I never had a chance to use it, but it looked like there was something special about it. Did anyone here own a BeOS system?
BeOS had a lot of good stuff going for it. A database-like file system, media frameworks, pervasive multithreading, a way-ahead-of-its-time file typing system, and so on. But the main reason I chose it over linux was that it was a lot easier to set up and maintain.
It's gone a bit too far underground for me to keep following it, however. After I got laid off from Be, I switched to Mac OS X 10.1, which had recently been released.
Boot and shutdown are really really fast.
Here it is, pasted for posterity:
So, Be fans, what makes BeOS so special?
BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper.
He yanked the plug on the box.
Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened.
Damn.
out of curiosity, how can you tell if the apps skipped a beat? It's hard enough when you have to focus on 2 audio streams, I can't image how you can deal with 2 dozen?
Perhaps there was some code monitoring dropped frames and such
Hopefully I'm wrong, and somebody can enlighten me?
Sure, most apps were lightweight and, like allenbrunson said, the pervasive multi-threading model made it harder to develop sophisticated applications, but they must have been on to something because the responsiveness was so good that it felt like you all of a sudden had a computer from the future, where _real_ multitasking was finally solved. It really was something else.
The quality of the file system and the way its advanced capabilities were fully utilized throughout the OS was also novel. Here is part of an old article written by Scot Hacker, who also wrote the BeOS Bible, which explain some of the advantages: http://www.osnews.com/story/421/_I_MacOSX_Week_I_Tales_of_a_...
Much of what the BeOS had going for it is now available in other OSes, in various shapes or forms, but what made the BeOS such a joy to use was how it all came together in a unified way. The Tracker, for example, which is the equivalent to Finder on Mac OS X, treated attributes as first-class citizens, making it very natural to set up views like the example in the article above, focusing on Category, Title etc.
Another thing that really stood out was the quality of the icons and the look of the window manager. The icons are everywhere on the web today, and while the UI might not be considered sexy by today’s standards, the yellow tabs that could be dragged along the top of windows were cute as hell. Other little touches, like the built-in desktop switcher that allowed different resolutions and color depths for each desktop (excellent for web development), are not commonly found today, afaik.
It will be interesting to see what the experience is like now, after so many years with Mac OS X. Will definitely install.
