Anyone remember the "Be" Operating System (BeOS) ??

We have Threadripper and Intel Xeon Phi now!

A multi core processor would be pretty useless if the OS didn't have preemptive multitasking.

A multi core processor would be pretty useless if the OS didn't have preemptive multitasking.

this thread made me miss netscape

I actually had a BeBox.

^^^

I really loved the Amiga and often drooled over it in stores.

A friend had one and we had the brave idea to connect my NES to the composite input of his Amiga computer's monitor (despite strict parental warning not to do so...)

Voila!

Super Mario Bros. never looked so good!!

:supermario:

It was cool but there’s a reason these things were binned.

I think I have OS/2 install disks somewhere!

Do tell!!!



I always dreamed of having one back then...

Have OS/2 disks also. True multitasking when Win 95 came out.

Like WordPerfect and Lotus, and Stacker, Gates just stole other people's ideas.

i still have a couple of pentium 2's 333 and 350 mhs here had a supermicro dual slot board at one point worked on rambus memory.

i 've also got a first edition p90 gold plated that i've owned since new

I was the second to last hardware eng at BE. I also did the SCSI drivers and developed internal debugging tools.

BeOS was a totally new thing at the time and had the best threading subsystem, We had 8 core systems running when no one else had more than two. and the OS scaled near linearly with added cores.

It mostly failed because it was a new design. To get the benefits of the lightweight threading you had to rewrite code from scratch, simple porting was not effective.This meant no existing programs showed any gain on Beos. Code written for it was amazing, full res uncompressed video editing, 3D sound mixing, multiplayer gaming. Way before anyone else had any of this.

The real killer was when Jobs came back to Apple and brought the Next OS from Next. This became OSX and Be no longer had anywhere to go with their product. Next and OSX are UNIX at the core, so porting code was possible.

and the rest is history.

I had an one speed read only CD player in my
Intel 80386DX 16 MHz processor with a gray ceramic heat spreader.


radio shack had one on sale for 899.00...1990



During the 1990s, CD-ROMs were popularly used to distribute software and data for computers and fifth generation video game consoles. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both computer data and audio with the latter capable of being played on a CD player, while data (such as software or digital video) is only usable on a computer (such as ISO 9660[1] format PC CD-ROMs).

This was back around the time of the late '90s as desktop computers were rarely exceeding 200MHz and multiple processors were mostly only found in servers (unless you had $1200 to spend on a single processor!) Multiple-core architectures were still a somewhat distant wet dream for engineers; yet one company stepped up to the plate to realize the coming times.. But this market was not hardware nor was it really "software."


Apple was in the market to find something to replace the ailing Classic MacOS; looking for something fresh going forward into the new decade (post Y2K madness) and Microsoft was literally scared shitless of this operating system and its possible potential. (This is obviously where the real conspiracy begins in this tale...)


Linux was finally no longer a college project / assignment and was starting to gain rapid traction as a server OS, yet with hopes and dreams of delivering an end-user desktop experience devoid of the "standard" and accepted (read: expected) litany of commercial licensing and closed-source nonsense that was ever so present and forced down consumers' throats; much to the chagrin of us all...


It was here that Be realized the need, the market, and the value of a true "media" operating system, literally as the internet itself was unfolding...and in rapid succession at that. This need for a capable operating system was also met with a strict requirement for performance, elegance, and stability among all other things...


:truestory:

:geek:

Cool story gramps

This was back around the time of the late '90s as desktop computers were rarely exceeding 200MHz and multiple processors were mostly only found in servers (unless you had $1200 to spend on a single processor!) Multiple-core architectures were still a somewhat distant wet dream for engineers; yet one company stepped up to the plate to realize the coming times.. But this market was not hardware nor was it really "software."


Apple was in the market to find something to replace the ailing Classic MacOS; looking for something fresh going forward into the new decade (post Y2K madness) and Microsoft was literally scared shitless of this operating system and its possible potential. (This is obviously where the real conspiracy begins in this tale...)


Linux was finally no longer a college project / assignment and was starting to gain rapid traction as a server OS, yet with hopes and dreams of delivering an end-user desktop experience devoid of the "standard" and accepted (read: expected) litany of commercial licensing and closed-source nonsense that was ever so present and forced down consumers' throats; much to the chagrin of us all...


It was here that Be realized the need, the market, and the value of a true "media" operating system, literally as the internet itself was unfolding...and in rapid succession at that. This need for a capable operating system was also met with a strict requirement for performance, elegance, and stability among all other things...


:truestory:

:geek:

Cool story gramps

I happened upon the last minute estate sale of one of the Macintosh consultants/repair people in the area. Back in the day he must have made a ton of money servicing graphics/printing clients.

Literally the entire house and garage was full of old Mac's, from the beginning to the early 2000's. I guess he had cleaned out his office when he retired and moved it all to his residence. Must have been around 100 that I could see, and who knows how many more were buried. It's too bad, a lot of stuff was completely turned into trash from sitting in the Florida heat in his garage for almost 2 decades.

I got a Quadra 700 and 950 working, the ones that don't have leaking capacitor issues because they used tantalums instead of surface mount electrolytics. I couldn't believe how slow they seemed now, even though I used these class of machines back then and they were fast! How did I ever browse the internet on a Mac IIsi? lol.

Ah, yes, Jean-Louis...
You have to understand how operating systems are made (from the perspective of industrial management). Apple had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on several failed projects.

Programmers cost a company about a hundred bucks per hour. An OS takes over 100,000 man-hours of work - each and every time you spin a new version of one.

While BeOS was nice, and had some nice features, BeOS was no different.
But NeXTStep was.

NeXT was based on unix. It *didn't* need to be rewritten each time. You only had to rewrite small parts of it - say about 5,000 man-hours of work.

Viola! You save 95% of your effort. Now you can fire programmers (to cut costs)
OR you use those programmers to write new modules to expand your OS universe.

For new products.... like a music player, or a phone, or watches.

Apple alone has this nimbleness. That's how they have become this behemoth.

Hey, when I was a kid we had to walk 15 miles per megabyte!