Read more to vote for the operating system that should have been the Next Big Thing (TM), but that never happened for whatever reason. Please make sure you vote an OS based on its *technical capabilities*, not because you used to be its user when you were 16, or because you like its background color, or because you heard good things about it once. Vote for the one that you truly think it was technically superior at its time.
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The company renamed to Apple and bought Apple (hehe, i know it is the other way round), while renaming NeXTSTEP as Mac OS X.
while renaming NeXTSTEP as Mac OS X
You're right about one part - OSX was largely based on NeXTSTEP, but I wouldn't say it was just repackaged and renamed to it.
So I voted for NeXTSTEP, even though it's not technically dead. :O)
OSX is not as NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP used to be though. OSX might use the guts of NeXT/OpenSTEP, but they have changed a whole lot of things, and neither it is binary compatible, neither it runs on 68k or x86 anymore. OSX is a brand new OS, based on principles and some of the API of NeXT/OpenSTEP. And the similarities stop there. It is like saying that the original Unix is not dead, simply because we have FreeBSD and Solaris today. The principles are still here, but the original Unix OS, is not.
Based on this facts, NeXT/OpenSTEP are dead for years now.
I wanted to vote for Be, but IMHO at the time Amiga was more ahead of its time. First is Amiga, second is BeOS, third is NeXTSTEP (and I claim ignorance on the other OSes).
Most people voted for BeOS cause they're newbies to the computer world.
The veterans went and voted for OS/2 because quite a few things we liked so much in BeOS came from the OS/2.
If only OS/2 had won instead of WinNT...
Seems to 'be' a popular choice. Why? It is fast, light, has a decent simple UI, has a usefully innovative filesystem, has a unixy subsystem but isn't hampered by full-on unix underpinnings like (IMHO) Linux (on the desktop) and Mac OSX to a lesser extent are.
I thought about OS/2, but having recently tried it out again, I wasn't so impressed by the WPS as I thought I'd be. It is too abstract/separated from the underlying file system (hence the Shell in Workplace Shell I suppose). MacOS<X had it better conceptually I think.
If the people who voted for OS/2 were veterans, they would know about MULTICS.
Regards
I voted on Amiga, not because I still own a Amiga 500 from when I was 14 but because the platform (NOT just the OS) was revolutionairy. Amiga had very good and decent hardware with a good idea behind it, something we all see now in PC's. Delagate control! The Amiga had a special architechture, every item has / had it's own chip. PC's are slowly catching on to the principle (Videocard are a good example). It's to bad that the Gravis soundscards didn't lift off they are also very good (architechturally).
Amiga just used 8 Mhz and run like the wind...
For me Amiga stopt being Amiga when they when bankrupt. Amiga isn't just software and it isn't just hardware; it's both.
Based on my experience out of all of those, it had the most promise for me. Now I've never used Amiga or most of those, I've used OS/2, and never saw the love.. I'm using OS X now but never used NeXT so..
I voted for Be - it is the one I know the best and the most about, except for NeXT, but that only on 68k NeXT hardware. It was so painfully slow. I also wish I knew more about OS/2. I'd buy it if IBM didn't charge so much for it. But, I really do think Be is the one. Built from scratch, so fast, so lean. I know programming is hard for it because of its complete multi-threading, but it was/is beautiful. At Apple, with Steve whispering in his ear, Amelio rejected Be and said, "It can't even print". Well, it was printing a long time before OS X did <g>.
If you don't have js (for whatever reason) and you just wanta see the poll results you can sneek up on this link.
http://www.go2poll.com/cgi-bin/nph-pwnet.pl?name=eugenia&id=4&sessi...
Seems there is still issuse, cause even after i got a js browser up and running it never submited my vote. Oh well it was gona Be for Win3.11 any way - oh wait thats not a choice.
I voted BeOS because it was SO good compared to the others in it's time but only lacked industry support and non-shareware apps.
This is the OS I would reinstall NOW if apps and drivers were available.
Close second was AmigaOS, but as good as it was, it started to stagnate well before Commodore went under since they had such a hard time breaking away from the A500 as a base system to write apps for.
Still, it was a really hard choice. AmigaOS ruled the 80's and early 90's easily.
Pretty good decision to exclude any OS you can go out & buy with ease that is, otherwise the feel of the resultss would be utterly swamped out.
Anyways I still use BeOS much more than Win for my HW-SW design work, it forces me to keep to stds so I can throw it over to Linux without having to deal with that right now. Still use Win for entertainment or if forced to, but only for a few apps.
If I wasn't so busy on my own projects & the other BeOS projects hadn't started (OBOS, Crusoe, winBe etc) I might very well have been tempted to start a BeOS desktop Explorer replacement for Windows (like PowerDesk), not just a Yellow Tab skin, but a really feels like Tracker project. Use Cygwin for the shell, maybe use wx or Qt for the Finder/Explorer engine & combine with some skinning SW to get the look right.
It wouldn't be able to actually run any BeOS apps as I wouldn't go so far as to include the Be APIs but the dev SW under Windows is better anyway than the BeOS dev SW & would substitute pretty well. As a bonus I would get the thoousands of things missing from BeOS. Of course if VMWare & BeOS worked together, that would be fine too.
The Atari ST had kinda two OS's
TOS the Tramiel OS which did all the grunt work
GEM from digital research which does the GUI
This had a very similar interface to Windows 95. So similar that I picked up Win95 very easily when it was released
I didn't vote Atari as it had no technical merit.
I didn't vote OS/2 because there where better ones
I didn't vote BEOS cause Iv'e never seen it
I voted NeXt Step because of the brilliance of its design.
Mainly the object orientated framework that made it easy to make apps on it. Not because it came in a sexy looking box or had a pretty GUI.
Good poll Eugenia
PINK / TAOS / VIC20 <- pick one
AFAIK OpenStep ran on HPPA/SPARC/x86/68K. Whith one nfs server and a configured netinfo automount one could have all its binaries on one server. Apple hows a patent for FAT binaries, such bins can run on multiple arch thats cool. Darwin when built is FAT and can either run x86 or PPC.
--
http://islande.hirlimann.net
hard to vote! os2 was the first real multitasking protected GUI on the 386+ that was near uncrashable, but then plan9 beats it hands down for concepts and ideas but they never felt very workable.
you got things at all ends of the spectrum!
in the end I picked the amiga because it was revolutionary. beos, next, os2, etc, were not. they were great, but not innovative.
i think, the original macos should have been in there tho, regardless of being able to purchase it now.
Although the last multics system was <A href="http://www.multicians.org/corby-letter.html">retired in 2000, it directly pioneered several very important OS systems concepts that gradually found their way into more mainstream OS's. For example, it was the first to be designed with support for virtual memory, hardware pagetables and segmentation rings(one of the reasons why chips like i386 support both segmentation and paging), smp, dynamic linking, dynamic memory management, access control, hierarchical fs, programmed in PL/1---a high level language, etc. Unix, a pun on multics, of course, borrowed and simplified several of these concepts (for ex., no hardware memory protection on the original PDP's on which Unix was first implemented---that's right, the early days' unix was comparable to the early days' windows), although all the above pioneering concepts slowly wound up being added to unix. I think the chief impediments to multics' popularity was simplicity, hackability (through being more cheaply available compared to multics), and fastness (for example, being programmed in C instead of in type-safe HLL's). It is quite instructive and amusing to find that these are roughly the same reasons that led to windows' dominance years later.
Multics wasn't THAT good. I love Vax/VMS - OpenVMS, but still, OS/2 was one step behond.
IBM made OS/2 as a business OS, like they did AIX. Still, OS/2 infrastructure was great, OS/2 could have been so much more.
I use Windows, Linux and BeOS. I’ve never used another OS. And till this day I’m happy that I find link to be.com and ordered their trial demo disk for 10$, and v4.5 after that. Nither Windows nor Linux gave me the same feeling be did.
I have only read about it once, where it was called "developper OS" - is there something to it like BeOS? I thought it is largely an inhouse thing of Bell (or whoever..)?
1) During the 80s and early 90s PC manufactures and salesmen often stated that GUIs were useless and only meant for people who can't type.
Today every mainstream OS has a GUI! The Amiga color GUI was the most advanced one around at the time, it even allows several screens with multiple resolutions and color depths to be displayed simultaniously. (Sadly modern graphic cards lost support for this feature mainly because MSDOS/Windows never supported this). And since 1985 AmigaOS offered amazing still unmatched 32-bit pre-emptive multitasking between a gigantic amounts of different programs without any noticable slowdown. To make everything complete Amigas also were the first computers to be able to display photo realistic graphics with up to 4096 colors simultaniously since 1985!
2) During that period PC people also stated that stereo sound wasn't very useful as well and that the internal peeps gives enough feedback to users.
Nowadays everyone I know has a very advanced soundcard offering great music and soundeffect.
