Ten Years of BeOS 264
Tracker writes "BeOS was released to developers officially for the first time ten years ago. OSNews has a charming write-up about the BeOS, some interesting historical events since 1994, and a few anecdotes as well. Today, BeOS still lives on with projects like the freeware BeOS Max (built upon BeOS 5 PE), the open source re-implementation from scratch OpenBeOS and YellowTAB's commercial Zeta OS (based on unreleased and updated code of what would have been 'BeOS 6' if Be wasn't purchased by Palm in 2001)."
10 years? (Score:4, Insightful)
BeOS is one of those cool things that "could have been". It could have been amazing and taken over the desktop.
However, it was a flash in the pan.
What killed it? Lack of driver support. (I'm looking at you Linux fanatics)
Re:10 years? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you miss the whole "Microsoft not allowing OEM's to dual boot multiple OS's" fiasco?
Not that it would have absolutely overtaken Windows - but it was never given a chance.
cough *bs* cough (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:cough *bs* cough (Score:5, Interesting)
If they had bought BeOS, both companies would now be gone instead of just the one.
Re:cough *bs* cough (Score:5, Interesting)
I loved BeOS. I truly, truly loved it. I think, purely in terms of technology, Apple made a mistake in choosing NeXT over Be. (*)
But, ultimately, it was the right choice - it's hard to imagine where Apple would be now if there had not been the iMac, and everything that led on subsequently from that (right up to the iPod). Apple may still be a niche player in the eyes of the analysts, but it's a much bigger niche than it would have been, and considering the disappearing use of "beleaguered" in relation to Apple, it's a niche most people are willing to accept Apple can continue in for a while at least. all this i believe really did arise via the Hand of Jobs (and Ives).
(*): I feel the oft-repeated lack of printer support in BeOS is overstated - OS X printer support is CUPS based anyways - it's not a "NeXT" thing - and there's no fundamental reason why Be couldn't have gone down the same route. As for the much-touted rapid/easy application development aspects of OpenStep/NeXT, well, arguably the sheer allure of the underlying non-cruftiness of the BeOS would have drawn as much development support. Xcode with Objective C traces it's lineage from NeXT, but at least as of now there does not seem to be noticeable success in forestalling the application gap.
Re:cough *bs* cough (Score:3, Interesting)
Next, i10n. Again, BeOS is empty handed. I'm talking double byte, Arabic, Hebrew... As of version 4 t
Re:cough *bs* cough (Score:3, Insightful)
As a longtime Apple geek, I was excited to see Jobs return as well. The company has rebounded fantastically under his reign. But the best thing about Apple choosing NeXT over Be is UNIX. Even with BeOS's technical coolness, I think that no small part of the success of OS X lies in its UNIX roots.
m.m.
Re:cough *bs* cough (Score:5, Informative)
So BeOS DIDN'T settle a lawsuit with MS concerning dual-booting? [computerworld.com]
Re:cough *bs* cough (Score:5, Informative)
So yes, after microsoft put them out of business by eliminating the market through monopolistic business practices, Be sued them for it and settled for 23 million when they couldn't go on.
This doesn't eliminate the original point.. it only shows how fully destroyed they were by Microsoft.
Re:10 years? (Score:2, Insightful)
I won't say anything about how fun it was to program for BeOS in general, especially if you consider (at that time) the horrendous loops one often had to jump through to grok Windows programming.
The BeAPI's really were fun
Re:10 years? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:10 years? (Score:2)
FactIndex [fact-index.com] is actually a feed from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
There are actually several sites on the net that are mirrors of Wikipedia content, only with banner ads and such.
Wikipedia has a page on it, but I can't give you the link right now, since Wikipedia seems to be not responding
Re:10 years? (Score:2)
Well, since it is a mirror, then here you go, from Fact Index itself:
Distibution of Content [fact-index.com].
Fact Index is not listed though, the other are (nationmaster, tutorgig, 4reference, ..etc.)
Re:10 years? (Score:3, Informative)
In other news, I finally got part of my "Be vs MS" lawsuit settlement proceeds just recently.
Re:10 years? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:10 years? (Score:3, Insightful)
AntiTrust Trial. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:10 years? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:10 years? (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably not... they don't have that kind of a monopoly over the book-reading market.
Re:10 years? (Score:2)
Yes, a vendor could of gotten out of the agreement and payed "regular" prices. But then their hardware would of been significantly more expensive then that of their competitors.
