar_daddy wrote:
| scelerat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| thought_alarm wrote:
| 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.
| mattl wrote:
| > 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.
| mattl wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| wmf wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kergonath wrote:
| I ran Cheetah and Puma on my 9600/233. I tried really hard
| to convince myself that it was useable. Though to be fair
| the UNIX underpinnings were a revelation and it felt like
| living in the (gorgeous) future. Just a very slow one.
|
| I then used a B&W G3 until it went out of support. It
| indeed became better with every new release, which was
| quite impressive.
| selestify wrote:
| What was so revolutionary about 10.4?
| cgufus wrote:
| 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.
| ianlevesque wrote:
| 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.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| The OS X Finder was unusable until 10.3, and ISTR there
| were still other missing things from OS 9 that 10.4 finally
| rectified, but I don't recall what exactly. I do recall
| recommending against relatives and friends installing OS X
| until 10.4 finally filled in the gaps.
|
| edit: you can argue with "unusable," but I never saw anyone
| use the NeXT Workspace or the OS X Finder pre-10.3.
| Everyone on those systems used the command line to get
| around.
| ianbooker wrote:
| 10.4 was also the first release for Intel Macs and therefore
| was the first version for the majority of modern day MacOS
| users.
| kergonath wrote:
| 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.
| blunte wrote:
| Question for you OS geeks: did we take the good things learned
| from BeOS and implement them in Windows/Linux/macOS?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| https://archiveos.org/ is kind of a step in that direction,
| although not exactly the same
| hackmiester wrote:
| Try this: http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html
| wmf wrote:
| 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.
| laumars wrote:
| 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.
| fault1 wrote:
| > 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.
| bitigchi wrote:
| Haiku is still alive, no need to look for other things in other
| OSs. :)
| pavlov wrote:
| A lot of BeOS veterans ended up at Android.
|
| Any direct influence would probably be felt most on the mobile
| side rather than desktop.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Unfortunately the mess of Android APIs lacks any proof of
| BeOS influence.
| danieldk wrote:
| 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
| codr7 wrote:
| 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.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This. The filesystem has yet to be duplicated in terms of
| sheer metadata functionality and probably never will be
| again.
| nerdponx wrote:
| What's an example of something you could do with the BeOS
| filesystem that you can't do with today's filesystems and
| operating systems?
| smallstepforman wrote:
| Find file(s) with queries in less than a second? Save the
| query as a folder and now you have "live" searches?
|
| I cant tell you how often I waste time searching for the
| lication of a specific file. But never gad this probkem
| with BeOS/Haiku.
| sharmin123 wrote:
| jploudre wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Awesome career twist, potentialy more interesting than the
| article :) Did you go from professional -> professional, or not
| much past hobbyist tech?
| cable2600 wrote:
| HaikuOS on a PC: https://www.haiku-os.org/
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