AmigaOS had since day *1*, support for great stereo sound as a standard, it doesn't matter how old your Amiga is, if you have the horsepower you can still listen to MP3s with 14bit (near CD) sound quality (or get an additional sound card for even more quality).
3) Furthermore all Amigas offered shared library support, autoconfig (plug&play), multiprocessing (several custum co-processor chips), genlockable graphics (sub-titling or add other graphics to movies easily), very advanced CLI with case insensitive long file names support, etc.
But what still very much appeals to Amiga users today is its efficiency and ultra small memory footprint. Without a doubt AmigaOS and Amiga hardware were miles ahead compared to the competitors.
1) OPENSTEP
Actually, OPENSTEP 6.0 (or 6.1 for Puma, or 6.2 for Jaguar). The architecture remains the same. It has been updated and widened. Emulators (BlueBox/Classic), compatibility layers (Carbon) do not change a system. And, about not being binary compatible: that is because 68k and x86 binary code cannot run on PPC. The .app bundles structura has changed slightly, but you wouldn't need to recompile for an old bundle to work, just change the internal directory structure. About Darwin not being the same UNIX that was under NeXTSTEP, just think that OPENSTEP 4 would run *on top* of the NT kernel. No Unix underneath, but Windows NT. Later, at the time of Rhapsody (aka Openstep 5) the same technology survived as Yellow Box for Windows. So I would say that OSX *is* OPENSTEP, but not Openstep/Mach or Openstep/NT, neither Openstep/SPARC. Think of it as Openstep/PPC v6.
2) PLAN 9 FROM BELL LABS
Plan 9 was an experimental OS that instead of considering the single machine as the logical unit for computing, it considered the whole network. That is, you would simply have a terminal (they have their own terminology, I just don't remember it) and then there would be file servers, printing servers, processor servers, and so. All the communication (process, data, *all*) went thru the same protocol: 9P. And all the resources are represented as files. Theres also something about namespaces and so... Quite a revolutionary thing that will be ripped off by Microsoft and Apple and will then get to the main public. It source has been released by Bell Labs. Just in case you didn't know, Plan 9 from Outer Space is the name of a sci-fi movie (I think it's by Ed Wood).
Hi.
I wanted to vote, but I didn't see linux in the list, which IMHO should be there in the first place...
First I voted BeOS as I use(d) it since R3 but I'll be on MacOS X soon.
What I don't get is, why do you list Irix and AIX? Both are still available and development for them goes on. Both OS won't target to the customer market, so they are not wide spread. Anyway my O² is running great (also my BeOS-boxes (x86)) and it's no prob to get new releases of irix (AFAIK the latest is 6.5.15... I'm running 6.5.10).
Irix and AIX are not "made" for that list.
Oh, btw NextStep runs great at my old computer too !
Peace,
LoCal
I voted for other. I'm still waiting for the Great OS. BeOS was good, but I think the original Be hardware was better. I lost interest in Be when the stopped making hardware. Does anyone remember the original Be machines? I work with a guy that still has a blue DUAL 133 MHz PPC with the blinken lights and the Geek Port(tm) in his cube. We call him "The Kevster." Be never made a single processor machine. When they stopped making hardware I lost interest. :-)
-- LadyJessica, geek girl.
I think BeOS will win this poll because a large part of this sites audience (first) came here from BeOS related sites. I'm sure Eugenia would verify that the first significant proportion of visitors had arrived from the BeOS sites that she and others had been involved in.
Having said that, I voted for BeOS for all the right reasons, i.e. it was a step in the right direction with a clean modern micro kernel design geared towards the increased capabilities of it's targeted hardware platforms. It was (should I be saying is?) very responsive with plenty of room for expansion (the great FS, multiple processor aware, mime type handling, translators etc). It tried to look forward, unfortunately the masses need an OS that will deal seamlessly with their past too.
As always, it's the lack of apps that kill and OS, WIndows has a rather large number of apps, BeOS didn't. Maybe they should have bundled loads more apps with the OS ;-)
"Pretty good decision to exclude any OS you can go out & buy with ease that is, otherwise the feel of the resultss would be
utterly swamped out. "
In that case, AmigaOS is excluded. There is no difficulty in buying
AmigaOS 3.9, and by next Easter there will be no difficulty in buying
OS 4 with an Amiga computer.
plan9 was just sheer genius: recursively defined user-space namespaces. i can union my directories over other directories, mount my own filesystems without being root, access osnews through /net/tcp/www.osnews.com/index.php, etc...
the power and flexibility of this idea still hasnt been realised by anyone in the main-stream, although the Hurd team grok it.
I wouldn't have excluded Amiga, never used it, but I appreciated it's contribution in the 80's. At the hight of AmigaOS time, I fell for MacOS instead, much more subtle even if only BW & no HW for anything. Anyway, they both used 68K so they were clearly far ahead of Wintel for quite some time. My boss at the time was an Amigan.
Anyway, I wouldn't know where to buy Amiga kit unless I was a fan with some general knowledge of that scene. Its the same for BeOS, OS/2 as well. Most of the other OSs would be very hard to come by unless you still had the HW. As much as I was a Mac/PPC fan, I would be much more interested in trying out AmigaOS if it ran on x86. If Be had never done the x86 port, they wouldn't even be on the poll & would have no significant following today.
If I had burnt even more $ than I already did, I would have owned NextStep, luckily they priced it way out of my reach.
OS/2 was a wierd set up. Like BeOS it took several versions & several PCs before I could even boot it. Once it warmed up though, I just couldn't get it, so opposite to everything Mac.
Anyways, I am sure the OBOS, Cosmoe, othere teams will be pretty chuffed with this poll.
I think AmigaOS has proven itself to be the fartest ahead for its time. MacOS X and WindowsXP have copied alot of features originally only found in AmigaOS {but without any efficiency and far less freedom for the user}.
BeOS was good, but seriously it was always lacking behind. If it were not for DTP support then it was for 3D support. It could have been a good basis for MacOS X, but BeOS completely lack good software support. AmigaOS still has much better DTP software available like Pagestream or good 3D support with Warp3D.
I do all my serious programming on an A4000T (purchased in 1998). Even running at 50 Mhz on
a 68060, it appears to be just as fast as the Compaq presario (Celeron @ 600Mhz) for most tasks,
& much faster in others (such as text editing. Are all windows text editors purposely slowed down or
what?). The main reason I love it? I know where everything pertaining to the OS is located, & I
know what to do to fix just about any S/W problem. Jim Steichen, author of AmigaTalk
Hmm, I really wanted to vote for several, based on the time frames they appeared in...
Early: AmigaOS - A micro-kernel based real-time-lite multi-tasking OS for the masses...
Middle: NextSTEP - well, might still happen in a round about sort of way, but was clearly revelutionary.
Late: BeOS - AmigaOS on steroids, but with a more modern design and a file system that was(still is?) ahead of its time.
AmigaOS
Spare, clean, elegant, fast, fast, fast.
Just enough, not too much.
No computer has impressed me nearly as much as unwrapping the Amiga A1000. An amazing experience. I have fond memories of all night game tournaments in college with the sound pumped through my stereo system.
BeOS
Windows NT 3.51 (the last Cutler OS, very stable/fast)
QNX Neutrino
BSD 4.4
Linux 2.5
OS X
#m
Really cool, even if in early stage:
http://uuu.sourceforge.net/
I even still got a Nextcube that I use sometimes.
I absolutely agree that linking to this article desirable, but I also think there are relatively a large percentage of ex-BeNews readers reading OSNews as that website died and Eugenia moved from BeNews to OSNews. I think that could be a factor for BeOS getting so many votes. Don't you think so?
I personally used a lot of the OSes (MacOS,AmigaOS,
TOS/MiNT/MagiC,Nextstep,Irix,RiscOS,BeOS) - I love
diversity. So its hard to decide, its surely depends
on the timeframe:
In the beginning of the 80s MacOS was a milestone,
being the first with an appealing windowed user interface.
The Amiga ruled the homecomputer market in the mid 80s
technically wise (multitasking, multiple screens), but
gets not much credits for its usability. (IMHO)
In the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s, Nextstep
was faaar superiour to everything - featuring display
postscript, a great object oriented user interface,
micro kernel technology and dozens of other unique
features - just ideal for productivity.
When the Acorn RiscPC600 appeared in 1994 it ran
RiscOS, featuring a lighting fast and super eye candy
user interface, antialiased fonts (!), multithreading,
drag&drop par excellence, multi processor support etc.
No Question - it was far beyond its time refering to
the home computer market! In many aspects it could easiely
compete with BeOS, when BeOS was released.
So I voted for RiscOS (maybe Nextstep deserved the vote
too, but it still lives inside MacOSX).
...as a os/2 user, but BeOS never was, and os/2 was murdered by MS.