Is it gun to the head forcing? Not exactly.
Is it strong coercion based on the strength of a market strangling monopoly? Yes.
Re:10 years? (Score:3, Informative)
Hitachi had agreed to license BeOS, and ship a dual-boot system using Be's boot loader and an icon on the desktop that enabled a Windows user to reboot into BeOS with one click.
"Microsoft sent two U.S. managers to Japan who expressed their 'anger' with Hitachi over its arrangement with Be, and 'reminded' Hitachi of the terms of its Windows license," according to the claim. "
now stfu.
Re:10 years? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:10 years? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure - IF John Grisham or Tom Clancy forced every publisher to not publish anyone else.
Apparently you missed the dual-boot fiasco as well. Relating to your situation, it would be that Tom Clancy's publisher ACTUALLY WANTED to publish your work, buy Mr. Clancy refused to let them publish you or they would not get his work (and basically have nothing substantial to sell).
Re:10 years? (Score:2)
If I bought a PC that had two operating systems on it, I'd probably just want to know the quickest way to delete the other one.
Re:10 years? (Score:3, Interesting)
Your choice.
Oh, and it's not just hardware that millions of
Re:10 years? (Score:2)
When's the last time you tried a new distribution of Linux? It now does a better job than Windows for the most part (Windows still requires a lengthy and buggy third-party driver installation process). The reasons for the slow adoption of Linux on the desktop are no longer technical; just market (in a market almost totally controlled by th
Re:10 years? (Score:3, Informative)
"Windows still requires a lengthy and buggy third-party driver installation process" and compiling drivers some guy from arkansas wrote for his printer is not a lengthy and buggy third-part driver installation process? Comparing that to windows is ridiculous. With windows, you get the driver on the CD with the device. You put the CD in, it copie
Re:10 years? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:10 years? (Score:2)
Your attitude is the one keeping Linux back, not Microsoft. If the linux community can't swallow its pride enough to admit when Windows does something people actually respond positively to, linux can't possibly go anywhere near the desktop.
Nice dodging of every other point I made, though.
Re:10 years? (Score:2)
Hello. This is 1998 calling. Give us our fucking "windows sucks" arguments back.
Re:10 years? (Score:2)
Windows requires five reboots and numerous driver installs one one box and SIX on the other.
All the software for Linux is updated with two commands. All the software is update on Windows with numerous downloads and a few dozen reboots.
It all depends on the hardware.
Part of the issue is that Linux has more frequent OS updates, so more hardware can be added to the "Out of the box" configurat
Re:10 years? (Score:5, Informative)
You remember wrong. It ran on just about any PPC (before that it ran on AT&T Hobbit chips, but thats another story). It also supported dual CPUs. At the time there where no low cost multi cpu PPC systems out there so Be made their own. It had zero video production ability. It had some nice audio features (four MIDI ports for one thing), but it used basic PCI video cards and had support for one TV card.
"Then they ported it to the powermacs (brand new ) at the time."
Nope, the PPC version ran on Powermacs from the get go. Granted there was a slight hold up as soem drivers needed to be written. However any of the clone systems based on CHIRP or its prediccesor worked out of the box.
"It would not run on standard intel hardware for another few years."
Once Jobs killed the clones off there was no point in supporting the PPC platform any more.
"When an x86 port was finally available software developer companies noticed no one was buying it (thanks to limited hardware requirements) so they decided it was a dude."
The most interesting software was written in the PPC BeBOX days. Most of it never made it over to the intel side. I recal a very cool audio program called BeatBox that let you hook up 12 mice/touch pads and "scratch" MP3 or CD audio tracks in real time.
"The few software that was written was powerpc based."
You seem to have no idea what you're talking about.
"If BE released it for x86 during its initial release its possible they could have had more users."
Why? You may as well say that if Apple hadn't killed off the PPC systems we'd all be running PPC based BeOS boxes.
"Also by now Windows2k is not too bad with video and graphics. Its still slower then linux and Be but not by much."
Eh? Windows2k us MUCH better at video then BeOS ever was.
"We also have journaling filesystems now, advanced threading, realtime support in the newest linux kernels, and today's hardware is much faster."
True, BeOS runs realy well on a P4.
"People used BE for specialized work and a really really fast system on ancient hardware. That problem is going away now."
No they didn't.
Re:10 years? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:10 years? (Score:2, Insightful)
It was so elegant.
