[HN Gopher] The Great Illusion: When We Believed BeOS Would Save...
___________________________________________________________________
The Great Illusion: When We Believed BeOS Would Save the World
Author : naves
Score : 11 points
Date : 2025-06-28 19:54 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.desktoponfire.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.desktoponfire.com)
| leakycap wrote:
| I was a Mac fan when it looked like BeOS was going to be the next
| Mac OS - some Mac magazines even sent bootable BeOS CD-ROMS. I
| remember booting my Performa to BeOS and being amazed how
| different the same hardware felt.
|
| After OS X, I worked on a backend team for AT&T. Their entire
| mobile network at the time - billing, backend, customer service
| notes... ALL of it was in NeXTStep being streamed from
| centralized servers out to basic PCs running Citrix.
|
| It was wild to know NeXT had made inroads so many places. I
| imagine that is why Steve had any sort of relationship with AT&T
| when he pitched the iPhone and got them to do it. They already
| saw he could deliver for them on a B&W NeXT-based product used
| well into the 2000s.
| orangecat wrote:
| _I remember booting my Performa to BeOS and being amazed how
| different the same hardware felt._
|
| No kidding. It took until the M1 to make macOS feel anything
| close to the responsiveness of BeOS on a 150MHz PowerPC.
| ksec wrote:
| While M1 - M4 are fast. I still think macOS is relatively
| slow in terms of responsiveness / latency compared to BeOS
| even with M series. This probably go back to Early Windows or
| DOS where everything feels instantaneous.
| leakycap wrote:
| I agree & still use a PowerBook running actual OS 9 as my
| "second brain"
|
| Nothing else is as fast, I don't get slowed down by it
|
| Even cursor movement on modern macOS is slow
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Windows, instantaneous? Haha. I never used anything older
| than 3.0 but unless you mean those older versions indeed,
| nope - it never felt anything even close to
| "instantaneous". (Unless you're talking about how
| frequently it crashes).
| ksec wrote:
| >I imagine that is why Steve had any sort of relationship with
| AT&T when he pitched the iPhone and got them to do it.
|
| Well iPhone was launched with Cingular, which wasn't AT&T at
| the time.
| leakycap wrote:
| Cingular acquired the "old" AT&T Wireless in 2004
|
| New AT&T Wireless bought Cingular later
| desktopninja wrote:
| I fondly remember running beos5 PE on a computer with a amd k6
| processor and ati tv wonder card. I think it was 400Mhz, maybe
| 600 and 192MB ram. Watched in awe as it purrr'd editing DVs from
| firewire and the turner. It was a glorious multimedia OS. BeDepot
| was awesome too! The ports for winamp (BeAmp), zsnes and
| genecyst/dgens were top notch. the hw support was great too.
| never had an issue with MS Sidewinder gamepad (gameport and usb
| versions).
| davekeck wrote:
| "Muitithreabring"
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| What an interesting site. News and history about Haiku and Beos
| only! Who would have thought?
|
| But nothing about the recently mentioned https://cosmoe.org ?
|
| Or their former port to run it atop of Linux, like hosted AROS,
| or plan 9 from userspace?
| phlakaton wrote:
| There are many features of BeOS I loved, but for some funny
| reason the one that just thoroughly won me over from day one was
| the three-second boot time on my crusty Mac. Might've been a bit
| of a cheat. You'd never know it. It was just glorious performance
| for the impatient.
|
| Of course, that version of the OS didn't do a whole lot. By the
| time R5 rolled around, the boot time had grown quite a bit. It
| was still damn fast though.
| JohnDeHope wrote:
| I think it has the prettiest UI of the era, including Apple's.
| leakycap wrote:
| I love that BeOS/Haiku is still doing its thing, but I don't know
| what its thing is.
|
| The only "killer app/feature" I know of for Be/Haiku is
| https://www.tunetrackersystems.com/status.html a radio station
| automation program, and it's in a weird state where they can't
| provide hardware that works reliably.
| johnea wrote:
| Nice article!
|
| So much great tech has been lost to aggressive business practices
| of entrenched companies it would have disrupted.
|
| The theme has been repeated... repeatedly: VHS vs Beta being
| maybe the typically cited archetype of business model vs
| technical specs.
|
| To me the dominant example in the world today though, is that s/w
| engineers continue to use windows 8-(
|
| C:? Does anyone ever stop to think about the abstraction of a
| file system directory hierarchy? The whole point is to remove the
| specifics of the h/w implementing it, and provide a logical
| abstraction of nested "directories". Explicitly specifying drive
| "letters", is the opposite of that. The only reason it ever
| existed was because the primordial DOS didn't have the horsepower
| to manage something like a unix mount. But why do we still have
| it in 2025?
|
| Business triumphs over technology.
|
| One aspect of the article that didn't track my experience was the
| description of linux in 2015. By that point I had long ago
| settled onto the fluxbox window manager, because I didn't like
| the constant churn of "desktop environments". It all just seemed
| too much like windows.
|
| In 2025 I'm still using it, and it's still exactly the same,
| which to me is one of it's greatest features. Personally, I don't
| want the latest brainchild of some UI engineer at Canonical
| disrupting my workflow.
|
| This veto power of equity over technical possibility is the story
| of modern tech development. Cory Doctorow cites this 2014 article
| in his post today:
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
|
| tl;dr US political policy making is 100% controlled by large
| financial equity stake holders. The support, for or against, a
| policy by the overwhelming majority of the population has a 0%
| effect.
|
| This is also true of corporate decisions. "Innovation" is pursued
| if and only if it benefits equity, regardless of potential
| advantages to users, or the progress of the tech itself.
| diskzero wrote:
| Former Be employee here who ended up at Apple eventually. BeOS
| was way, way behind NeXTStep in so many ways. We also had fragile
| base class problems and had a lot of kernel issues. BeFS was cool
| but Dominic ended up at Apple (and is still there) so I feel
| Apple got generations of BeFS evolution. Jean Louis wanted an
| unrealistic price and Apple spent the smartest 400 million
| dollars that I can think of by buying NeXT. Apple got Steve,
| Avie, Bertrand and so many others. Many Be people ended up on
| board after journeys with Eazel and others. Some never made it to
| Apple due to their Danger/Android/Google paths. This saddens me
| even to this day.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-06-28 23:01 UTC)