OS/2 was amazing to me. The most powerful database software ever created (which many of the same ideas were used for creating oracle) were invented on os/2. Openbooks was an amazing system and couldve really changed the server market back in the early-mid 80s. Too bad venture capitalists kill companies with vision =(
1. NeXTstep
Clear, sleek design. Great Interface. Fast, even on my 25MHz NeXTstation Mono NonADB. Fine tools for development.
2. plan9
Strange, but really interesting design.
3. AmigaOS
...because it was *so* different at its time.
A hard choice, both have really interesting features..
Still Plan9 is not really dead, and some of those feature have percolated to The Hurd, FreeBSD (which have also unionFS).
Some won't which is a pity because Limbo(the language not RedHat 's distro) is very nice too..
I voted BeOS, as it is the true AmigaOS 4 to me.
I was a die-hard Amiga user until I first saw the BeOS 4 demo CD in 1999. It had everything I ever wanted from AmigaOS 4. I ordered BeOS the same day, and a month later I sold my Amiga 4000 (which had everything - all-SCSI drives, Picasso IV, 64MB RAM, lots of software) and got a dedicated BeOS x86 computer.
I voted for Amiga, it was ahead of time.........
Amiga was way ahead of its time technically, which is another proof that superior technology is really not enough to win in the marketplace.
I couldn't read a detailed explanation in the 44 comments so far, but maybe I missed it, so forgive me if this is a repeat. Amiga had in 1984 :
* An OS consistently using a very small number of abstractions
* A single address space, message-passing OS
* A fully preemptible 'sort of kernel' (exec)
Of course this came with many trade-offs (including no protection for applications, like MacOS, and not possible to build it later into the system without losing the performance). But sassenrath's consistency in design was admirable.
It still failed though 
I say BeOS. Simply because in this day andage it could have hit the widest audience.
OS/2 was nice at the time. But the best thing I can say about it was that is was functional. Like a big diesle truck.
Amiga was great, but you have to account for the hardware.
BeOS was functional and beautiful, all on off the shelf hardware. The only place it was really lacking was the netwroking. But the general population is running high traffic web servers. Under normal day to day use, BeOS R5 would stay up for weeks.
OS/2 was functional, but ugly. Amiga was great, but ran on proprietary hardware.
Can't comment on NeXT, because I wasn't making that kind of cash when the NeXT cube came out.
Although I love BeOS, and still use it as my day to day OS. The fact that we 'suffer' a Wintel monopoly and not a Commodore monoply was one of the most tragic mistakes made in the computer industry so far.
Than people actually brought 2000UKP IBM's over more capable 500UKP Amiga's with equivalent software, before the big software lock in we have now, is something that will always disappoint me.
Since there are so many multi OS fans out there, I would offer to give away original Warp OS/2 & Tenon Mach OS? (Older Mac is fine) just for the shipping, otherwise just sitting around. The Tenon was quite a value but I will never use em.
I agree with you, most costumers are so easily brainwash-able. Good marketing sadly is far more important than having superior technology. Looking back who really still believes that MSDOS was *cutting edge* as marketed?
I voted Plan9, it failed but to me, was the must revolutionary OS I've ever read about. The only one who really tried to make the dreamed paradigm of "everything is a file" a truth. The Hurd is just trying to get the same thing done with a diferent aproach, but I wonder what a solid base would have Plan9 been to avoid having those nasty things as having a copy of libraries an programs in a separate directory to have ftp funcionality without compromising root, or things like the gnome virtual file system. How much extra code could have been avoided with such a basement.
recursively defined user-space namespaces. i can union my directories over other directories, mount my own filesystems without being root, access osnews through /net/tcp/www.osnews.com/index.php, etc...
recursively defined user-space namespaces? can someone explain what that means? I am not a programmer, but i do know something about OS technology ...
fred
Even though I'm a hardened BeOS nut, I still believe that Amiga was destined to be the one. There were just so many innovations which came with the Amiga, things that we take for granted today, but were revolutionary in the 80's (I wont mention them all, but I'm sure Mike Bouma will :-) Had the big C= had more financial sense, who knows how different the PC landscape would look like today, and how much more revolutionary it would be. The biggest WOW I had in the computing world came from the first A500 I saw. 12 years later, BeOS provided the second WOW (notice how the second WOW isn't bold).
I'd have to say OS/2 for PPC. The betas were very nice and fast but it never got out of IBM.
I've voted BeOS.
I still know the day I got an illegal copy of BeOS 4.0 and installed it. Wow. Bye Bye Linux. Now I'm only using Windows (for the stuff not available on BeOS like Delphi, VirtualDub and VideoEditing (Although I have Personal Studio)) and BeOS on my PC.
I ordered (a legal) BeOS 4.5 the day it was available (as did I for the 5.0) It still feels the right OS to use.
To use it is to love it.
Maybe if I was involved in PC earlier I would't have know the power of AmigoOS. I sense the same love for the system among it's users as the BeOS user.
'BE the difference that makes a difference' - JEWEL
I voted for AmigaOS not because it was more advance when it was released, but because it is more advance at this very moment.
None of the others actually offer me the flexibility and the easy of use of AmigaOS.
So the vote goes to the best OS ever.
Actually I voted for BeOS. On reflection I think I should have voted AmigaOS... since when you think about it, what else was there? DOS - a joke; Mac - innovative but it wouldn't have multitasking for another 15 YEARS. I'm talking about the A1000 release year, 1985, when I was 2 years old...
But I really believe that BeOS deserved to grow and be at least successful to sustain itself. It was (is?) a technically brilliant OS, a perfect desktop/user OS. I've used linux and linux only (read: not booting windows) for weeks at a time, trying to switch; I configure everything nicely, which takes ages, I run my commercial CAD program and freeware dev software on it, in fact I'm using it now for some reason - I don't know why - but I always end up going back to windows to do any real work. I hate to say it. My windows install does not crash, yes it is slow, but does not ever crash (win98 first edition on a PII/300 w/256MB), and it seems like less effort to do my productive work in windows rather than linux. I always end up using the shell to do EVERYTHING in linux, which is not bad all the time, but the GUI parts of linux are very frustrating/inefficient to use.
Linux is a pain to do any real desktop work with, let alone adminster. As they always say, an average joe desktop user with linux still needs a personal sysadmin to maintain it.
So, linux is out of the question... It's my opinion that if AmigaOS had been continuously developed over all these years, there would have been no NEED for BeOS at all; but as it stands, BeOS was the most refreshingly elegant OS of them all in recent years. There was of course OS/2, but well... it was IBM and 'all 
I can't comment on NextSTEP etc. so I claim ignorance if anyone thinks those others were better...
- Paul
millions spent on those OSes that never saw the light of day...
I voted for NeXTstep, despite being one of the old-guard BeOS folks. At the time, NeXTstep was a HUGE step forward compared to all of the other systems, even Macs. BeOS was simply mostly-current state of the art, done without the legacy baggage.
- chrish
Most of the OSes listed on that page were quite good. NeXT had the enormous benefit of being based upon Objective C, instead of C++. But I still voted for Be.
Current operating systems are absurd. Think about it for a second. Windows CE devices often come with 64MB of ROM. That's including the OS installed on flash, which the user never sees; all the user does see is a directory of applications, and a directory of documents. And Windows CE is the most bloated of the embedded OSes; Palm OS can fit in 8MB, and Symbian, AFAIK, is similar. I've seen dumb terminals with Windows CE installed. They use a web browser with the same rendering code as Internet Explorer, but it's WinCE.
So how come the only three OSes with measurable desktop marketshare (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux) all require gigabytes of installation space, how come most applications require hundreds of megabytes, and how come both install huge, convoluted directory trees that should be invisible or non-existent?
Since 1990, Be is the only completely-new desktop OS developed from the ground up. Most of the other OSes on the list were based on UNIX, and the few that weren't were inferior to UNIX. Be is the only one that's better. There's also Palm OS and Symbian, but those were influenced by Be (or at least, influenced by the same things Be was influenced by).
Unfortunately, BeIA is dead. But luckily, what it stands for is now. Due to the proliferation of mobile phones, Symbian may soon be the most widely-used OS in the world, moreso than Windows. As the desktop slowly dies, and the laptop shrinks, demand for embedded devices will grow, and Be's ideas will live on.
AmigaOS could have been the ONE, if Commodore wasn't strict, like Apple. Both companies could have done better if they allowed other companies to sell clones. Since the PC market was wide open everyone could build their own PC. This resulted in a nice competative market with interesting prices for users. Mac and Amiga didn't have that. It wasn't just the marketing it was also the fault of their 'greedy' creators...
veterans went and voted fore multics, you whippersnapper! ;-)
Those are all nifty OS'. Except for Atari ST. That was a computer. Aside from the hybrid GEM/TOS (which was based on CP/M-68K) that came stock, there was also Minix, MiNT, and possibly MagiC (I'm not sure if that's a different OS, and update or just a desktop replacement like NeoDesk). Oh, and maybe Oberon.