Re:10 years? (Score:2, Interesting)
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
The user interface was a bizarre mishmash of copying from Windows and MacOS, with no real understanding of why MS and Apple did the things they did. Sometimes it depended exclusively on the mouse, sometimes it depended on memorizing short cuts that directly contradicted prior training experience (I'm thinking of the whole Ctrl/Alt terminal thing here). It was definitely minimalist, but elegant?
It had some neat ideas on querying the filesystem, and hence using the filesyste
Re:10 years? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:10 years? (Score:2)
Re:10 years? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, what killed it was that switching to it required not only buying a new OS but buying all new applications. There simply weren't enough people who found a "multimedia OS" compelling enough to make the large investment just to give BeOS a real shot.
Linux is different because 1) there's now a huge pool of free (beer) GUI software so users can give it a real shot and 2) even before those apps came along, there were plenty of text-only apps that met the needs of Unix users of the day. Those were available for BeOS, too, but the users who wanted the ultimate GUI didn't care whether bison and nn were available.
At least that's why I installed BeOS a shot, but really started using Linux.
Re:10 years? (Score:2)
I bought a PowerComputing computer (Apple clone) at the time when they were providing BeOS with every computer, and likes what I saw, but there was so little I could actually do with it at the time.
To give a great example, BeOS was a "Media OS" that could not play QuickTime, the dominant media format of the time. It was a wonderful foundation for an OS... mor
Driver support (Score:2)
Re:10 years? (Score:2)
After all, Xerox PARC's windowing and networking system wasn't really a success either...
Re:10 years? (Score:2)
Don't forget Apple fanatics while you're at it. Remember when Apple's engineers started withholding engineering specs from Be, and as a result Be couldn't write drivers for the new Apple hardware? This decision from Apple came shortly after Apple decided to purchase NeXt and use their assets to build their next OS.
LK
Re:10 years? (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me that I could install a functional Linux distibution on the same hardware that the Be geniuses said they were "locked" out of...I guess they just couldn't embrace open source to look at those GPL'd drivers.
Be just seemed to whine rather than get on with the business of doing business. Great ideas, crappy leadership.
Re:10 years? (Score:5, Interesting)
A pretty impessive flash though. Even in mono at 640 X 480 I knew I just had to try it. I lived with it as my main system for a couple of years so I think I can maybe add a few things that did kill it (at least for me).
What do I miss? I've moved on to OS X as many e-BeOS people seem to. By and large I am very happy, Windows was always boring and utilitarian, a problem that both BeOS and OS X avoided with some style.
I miss the speed, simplicity and stability of BeOS. It was a unix-like OS without the labyrinthine complexity of GNU/Linux. I really miss the custom attributes that were such a unique feature of BeOS - I don't believe any other OS has implemented such a scheme. Would I go back? Unlikely now. OpenBeOS will have to develop hugely to fill the above gaps. Zeta is just the bastard offspring of BeOS - a dead end that's going nowhere.
Re:10 years? (Score:3, Informative)
Some have [syllable.org]. XFS on IRIX and Linux can too [sgi.com], but on Linux support for those attributes suck.
Re:10 years? (Score:2, Informative)
However as no Microsoft application uses them (except maybe the explorer integrated image viewer in WinXP), no one else uses them. And of course, FAT does not have it and backward compatibility seems to be an issue for Microsoft.
Re:10 years? (Score:3, Interesting)
Speed and simplicity, yes. It was a damn fast and simple desktop OS. Far too simple for me, I actually prefer KDE on Linux (and I'm writing this from OS X), but I'm not going to argue against your taste. But stable? Compared to Windows 9x, I'd have to agree. BeOS wasn't particularly unstable. But with my limited use, I've had it crash on me more than Windows 2k/XP, which I've spent far more time with. Haven't had a crash with OS X yet, but I've only had my
Re:10 years? (Score:4, Insightful)
Lack of software - particularly "killer app" software. Linux could run open-source Unix software almost right from the start. Its "killer apps" are Apache, Sendmail, BIND and Samba. BeOS was a desktop OS with no "must have" desktop software - and it fizzled.
Re:10 years? (Score:2)
Re:10 years? (Score:2, Insightful)
Rather it is games for home users and apps for business users.
The apps side will diminish a bit with time.