Actually AmigaOS still lives on, but at a much smaller scale and soon you will see AmigaOS4 running on ordinary off the shelf PPC clone hardware. Note that when Commodore bankrupted Amigas were still selling incredibly well in Europe. In some countries like in Sweden, Amiga had market shares up to 90%! Also there have been high-end AmigaOS clones, like Draco towers, which were mainly used for professional video editing.
What does make a huge difference however is that there were dozens of PC companies promoting their (inferior at the time) solutions, while commodore management and marketing did not focus solely on Amiga solutions.
This only changed dramaticly when they were close to being bakrupt, for a short while all resources were set behind Amigas, for instance the top basketbal team in the Holland changed their Commodore shirts into Amiga shirts.
According to insiders Amiga could have saved Commodore if they would have been able to manufacture more hardware during the last months before the actually bankrupting.
...technologically superior to Windows 95, and 98 in most repects, plus an integrated office suite with features that did not appear in another commercial office product until Office 97.
It was a shame that this one went away. I suspect if the resources had been available of Geoworks to truly develop this product to it's full potential, it would still be giving MS a run for it's money.
Despite being a long-time Amiga fan, I voted for BeOS. For many reasons that I have read in the postings here I believe that they are technically tied.
It really is difficult to say what might have been or what should have been.
I was a really big NeXTStep fan. It was a great OS and it pains me to see how slow it is now on Apple hardware, considering how quick it was on my Pentium Pro 200.
I think BeOS could have succeeded as a consumer OS were it not for the "focus" shift. I was very fast and it handled multimedia like there was no tomorrow. (Indeed, I would still be using it today if it were not for driver-rot.)
I do think Apple could have replaced the classic MacOS far more quickly had they bought BeOS, as it already ran on PowerPC/Mac hardware and NeXTStep needed to be ported. Still, with BeOS' problems with large, non-multithreaded applications, Apple may have made a better choice in the long run, not to mention that regaining Steve Jobs was a boon.
This is not meant as a troll...
I've used BeOS and besides the file system and the fact that it was written from scratch and uses a C++ API, where's the innovation?
No offense, but what does BeOS offer that isn't available on, say Windows, Macintosh, or *nix? (And it just works better is not an option)
Once again, this is not a troll...i'm genuinely curious what the big deal with BeOS is...
-bytes256
Apollo Computer's Aegis/DomainOS of course. Better Unix
than Unix, great windowing system. Beat the hell out of
Sun at the time, but everyone knows the best never wins.
HP eventually bought them out, killed Aegis and gave the
world HPUX (a.k.a. PHUX).
Okay, so you know where I'm posting from by my IP address. That qualifies me even more to say:
IRIX FOREVER!
IRIX is one of the best maintained UNIX OSs ever - every quarter a new release comes out, without fail. Then there's the "freeware" distribution <URL:http://freeware.sgi.com/> - looks pretty similar to what lycoris and others are now starting to do (and the SGI freeware distribution has been going out for a few years now).
How many other OSs let you write and build software on a 10 year old machine (say an Indigo R4000), and then run it on your 1024 CPU Origin 3000 (Single system image, using ccNUMA)? That kind of binary compatibility is simply amazing, and that kind of scalability (whilst remaining reliable) is stunning.
IRIX is not dead, nor is it dying.
byte, when I voted, I took the poll as one where there was an OS that could have possibly taken the computing world by storm. I think that Be was in a time and place where, had things been different, it could have happened. In one sense, the poll is hard because of the historical timeline involved.
Looking at the comments really does make me wish so much I had looked into Amiga way back when. I was an Apple zealot then though <g>. But, it appears I may still get a chance at that.
Multilingual, used by all ages, doesn't need upgrading, uses no power....
The Abacus
I am surprised that Inferno wasn't included since you included Plan9. Basically, it is the OS that the Bell Labs folks started after Plan9. It incorporates a lot of the same concepts, plus some new ones. I have only used it under Linux, but what I was impressive. It used TK for the gui which some people may not like. I hope it starts to become more general purpose. Check out http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/index.html for more info.
" Inferno runs in hosted mode under many different operating systems, providing an environment suitable for rapid development of distributed systems.
Native Inferno, on the other hand, is a complete operating system in its own right, running on embedded systems with as little as 1Mb of memory."
IBM dropped the S/1 in the early '90s, but we still run it under an emulator on AIX and SCO OpenServer
I voted for BeOS, because it is the best OS I have come across, and not because I am some newbie. I have used OS/2 v2 and v3, and was never all that impressed with it. The U of Arkansas had it for a while in a few argri computer labs (don't ask I don't know why) and it was interesting, but Be was the first one that had me saying "wow".I have also tried Lunix, Mac, Apple, etc. The only I have never used is NextStep and Amiga, both of which I have heard are quite interesting.
Since I think that it was an excellent, excellent machine. It was sooooo ahead of its time. I remember coding blitter and copper chips, and still feel the exitement after creating my first copper bars! Actually, I hate Commodore because they killed Amiga for their greed. I believe that if it lived, we would not have to deal with these soulless shitty computer hw, and soulles OSs like Windows.
> If the people who voted for OS/2 were veterans, they would know about MULTICS.
Agree. I never tried any of them, but AFAIK, MULTICS was a *MUCH* more innovative OS at it's time.
Didn't used to see the EPOCH option (Psion handheld OS). In my opinion it was the most impressive handheld OS I ever seen (including WinCE, PocketPC, PalmOS, etc). A real shame the company fell down...
> Multics wasn't THAT good. I love Vax/VMS - OpenVMS, but still, OS/2 was one step behond.
You have to replace it in context. Maybe I'm totally wrong, but there's a LOT more difference between the before-and-after-MULTIX than the before-and-after-OS/2.
It would be nice if we could pick more than one to vote for.
For example, using a point system, the first place choice gets 3 votes, the second place, 2 votes and the third, gets one.
Then, record how many votes of each type was for each OS and display that in the final tally.
AIX - never used it. But it is VERY important to IBM as they have made lots of money off of it.
Amiga - the first multimedia computer that PCs are trying to be now.
AtariST - I used an Atari 400 (4k of RAM, no hard drive of floppy drive) back in 1982. I wrote my first 3D first person wireframe maze on it. Got boring fast as the maze couldn't be bigger than 8 x 8 due to RAM limitation.
BeOS - BeOS 5 Pro can run multiple videos on the screen at one time without loss of frame rate and sound instantly kicks in on which ever video you are watching. First OS on home type computers that could do this.
GeOS - Great idea. It looked the same on laptops, desktops, etc., before any other OS could say that. It included an word processor, spreadsheet, card game and worked very well before Windows 3.1 caught up to it and looked better. It was always more stable than Windows 3.1 though. Its main flaw that it wasn't pretty.
IRIX - never used it and don't know much about it
Multics - never used it and don't know much about it
NeXTSTEP - John Carmack raved about NeXTSTEP. Does anyone need to say more? No. But I will. As stated before. It still lives as a small part of OS X.
Novell - This is THE company that just can't figure out how to market their product. They are even worse than IBM was when trying to market OS/2 with European or Itallian nuns who didn't speak American. They have very good products that need significantly less servers to do the same thing as compared to MS. But they just know how to tell anyone this.
OpenVMS - never used it and don't know much about it
OS/2 - IBM is the second most inept company at marketing behind Novell. When the beta for OS/2 2.0 came out I was able to replace 4 Windows 3.1 computers with one OS/2 computer running on the EXACT same model of computer. And it was far more stable even when running 16 bit Windows programs. I was even able to reduce my paper consumption by 90% at work as I could very easily receive/modify/and send faxes and other things that drastically reduced my need for printing things out. My paper consumption jumped dramatically when I had to switch back to Windows at work. OS/2 (which I still use on one of my computers at home) changed my life more than any other OS.
Other - I've not used this OS <wink>
Plan9 - never used it and don't know anything about it
RiscOS - never used it and don't know much about it
Solaris x86 - never used it. Not sure how it differs from "regular" Solaris other than what hardware it runs on.
Tru64 - never used it and don't know much about it
All these OSs have some of their ideas live on. Software
Engineers don't die, they just start new projects.
Preemptive multitasking, journaling filesystems, virtual memory, etc all started in single OSs. Look how they have
spread.
Now the BSD licence has made the pace of cross adoption much
faster. Anything released under the BSD liscence can be
adopted quickly to all OSs.
The only thing that doesn't survive from good OSs is their
clean consistant code and interfaces. Besides the filesystem BeOS didn't have anything revolutionary, but a lot of people really appreciated all the stuff it didn't have cluttering up everything.
The same could be said for Tru64. Tru64 is in my opinion what I will miss the most. No 32-bit baggage to carry around, and everything they did was an almost perfect implementation. Nothing special feature wise, but just so darn well done.
Another question is what killed the OSs? What about the current ones, what will be their downfall.
Next - Too dang expensive and not so fast. Hard to sell that
BeOS - We are a hardware company, no a desktop OS company, no an embedded OS company, on PPC, no wait x86, with metrowerks, I mean gcc as our compiler, and netpositive, err Opera as our browser. The problem with Be is they couldn't stick with a decision, and it's hard for deveopers or customers to hit a moving target.
Tru64 - DEC, Compaq, HP. That alone is enough. To add insult to injury the Alpha was always sold as a low volume high price chip. Topp it off with making everybody jump to 64 bit when 16 bit was the standard.
VMS - it lived a long life and its time had come.
Multics - a great foundation who had been surpassed.
AIX - not dead yet, but quickly being commoditized by Linux
on the low end.
Solaris - not dead yet, see AIX.
OS/2 - Don't mess with a better Monopolist head to head. Those OEM contracts won't let you get in the market.
Linux - What is the strategy? Linux is being pulled in several competing directions. If it tries to be all things to all people it will become lousy at everything.
OpenBSD - can't claim no remote root exploits anymore. Lacks features that are becoming more and more necessary (like SMP).
netBSD - there is only so much of a market for an OS targeting old discarded hardware.
FreeBSD - With Apple behind this now will it be overshadowed by big brother Darwin, OSX?
PalmOS - already being overtaken by Be. Nice stories in the register on Be's takeover of Palm.
DOS, Win3.1, Win95, Win98, Win Me - NT (3.5, 4.0, 2000, XP, .net) has grown up and overcome. One united front from Redmond.
NT - When the OS starts to cost more than the hardware and has to be upgraded every other year Open Source starts to look better. Add to it a history of unreliability, poor security (even Gartner suggests running away), and infrequent fixes to well known problems and it is an uphill climb. Plus when you own the market there is nowhere to go but down.
OSX - Will PPC ever catch up in speed? Is a microkernel actually a good idea outside of a University? Certainly nicer than any other Desktop OS, and certainly more expensive than any other Desktop OS. Price may be a downfall.
MacOS - OSX has almost finished this battle.
IRIX - MIPS can't keep up. Propriatary grahipcs workstations are too expensive. IRIX is already relegated to niche markets, and slowly being driven out of those.
There are others like OS/400, VM, NewOS, Plan 9, SCO UNIX, SunOS, etc. I'm just running out of time.
In summary all OSs will die. All of them will live on, their ideas embodied in what replaces them.
> BeOS 5 Pro can run multiple videos on the screen at one
> time without loss of frame rate and sound instantly
> kicks in on which ever video you are watching. First OS
> on home type computers that could do this.
BeOS is fantastic, but AmigaOS could do this already before BeOS existed. For playing more fancy movies simultaniously however, you would need more fancy Amiga as well or for example Amithlon http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=604 which while *only emulating* AmigaOS is able to play truckloads of movies simultaniously, without any slowdown.
>Read more to vote for the operating system that should >have been the Next Big Thing (TM), but that never >happened for any reason.
I don't really consider Atari ST and Amiga being elegable for this list, mainly because they were big for their time, but this list is meant to be for "that never happened"... progression doesn't automatically defunct their once large status imho
I think almost every OS on that list deserves credit somewhere along the line, and when it comes down to what is the most revolutionary Operating System?, hmmm, Since the computers the ancient Inca and Greeks used analog and digital, can I assume that, since the user manipulated parts like we manipulate a mouse, it to had an "operating system"??
But on a more serious note, It's not an easy poll to vote on thats forsure
It probably was a completely unworkable project, but it would have been nice to have a modern OS in the style of the classic Mac OS.
Zenja sez:
The biggest WOW I had in the computing world came from the first A500 I saw. 12 years later, BeOS provided the second WOW (notice how the second WOW isn't bold).
-------------
Amen. I feel exactly the same way. Nothing computer-related has excited & inspired me like those two. When I hear people talk of Linux, MacOSX or Windows as the future, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
when was the last time you saw an OS that wasn't a knock-off of UNIX/Multics (cheap, high-quality, or otherwise)?
I voted for BeOS, but When I thought about it, wish I voted for OS/2, I've never used it, but have read detailed info on it (and thus NT), and personally, I think they outclass BeOS.
Considering the choices, I choose NeXTSTEP. To non-users, they probably don't think there's any difference between NeXTSTEP and OpenStep except for the name, but there's quite a bit of difference. NeXTSTEP 3.3 is the acme of NeXT's OSes.
If I could, I'd vote for NewtonOS 2.1. NewtonOS is, hands-down, the most user-friendly operating system I've ever used. Not "user friendly" like the Mac OS or Windows, but an OS that truly felt like you worked with it, rather than being forced to adapt to the way that things are done. When I first got my Newton 2100u, I was really amazed- I would love to have a desktop system that worked like that. I'm not talking just about the UI- that is superficial- but the design from the top down. It lacked in many applications that would make it suitable for using on the desktop, but Apple could've made the Newton OS their next generation operating system- instead of OS X- if they were truly interested in revlutionizing the computer industry.
While Microsoft talks about using databases as filesystems some day, and about all the very real benefits that will have for developers and users alike, the Newton OS had it from the beginning, and it worked wonderfully.
From the NewtonOS, I'm taking many ideas for Dynapad, my Squeak-based environment primarily for PDAs. Unlike the PalmOS, however, Dynapad's purpose is to enable PDA-class devices to be used to do the same things as the intrusive desktop computers we use now, in a most natural way. I forsee not needing a desktop or laptop within the next couple years, as I get closer to implementing my dream software.
BeOS is probably the best it can get as far as desktop operating systems of the old-breed, the old vision of computing. The "old vision" is a bit of a misnomer however.
Rather, I shouldn't say the old vision, rather the new one. The old vision was one that would be quite like the NewtonOS- of pioneers like Alan Kay (and the rest of the Smalltalk team), Doug Engelbart, Ivan Sutherland, Steve Wozniak, and others. The new vision, the one driven purely by profit, is stale. But the world seems to prefer computers that worked like the generation before them- which has us stuck using garbage like Windows, Linux, Unix and OS X.
Don't misunderstand, so-called modern OSes are stable and have a wealth of applications. I use Linux and OS X on my iBook, and it's passable I guess. But as I get more and more software ideas worked out, I find myself using my Jornada 720 running Dynapad instead of my iBook. I may have to put up with a slower CPU, but for a computer that works exactly like I think it should, it's a miniscule price to pay.
I don't expect many regular computer users and geek to understand what I'm trying to say. But surely there has to be at least one other person that reads OSNews that does.
I bring it down to Amiga BeOS and OS/2. First Amiga. They really had a good chance. Amiga brought all the Commodore 64/128 to the table. It had great hardware. It had lots of software. yes, games came out first on Amiga before ported to PC's. One problem was that Commodore was a very corrupt company and that led to its demise. But there were other problems. Amiga had no concept of open hardware which guarantees it being behind the times (just like mac with no 2 ghz, ddr/rdram etc). Also I knew Amiga was doomed when I saw an Amiga 3000 running UNIX in hi res with only 16 colors when macs already had 16 million colors by default.
OS/2. Even though it looks like Windows 95 or 3.1 (in other words really ugly) it actually had some interesting UI concepts which have not yet been fully implemented in other OS's. OS/2 had its chance during 1995. It had the biggest company, IBM behind it. But it really wasn't. Once Windows 95 started to took over the best chance for an alternative OS was gone.
BeOS. Despite this, Be Inc kept trying. First they didn't know what cpu to use. They picked the wrong one of course and Apple locked them out. Once the hard migration to x86 was over it was all about drivers drivers drivers. That makes it really hard to work on the real OS. They managed to get a decent lineup on apps on board. Certainly not as good as Amiga but that was ancient history. It was a start. But "killer apps" mean nothing if they couldn't get BeOS preinstalled on PC's. They couldn't even have it as a dual boot option on the few companies that wanted it. They couldn't even give it for free because then Microsoft would raise the price on Windows. That's what really killed BeOS on the desktop. Some would say it's a lost cause from the beginning but they had the guts for trying.
So I have to vote for BeOS. They started with absolutely nothing in their corner up against Windows which had already dominated the market. OpenBeOS might keep it alive-if they finish. But it will still be hard to get commercial apps and OEMs to support it again
> Amiga had no concept of open hardware
High-end Amigas offered fast Zorro slots and could easily be upgraded with 3rd party graphics cards and sound cards. Amigas were more open with regard to this then compared to PCs. For example try upgrading any PC from the 80s to Amiga class upgraded specs and you will see that you will never be able get a modern experience from the 80s PC while you can upgrade an A2000 to semi-modern specs with soundcards/graphics cards/network cards/etc.