Re:10 years? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:10 years? (Score:2)
Re:10 years? (Score:2)
The OpenBeOS project status page [sourceforge.net] indicates the filesystem is in the late beta stages. I don't know how much work it would be to port it to *nix, but I expect it's possible.
Ooh, I just followed the BeFS link on that page, and it references an experimental Linux BeFS driver [sourceforge.net]. Happy birthday.
P.S. You said you would kill....how about Darl? (I keeed,
The real question (Score:4, Interesting)
You do need a horde of developpers to get drivers, which you either have to pay or entice with a truly open model. Be did neither.
If Machiavelli lived today, his quintesential book would be called "Il Executivo", not "Il Principe"
10 years of BeOS (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:10 years of BeOS (Score:5, Informative)
So yes, there is a lot of Be in Cobalt (multimedia, POSIX, etc)
Now we just have to see were the market is going. PalmSource seems to be looking at Garnet (which is targeted at the small foot-print phone market space) as the cash cow for the future. I had hoped that Sony would lead the charge and release a Cobalt Clie (as they tend to beat the more conservative PalmOne to market on such things) but with them dropping out. Outlook not so good. I just hope that Colbalt doesn't get infected with the same ahead-of-its-time issue that BeOS suffered. At least to PalmSource's credit, they really bent over backwards to make the old PalmOS stuff work, without polluting the new too badly. (If BeOS had had a WINE for MacOS emulator to bridge the app gap, it might have done better.)
Re:10 years of BeOS (Score:2, Informative)
I thought it did. It was called SheepShaver or something like that. This still didn't solve the driver problems though.
Obligatory BeOS Quotes (Score:5, Funny)
This first one is particularly applicable as it pertains to the "uncorruptable" BeOS filesystem.
but you have more problems with win95 than i have ever imagined anyone having
nah...you should see some of the people on my dorm floor...
one guy had to fdisk like 5 times last semester
hehe
You CAN'T corrupt the BeOS file system
Even by kicking out the power cord
you can't play Q2 on it either
potty stop - brb
overkill.. yellow card
what, you'd rather say i was going to "the little programmer's room" or something??
I got take a BeOS
"BeOS combines the best features of all the major operating systems: the ease-of-use of the Macintosh, the power and flexibility of Linux, and Minesweeper from Windows."
LOL! (Score:5, Funny)
Karma be damned, that is funny.
I honestly can't think of an "oh, and maybe
Re:LOL! (Score:5, Funny)
"...and the marketing team from OS/2, and the rabid fans from Amiga."
There. Now's its complete.
(Yes, I have BeOS 4.5)
Quake II (Score:2)
Re:Obligatory BeOS Quotes (Score:4, Funny)
<dEad{Ni}> but you have more problems with win95 than i have ever imagined anyone having
<Tolen{Ni}> nah...you should see some of the people on my dorm floor...
<Tolen{Ni}> one guy had to fdisk like 5 times last semester
<Magaera{Ni}> hehe
<Magaera{Ni}> You CAN'T corrupt the BeOS file system
<Magaera{Ni}> Even by kicking out the power cord
<Gunfighter{Ni}> you can't play Q2 on it either
<Magaera{Ni}> potty stop - brb
<Gunfighter{Ni}> overkill.. yellow card
<Magaera{Ni}> what, you'd rather say i was going to "the little programmer's room" or something??
<Deathwish{Ni}> I got take a BeOS
<Magaera{Ni}> "BeOS combines the best features of all the major operating systems: the ease-of-use of the Macintosh, the power and flexibility of Linux, and Minesweeper from Windows."
B.E.OS (Score:5, Informative)
IMHO a very good approach, as using the Linux kernel and XFree86 will take care of the lack-of-drivers problem that the original BeOS had. Also, this will give it decent OpenGL performance for free, which was also one of the weak points of the original BeOS (and will be one of the other sucessors).
Re:B.E.OS (Score:3, Informative)
Re:B.E.OS (Score:2)
Re:B.E.OS (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the best features of BeOS was that it was practically a Mac (but with multitasking!) on a PC. The Tracker was very much like the Finder, windows were similar (close box on the left, size & shade buttons on the right, grouped scroll thumbs, etc.), applications were well designed UI wise, and simple, never cluttered, used a sane file association system (I think they used MIME types) as opposed to having file extensions hard coded to open in a certain app - you have to remember that at one point BeOS was being engineered specifically to sell to Apple to become their new OS. Needless to say they picked OPENSTEP instead and now we have OS X, but that's another story...