Also there did exist AmigaOS clones without Amiga's custom hardware chipsets. (DraCo)
One trouble however was that most people did not see any need to upgrade their machines as the standard machines provided them everything they needed.
> Also I knew Amiga was doomed when I saw an Amiga 3000
> running UNIX in hi res with only 16 colors when macs
> already had 16 million colors by default.
The Amiga 3000 was released in 1990 and was voted by computer experts to be the most revolutionary machine released that year. You should have bought yourself an Amiga graphics board instead.
The issue with OS X wasn't getting it ported to PowerPC- that was easily done. Apple spent years on getting it to resemble classic Mac OS more, and getting it to work with legacy applications and legacy users.
As far as I can tell, there was nothing revolutionary about BeOS other than that it worked most of the time, more than Classic Mac OS and Windoze worked. And it is more consistent than Unix. If there was something truly revolutionary about BeOS, I'd be interested in hearing about it too, but from my (limited) personal usage and research, it's nothing but the same stale desktop operating system paradigm done better. That's not a bad thing- most people just want what they're used to, not something revolutionary- and BeOS did what they were used to better.
To all those who are pretending to know what they're talking about with the ST, but really dont, quit it. 
The Atari ST isn't the Atari 400. Or 800. Or 2600. It's a different class of machine. The Atari ST was a 68k processor. That's like having the option in the poll being "Macintosh," and raving on about the Apple ][.
I'm no Atari ST junkie, but I know the difference enough to call the bluffs of some of you out there.
Now, if only someone could get me an Atari ST Notebook... mmmm, 4 pounds.
Be got it because it's familiar and the best of those I've tried (Windows, Linux, Early Mac, RiscOS). In the spirist of the exercise, it could soooo easily be Riscos. When I see what it does on antiquated hardware it makes me thing what it could do if there had been more development.
I have absolutely no experience with the Amiga, so I couldn't consider it.
BeOS was a little to much of a one trick pony with its multimedia performance, but I did like its novel file system.
But, NeXSTSTEP, wow, what a system. Today we take for granted a lot of the things that NeXSTSTEP brought to light.
Things that really grabbed my attention, besides the development environment.
Display PostScript - The fact that you used the same imaging model for both screen and hardcopy is truly a wonder to behold. The only real differences were the DPI and color model between print and screen, rather than some arbitrary printer driver making the choices for you.
The fact that many folks now use PDF as their format of choice for reports and such shows that DPS was a pretty good idea. The fact the Crystal Reports still can't get its output to match the PDF output shows that we're still in the '80's regarding imaging on some platforms.
MIME E-mail built-in - The standards were just emerging, which is why it was NeXTMail, versus the MIME standard of attachments et al. I'll never forget the simple demo Jobs gave where he recieves a Purchase Order Request Document by e-mail, clicks on it, up pops the form from the associated application, he enters his User Password to approve it, and it goes on its merry way. Ad Hoc Document work flow using attachments in e-mail. Mundane today, but pretty darn innovative for the time.
Services - The heart and soul of the Workspace, I think. Extensible services available EVERYWHERE (when was the last time you were able to spell check your file name in a Save As.. dialog). This ubiquitous availability of functionality was very powerful. I'd like to see it get even more integrated within OS X.
Distributed Objects - Nice, lightweight, easy to use with minimal boiler plate. Hardly perfect, but it made for some interesting software at the time without all the mass of something like CORBA.
NetInfo - NetInfo was a love/hate thing. It made a lot of things easier, and even integrated fairly well, it just needed some better documentation, I think. But it was endemic to the nature of NeXTSTEP to leverage the standards it had (the Unix core) and add value to them.
OS X IS NeXSTSTEP, just NS 10.0, with a Mac compatability layer on the system. As the older Mac stuff goes quietly into the night, OS X will be able to shine more and more.
Windows for Workgroups get my vote....lol...it screams quality.
I looked up some factual information on Apple's hardware in comparison with the Amiga 3000 in 1990.
The following hardware was released by Apple in 1990 offering the following display modes:
The Mac Classic - 2 colors at 512x342
Mac LC - 16 colors at 640x480 or 256 color at 640x400
The Mac IIsi/Mac IIfx - 256 colors at 640x480
Now compare that to the Amiga 3000 standard offerings in 1990:
In addition to lower resolutions screenmodes it offers
4096 colors at 640x512 or 64 colors at 1280x512
Conclusion
In 1990 the Amiga 3000 clearly outspecced any Apple hardware available at the time. If you need even higher resolutions you can easily add an old Picasso IV graphics card into your Amiga 3000. Then you can have a 1280x1024 24bit GUI!
Picasso IV http://www.vgr.com/picassoiv/
On technical merits, Lisp machines were much more advanced than Unix. If only they had survived...
Lisp machines were and still are the bomb! Incredibly advanced. But like anything revolutionary, no one wanted to use them.
I should mention Squeak Smalltalk, since we're talking about LispMs now and someone else mentioned Oberon. Squeak already has quite a few features in common with Lisp Machines.
Dynapad:
http://dynapad.swiki.net/1
Squeak:
http://www.squeak.org
No one has yet mentioned the Lisa Office System- quite advanced, with features that a lot of desktop machines still don't have today- definately more advanced than the classic Mac OS, especially that of 1984! I'll leave research an exercise for the reader.
"> Also I knew Amiga was doomed when I saw an Amiga 3000
> running UNIX in hi res with only 16 colors when macs
> already had 16 million colors by default.
The Amiga 3000 was released in 1990 and was voted by computer experts to be the most revolutionary machine released
that year. You should have bought yourself an Amiga graphics board
instead."
That was indeed the defining moment. We had A3000s and Mac IIs side by
side. The Amiga could only display 16 colours at a time (from a total
of 4096) at 640x512. The Mac was displaying in 8-bit colour at almost
as high resolution.
When it came to image processing or paint, there was no contest.
The Amiga did have on-screen rendering of outline fonts before the Mac
had Adobe Type Manager, but not long before. And then Photoshop
arrived for the Mac, with a true soft airbrush.
It was another two years before the Amiga could offer a screen display
equal to the Mac II, and by that time any hope of it being used in
design studios was gone. Yes, there were expensive 3rd party cards,
but they were very expensive.
Commodore simply stinted on R&D, and that was what killed them.
We have a similar situation today with audio. The Mac can handle 24/96
sound, Amigas are limited to 16/44.1
Once and for all... Mac OS X is not NeXTSTEP 10.0! Nor is it NeXTSTEP 5.0! Or 6.0! If you're going to draw comparisons like that- do it right. If anything, Mac OS X is OpenStep 7.0. Repeat after me: NeXTSTEP is not the same as OpenStep. OpenStep 4.0 isn't just NeXTSTEP 4.0, rebranded. Binary compatibility for AppKit &c was lost between NS and the major overhaul that was OpenStep.
Jeeze Louise kids! Uff.
When OS 9 toasted my HD, I had to use my NeXT cube for a while before I had to the time to try to restore the HD and install Debian, whiping OS X and OS 9. On a 25 MHz 68040 with 24 MB of RAM, that thing sure flew! No joke- a lot of operations, especially in how fast the UI felt, was just as fast or sometimes more responsive on my 25 MHz cube than on my 500 MHz iBook under OS X. Fine proof that pervasive objects and a microkernel doesn't mean poor performance.
--------------
Now compare that to the Amiga 3000 standard offerings in 1990:
In addition to lower resolutions screenmodes it offers
4096 colors at 640x512 or 64 colors at 1280x512
------------
I think this specs are not quite fair. Since the only use for HAM graphics were wathing pictures or dra them with a special program, however you couldn't use it throughout the system, I mean you couldn't run the Workbench or a Wordprocessor in HAM mode.
The same goes more or less for that "Extra-Halfbrite" (or how was this 64 color mode named?). There were not many applications/games using it.
However, since I don't know the Mac I can't say how it works on their side.
However: Amiga rocks! Of course I voted for it. After the Amiga I never seen such a innovative, fast and generally usuable and cool OS.
There were a few good choices like NeXTStep, AmigaOS, BeOS, and OS/2.
NeXTStep was revolutionary using a totally new language, Brad Cox's Objective-C, to give it life. Its use of Display PostScript was ingenious. AmigaOS was created with BCPL which wasn't used much outside Cambridge University, but it wouldn't have gone far without Jay Miner's special chip designs. BeOS was more like a proof of the desire for a MultiMedia-enabled O.S. A few new ideas thrown in, but the same old story.