Unless they've gutted XFree86 I can see this just becoming another stock standrd, bloated (BeOS was a perfectly usable OS + a multitude of applications in under 200MB) distro but with a BeOS skin. Which is NOT the same thing.
All the apps will still use GTK or KDE because nobody will be bothered redoing the GUI in BlueEyedOS's native toolkit (why bother when it works okay using whatever we're using now but just looks a bit out of place). Even Apple couldn't make X11 acceptable with their implementation and look at how anal they are about OS X's GUI being perfect and consistent. It just looks like some generic linux distro with a bad aqua skin slapped on top.
I won't say this will be a failure, because by definition it is nigh impossible for any open source project to be a failure. I'm sure there are people out there who will love it (and as long as at least one person still uses it and appreciates it, that's all that matters), but I will say that I think this will be a failure as a new BeOS.
Re:B.E.OS (Score:2)
Re:B.E.OS (Score:3, Informative)
If you bump up the priority of X, the panel, and your window manager to something like -20, you will find that X responsiveness increases tremendously.
This is exactly what the other
Still got my BeBox. (Score:5, Interesting)
Strange attachment to it
Still, I suppose I'll find a use for it. 66mhz dual-proc ppc601's (is it, i forget?), and it runs smoothly every time I've turned it on recently. I guess Linux wouldn't be out of the question for it, but I can't help this nagging feeling that there could be -other- things to run on that poor, simply nice little machine...
Re:Still got my BeBox. (Score:3, Funny)
So do you!
Re:Still got my BeBox. (Score:2)
GeekPort (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:GeekPort (Score:2, Interesting)
ah, bebox. its really just the blinkenlights i like, its so 'orac'. i'm sure theres a speech synthesizer for it
Re:GeekPort (Score:2, Informative)
The coolest thing about it, was that it was - to the computer - an addon LPT port. So you could build your gizmo easily with the screw-down terminals, and on
Re:Still got my BeBox. (Score:2)
Apple and BeOS (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Apple and BeOS (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Apple and BeOS (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Apple and BeOS (Score:2)
Re:Apple and BeOS (Score:5, Interesting)
Proofreading! (Score:5, Funny)
You misspelled "morbid obsession with".
Here's your reason why... (Score:2)
This first time I heard about Be was in Forbes (Score:4, Interesting)
Article [forbes.com]
Now that I read it, it wasn't even that article. It started something like "Everything Bill Gates has sold you will be obsolete" and it had the BeOS guy standing by a BeBox.
Can someone explain Zeta to me? (Score:2, Interesting)
Do they own the code? If Be was sold to Palm, how are these guys continuing work from the BeOS codebase? Was the OS sold separately, and if so, then who cares about the Palm deal?
Or is the whole Zeta thing owned by Palm?
Re:Can someone explain Zeta to me? (Score:5, Informative)
Palm has no plans to open source the BeOS code, mainly because there would be no profit in it, and also because there are licensing issues with bits and pieces of it. Most BeOS fans wanted Palm to open source the code to speed up OpenBeOS and the other projects out there, but I think we've done fine without it. :)
Zeta is a small company in Germany, and as far as I know, has no connection to Palm other than the license deal.
As it was written, so shall it be, from the book of Be... ;)
BeOS was hard to get over (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing that is still unmatched is the responsiveness of BeOS's GUI. I was running BeOS on a PII-300 in 1999, and none of today's operating systems can match the responsiveness I had, even on today's fastest machines. Window resizing and scrolling were rock-solid and flicker-free. As much as I love OSX, resizing and scrolling feel sluggish. Windows is better, but prone to flicker and outright delays if the application is busy doing something. The GUI in BeOS never missed a beat, largely due to pervasive multithreading of the core infrastructure.
Re:BeOS was hard to get over (Score:3, Funny)
Where'd you get a version of Carbon that's object oriented and threadsafe?
Re:BeOS was hard to get over (Score:2)
Re:BeOS was hard to get over (Score:4, Funny)
Windows? Please?
While not exactly a clone.. (Score:2)
Re:While not exactly a clone.. (Score:5, Informative)
Not to sound like a fanatic... but... (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess is 99% of you never did anything more than boot it, realize it had no good web browser and then returned to windows/linux/bsd/whathave you.