When OS/2 first arrived, it looked like VM from the mainframes with a PC-DOS shell tacked on. It did many things well when dealing with text. It took forever to get a graphical user interface but that also was nice. It was only when version 2.0 arrived that it was great. It was the next big thing--32-bit O.S. on 32-bit hardware. It could have done well in several markets and industries, if IBM had marketed it well. Instead, it languishes, still probably running a large percentage of the ATMs in the U.S.A.
Oh, and MULTICS? It was never the next big thing. It was just another big thing.
> Since the only use for HAM graphics were wathing
> pictures or dra them with a special program, however you
> couldn't use it throughout the system
That why we had screens didn't we? (Macs do not!) A workbench in 16 colors wasn't that bad (MagicWB with only uses 8 colors and looks great http://www.sasg.com/mui/gallery/Stefan_Stuntz/Pic_2.gif ). In fact at the time having icons and GUI in more than 16 colors would have costed alot more processing power and memory, which could better be used to process graphics or do other more important things.
Yes HAM modes were too slow and used too much memory to be used with most games. But actually almost any of the games from that period of time were far better on the Amiga compared those found for Apples, anyway. Did you guys ever do a color count on the amount of colors used in for instance a game like Lion Heart? Due to copper tricks this game and loads of others displayed hundreds of colors simultaniously at amazing speeds.
Anyway as I stated before if you wanted a more colorful workbench you should have bought a 3rd party graphics card for your Amiga 2000 or 3000.
Here are some better looking examples of 8 color MagicWB icons. (Note that although some screens are likely to display higher color depths the icons and pictograms themselves only use 8 colors)
http://www.sasg.com/mui/gallery/Stefan_Stuntz/PSI.jpeg
http://www.sasg.com/mui/gallery/Stefan_Stuntz/Prefs_PSI.jpeg
Rhapsody
http://www.osdata.com/oses/rhapsody.htm
Anyone have a copy?
*not my real email address ...duh.
;-)
I have a copy of Rhapsody DR2 for X86. I have no idea where the floppies are, however. 
I ran it on my K6-2 350 before I followed my NeXT fetish to the logical conclusion of a G4 Tower. Funny how Rhapsody DR2 was faster on that 350 MHz than DP3 was on my G4. Not so with 10.1 though (as it should be).
If anyone knows where to get disk images for the 2 (or more?) boot floppies, I'm sure there's a long line of people itching to try it out... but i don't have the bandwidth to host it... well, email me and we can discuss vintage computing in a very legal way.
Personally, I liked Rhapsody and OS X Server more than OS X 10.0. Not that I dislike Aqua, but I liked the NeXT way of doing things, and Rhapsody was simply a skinned version of OpenStep.
Aaron
Several of these could be said to have been revolutionary *in ther time*, so are we trying to decide which one was the most revolutionary?
This was a tough one, but I choose Amiga, because it had something really different from what the rest of the desktop systems were doing and it deserved better than what it got.
BeOS was a close second, but there was nothing really revolutionary about it. It was good, because it put all the right technologies together really well.
Irix shouldn't be on the list, because it isn't dead or dying.
Click on *Read More* and read what we're voting on.
The poll question is a bit off. BeOS shouldn't have "won" over the other guys because it was the most revolutionary, but simple that it was evolutionary. The same goes for most of those OSes. They all made computing the way you were used to a bit better. There are exceptions, sure. People seem to associate "revolutionary" with "well done" and not so revlutionary as a bad thing. If BeOS was truly revolutionary, most of you geeks used to Mac, Win and Linux wouldn't want to use it. Why? Because it's not just an improved version of what you were doing before, which is the reason that most computer users and adept geeks alike don't bother with the truly revolutionary stuff.
> We have a similar situation today with audio. The Mac
> can handle 24/96 sound, Amigas are limited to 16/44.1
No Don, we are not.
Take for instance the Repulse Zorro II Card expansion soundcard:
Sampling Rates from 8 to 48Khz including 44.1Khz and 96Khz S/P-DIF
Supports 16, 18, 20 and 24bit (S/P-DIF) samples in mono and stereo
Enhanced Full Duplex Recording
For information on more Zorro based sound cards go here http://www.amigau.com/c-amiga/hwsound.htm
However should be noted that the AmigaOne will ordinary off the shelf PCI based souncards. Drivers are already finished and have even been demonstrated on classic Amiga hardware using Zorro-PCI bridges at Amiga shows.
Apple has never put a good sound chip on any of their machines as far as I know. Or even a good DAC.
Even the vaunted AV Macs weren't that spiffy.
Apple has always been the cheapest company when it comes to giving their customers good sound.
It's hard to find a PC system that doesn't have some form of 6 channel sound via C-Media, Realtek, Avance, etc.
And then when it comes to PCI sound, the PC has far and away more choices than Mac.
Even today, no Apple computer is available with a good sound chip. On a $1000+ eMac/iMac, that is inexcusable. On a $4000 Powermac, it is criminal.
Maybe someone at Apple can tell everyone why they are so cheap.
#m
AmigaOS4 will certainly ship with Soundblaster Live! drivers. According to Martin Blom (AHI) Soundblaster 128 drivers may become available as well.
Perhaps "evolutionary" is the best term for this. And there is the historical context to deal with. I would still vote for Be. However, in the time frame where the Amiga came together and was ahead of the curve, it was the most evolutionary. I think the same is true of Be. Be did not invent anything new, except itself. And, in a sense, having done that and done it so well, was revolutionary in that it showed what could be possible in an OS that was both fast/lean and capable of doing anything, capable of handling any file size, etc. And lastly, because Be almost made it. Apple was desperate when they were negotiating with Be. There's enough blame to go around, but I think JLG really blew it. He should have made an offer Apple couldn't refuse.
Sorry folks, I lost the IQ-test.
But where the #@?! is the URL to the poll ?
Thanks !
Guys, all the stuff GEOS crammed into a Commodore 64, how could any of these other systems be considered as revolutionary? Remember the pc-geos that you may be thinking of wasn't the first version (and it would run on a 640k 8088). GEOS started on an 8bit 1mhz 6502 processor machine and was comprable in features to the classic Mac.
Stomps all the rest of list to smithereens.
The poll is in the same page with the rest of the article after you click "read more". In order your browser to be able to render the poll, you need Javascript. Learn to READ the article before your start swearing.
The fact that some one was adopting newer ideas was "revolutionary".
Besides the obvious clean interface and multimedia capabilities, BeOS had many other nice features.
My favorite was the hardware detection. I could just drop a new video card, and it would boot up like normal and just work. Provided I check the compatibility, I could take the harddrive, drop it in a different PC, and it would just boot up like nothing happened. Try that with Windows or Linux. You'll be looking at alot of reconfiguring.
Be Inc. really shot itself in the foot with thier obsession with Internet Appliances. If instead of sinking all their resources into that 'white elephant' and instead focused on delivering real applications to their already impressive r5, maybe they'd still be around today. Truthfully I wonder what they were smoking sinking so much effort into promoting it for Internet appliances when it didn't even have a capable browser (since mozilla is just a crappy port (for Be it really should have been a re-write), netpositive is barely more functional than Lynx, and Opera is just pathetic).
Two years ago, R5 was one of the most impressive OS' I had ever used or programmed for. To this day sight few OS short of Solaris make as good a use of multiple processors, were ever as stable, or isolate memory/devices/processes and programs as well. My OS experience ranges from CP/M through to XP, with experience on easily two-thirds the OS listed in the vote. From that I can say that having written a couple simple apps under Be, it is easily one if not the most powerful multithreaded OS I've ever used, and that it's fully journalled filesystem and placement of I/O handling in user space provide a level of stability and ease of hardware support/installation that every OS should aspire to.
Besides, BeOS proved what I've said all along. Hardware detection doesn't take five minutes, so what the @#$% are all these other OS' wasting their time on during boot. The excuse people use as to why Mac's boot so quick (hardware support in rom per item installed) as opposed to on x86 hardware where you have to detect then load+start the driver, stopped holding water with Be's quick hardware detection and driver selection. Even Linux these days seems to take forever to start, so much so that Mandrake takes longer to start than WinXP on my box, by about a factor of three, and don't even get me started about dead hat! Well, that and XP is more stable with better hardware support. Wait, checking, no, I'm not stoned, why am I praising an M$ product??? Hmm, posession maybe? Alien abduction? Maybe I was replaced by a pod.
... is OS/400.
I don't know any other OS platform where the underlying hardware was changed from 32bit CISC processors to 64bit RISC without the need to recompile the applications.
(if anyone is still reading this far down)
what this means is that init sets up an initial name space, consisting of /, /bin, /proc, /share, etc... then each program which starts can modify the namespace, passing it on only to its children. this doesnt mean i can delete /etc/passwd, because if i did, all that would happen is that files I started wouldnt be able to access that file (plan9 did implement unix permissions also, so i wouldnt be able to delete it but i might be able to union a file over the top)
eg: when you were in 8 1/2 (plan9 window system), 8 1/2 would define the /dev/window device which was a handle to pipe stuff into the window manager. eg: the X window system uses TCP/unix sockets, 8 1/2 defined a file system handle which was recusively available, but only to descendant processes. hence no need to MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE, as noone could even see /dev/window, let alone access it, unless they were you.
its this kind of simple, powerful and extensible techniques that are missing in common OSses: windows has about a million APIs and linux has about three million inscrutble ioctl()s...