What I want to say is I spent 4 years using BeOS as my primary platform. Why? Because I don't like using a system I am uncomfortable developing on. [ Yes, I'm talking about you, Win32] BeOS's ease-of-use and user focus were secondary to it's having an API and clarity of development which blew my mind.
I gave it up for linux, when I discovered Qt, and now I'm on Mac OS X, which is from an API standpoint actually better. Amazing.
So, I'm rambling here but the thing is, beOS made it *easy* to write amazing things. Not many systems can claim that, except maybe Cocoa.
Case-in-point: I had a dell laptop with a trackpad. I hated having my insertion point jump around when I typed and brushed the trackpad with my thumb. So I decided to write an input-server plugin to discard those events. How long did it take me to write it? *One* hour. Not because I'm a genius programmer -- I'm not. it was because beOS was a well-designed coherent system with APIs that made sense *across* the board, and excellent documentation from nape to nuts.
My plugin: http://bebits.com/app/1344
Beos is getting some use... at work. (Score:5, Interesting)
Why BeOS, you crazy SOB? Well, it's a P225, so BeOS flies on it - it boots in 20 seconds (90% of that is POST) and I dont have to worry about antivirus, spyware, trojans or other Windows crap. It's fast, and does what it's supposed to, and no one will be installing Solitare on it. :)
I am finding the built-in terminal lacking as far as term emulation goes, so I'll keep an eye out for updates.
If it goes down, they're back to running to the PC - (Win98 minus IE and Outlook Ex, plus Firefox and Thunderbird), but I haven't had many problems with BeOS yet.
And what the hell, we've got the equivalent of the Battlestar Galactica armada in old-ass computers, BeOS should be getting its time along Mac OS X, 9, 7.x, Windows 98, XP, and did I mention we have our inventory system running on SCO Unix? ;)
BeOS was fantastic (Score:2)
I ran the desktop 1280x1024x32. So once I ran Quake at 640x480 and a TV window also at 640x480 at the same time. It didn't crash, it didn't slow down, they both ran flawlessly. There is no way Windows could have done that at the time, or anytime for that matter.
I stopped running BeOS when they pulled the plug for it. And still today I wish I
Bear Hands (Score:2)
It is kind of romantic hearing all these stories, e.g. a developer who later became a Be engineer had to carry his BeBox to his house from the post office with bear hands (and the BeBox was a very heavy machine compared to PCs)...
I wonder why he didn't just use his own hands...seems like bear hands would only make the load heavier.
BeOS was a ray of hope (Score:5, Interesting)
1995 sucked!
Then an audacious person introduced a dual-CPU developer machine with a nifty new OS with hardly any legacy constraints. It was shockingly unfathomable. It was idealistic and hopeful, in a time when that sort of attitude was deader than it had ever been. It sure cheered me up.
Gone but not forgotten... (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah, this article brought back a lot of old memories... My favorite part:
Yes, 4.5.2 really was the best BeOS ever, as well as the best OS period. I had it running on 2 boxes, day and night, for months upon months. One of the computers had all my music stored in its database-like filesystem. It used to play these hundreds of songs just about 24 hours a day, to be paused whenever I left and resumed when I came back. This was next to several Linux and FreeBSD boxes, very "heavy" in terms of all the software that ran on them... I'll never forget how the computer I had configured as a NAT firewall ran X with XEarth in the background, and a ton of unnecessary processes at the same time... or how there was some weird bug in KDE back then, I think I had version 1, that caused the GUI to go completely crazy while the VM would go on these disk grinding frenzies, which would last about 30 minutes before the computer regained its sanity, and it routed packets perfectly through all of this crap. I have always liked these OSes, but I have to admit that I always enjoyed working with BeOS a lot more than these other operating systems, all of which I swear by. BeOS just had this feeling, as the author of the article said... I don't think that any other OS will reproduce the spirit, culture, and fluidity of this fine piece of software.Ooooooooh well.
Re:Too bad (Score:2)
Re:Too bad (Score:5, Funny)
When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. [...] This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
Not sure about Mozilla, but that certainly explains IE's memory problems.
Re:Why BeOS failed, IMO. (Score:4, Interesting)
IIRC, it was at least $50 (not counting using the gnu tools) and went a lot higher. $50 is nothing as far as the costs of dev tools are concerned, but I was irked.
As you said, if you're new and trying to make it you should be courting developers (and resellers), not acting indifferent to them or prematurely trying to use them as a revenue stream.