What's more interesting than the result of the pole is just how many superb/revolutionary OSs there have been.
I reluctantly voted for BeOS because, as the title for the poll states, hearsay isn't valid for a vote and, of the varying OSs I have used (Linux, MacOS ..., Win-whatever, BeOS, DOS Operating System), it was the most technically sound. Otherwise I would have voted for Amiga. For something so "old," it generally appears to have been a competitor for mid-90's computers instead of mid-80's ones!
once upon a time there was a website called
www.benews.com
that website got quite a bit of traffic but osnews was dead.
then eugenia came from benews to osnews.
benews died, osnews took off
she brougth with her be os user base.
hence that is why be os is in the lead
If the Amiga OS was such a great OS then why did it lose out to the Mac OS?
both used teh same 68k hardware. amiga had custom circuity that blew away apple's mac.
so why did amiga lose but mac win?
Time to market is critical in the computer industry.
Why didn't JLG, be's ceo and founder, recreate OS? why didn't he just take over commodore or buy commodore's IP,
and build on the Amiga OS and hardware. offer workstations on the SGI model. then port amiga os to x86,
he would have gotten what be inc had never had - a solid revenue base and a mature product.
rewriting be os from scratch when amiga already had most of that functionality costed him time to market advantages such as printing and internet and networking functionality.
plus he lost the opportunity to enjoy an installed base of applications, games, and OS code.
Technically, I think it was the first OS out there that had the built-in ability to run dual-OS applications from competing products (OS/2, DOS AND Windows apps)... This was a great step.
No, it's not revolutionary to slightly improve on the ideas of all those that have come before you. Having prettier icons, a more consistent interface or plug-and-play isn't revolutionary. It may have done those things better (or worse in some situations) than that the Mac OS or Windows, but that's no revolution, that's evolution.
I'm glad that BeOS worked for you- it did for a lot of people. Almost no one who used it disliked it. However, BeOS wasn't revolutionary.
I've done your harddrive swapping trick on PowerMacs. It's not revolutionary with BeOS, nor is it on the Mac. It's just a slightly more improved version of the hardware detection schemes that was already in place.
Aaron
i was just thinking the funniest thing. if windows never cought on and if everyone was using something else. i would wonder how it would effect the list and if anyone would of cared. course everyone would of just blown it off and voted for something significant.
just a what if i had in the back of my mind.
trakz.
> If Amiga was so great, then why did Amiga lose to Mac
In short, Commodore bankrupted. During the period June 1992- June 1993 Commodore lost 356 million dollars mainly on unsold PC hardware and expensive PC marketing compaigns. After that many different investors claimed to own the right to the Amiga platform, many years of lawsuits and bad luck followed.
Meanwhile there still was a huge demand for Amigas in Europe. In the US professional companies like Disney quickly snatched themselves hundreds of A4000s to be used as spare parts (Most Disney movies like i.e. the Lion King were animated on Amigas). Companies even placed ads in Amiga magazines, asking people to part from their machines, as they would pay *MORE* money for them secondhand then then originally costed brand new!
> Why didn't JLG, be's ceo and founder, recreate OS? why
> didn't he just take over commodore or buy commodore's
> IP, and build on the Amiga OS and hardware. offer
> workstations on the SGI model. then port amiga os to
> x86
He probably could not. There were tons of Commodore investors claiming the rights to the Amiga platform. Also it would have cost them alot of money. The current Amiga Inc team even had to pay 5 million dollars for the remaining Amiga company, 8 years after the last classic Amiga model appeared on the market!
Be Inc was a small company when they built the BeBox and moving AmigaOS to PPC would have cost them huge amounts of money as well.
But, of course Be was smart to promote themselves as the new Amiga at Amiga shows. Most of the developers and users who bought themselves a BeBox were Amiga users. Personally I don't view BeOS as being a better AmigaOS, but rather a better MacOS with Amiga inspired features.
"when was the last time you saw an OS that wasn't a knock-off of UNIX/Multics (cheap, high-quality, or otherwise)?"
The last time ? well ... the last time I visited the Symbian OS home page :-)
I voted BeOS. I'll always vote BeOS. Period.
Didn't used to see the EPOCH option (Psion handheld OS). In my opinion it was the most impressive handheld OS I ever seen (including WinCE, PocketPC, PalmOS, etc). A real shame the company fell down...
Because EPOC is making it big in smart handphones.
Once Windows 95 started to took over the best chance for an alternative OS was gone.
The main reason behind OS/2 death is that IBM charged for their OS a much higher price than Windows. Reason: to have a price advantage over other hardware companies. They thought people would dismiss Windows as OS/2 was a million times better. In other words, IBM turned their backs on most of the PC market. And to add that their hardware market share was going down...
Display PostScript - The fact that you used the same imaging model for both screen and hardcopy is truly a wonder to behold. The only real differences were the DPI and color model between print and screen, rather than some arbitrary printer driver making the choices for you.
And it was also the reason why NeXTStep was slower than Windows and Linux on the same machine. Was also the reason why GNUstep decided to go for X11.
Distributed Objects - Nice, lightweight, easy to use with minimal boiler plate. Hardly perfect, but it made for some interesting software at the time without all the mass of something like CORBA.
Nice to see someone precieving something that is wrong: CORBA isn't slow. The speed of it depends on the ORB. And personally, it is pretty fast (OmniORB with Fresco). But it is very nice to see someone comparing something to basic with something so complex and all rounder. With CORBA, a lot of things would be much more consistent in NeXT, besides having things like language independant and so on.
The excuse people use as to why Mac's boot so quick (hardware support in rom per item installed) as opposed to on x86 hardware where you have to detect then load+start the driver
2-3 years ago, Mac boots really fast compared to Windows-based PCs. Right now, with OS X, it looks like a slog compared to Windows XP-based machines in terms of boot time.
Why didn't JLG, be's ceo and founder, recreate OS? why didn't he just take over commodore or buy commodore's IP,
and build on the Amiga OS and hardware. offer workstations on the SGI model. then port amiga os to x86
He was targeting an processor (I can't remember), and since Amiga OS was mostly non-portable, it would be easier and cheaper writing from scratch that porting it. Plus, BeOS was mostly portable, enabling it to be ported to PPC just when the PPC hype was going on, and then to x86 just before Be died.
Technically, I think it was the first OS out there that had the built-in ability to run dual-OS applications from competing products (OS/2, DOS AND Windows apps)... This was a great step.
It actually could do this because it has the Windows code, nothing amazing about that. If they didn't have any Windows code, I would be amaze, like you, if they have 100% for Win16 apps.
I voted BeOS. I'll always vote BeOS. Period.
Even if the vote is for world's worst OS?
PS: I voted for Amiga, even though I prefer BeOS over it. Amiga is much more revolutionary that BeOS, which was just evolutionary. All BeOS did was bring the right ideas together, with some of their own ideas. In other words, it was just an improvement to current OSes out there. Multics was a close second, followed by OS/2. I never tried the rest (I also never tried Multics, but I know what it was).
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1) Exec - Carl Sassenrath produced a piece of code that was functional, efficient and beautiful in its implementation. I'll be interested to see if the AmigaOS4 folk can keep that beauty whilst adding stuff like full memory protection and virtual memory. Not that the Amiga really needed memory protection, after Commodore released their testing and debug tools, Amiga software became much more stable, and I only ever crashed if I ran out of memory (so guess virtual memory would have been useful :-).
2) AmigaDOS - OK, the actual code may ahve been a bit clunky and rather out of step with the rest of the OS (having been written in BCPL), but the power... OK, many modern OSs can do similar things, but AmigaDOS probably did them more simply. Virtual devices (assigns) were wonderful things. And devices allowed for stuff like FTP (or even raw TCP, I wrote a simple SMTP server in AmigaDOS script using the TCP: device) and multiple filesystems on a single physical device (very handy for floppies or other removable media).
Seriously Plan9 is probably the most _revolutionary_ OS of the ones listed. The others didn't do much new (except for AmigaOS) -- just old things a bit better. More people (especially OS designers and developers) should take some time and read about plan9.
my 2 cents/ören
I haven't been able to look at all the comments, so I am not sure how much it applies, but that never stops folks, does it?. Anyways, I was surprised at how little OS/2 did in the polls. I can't help but think that it is because it is too old and not enough voters were aware of OS/2 in 1995 when OS/2 Warp was released. Its multitasking ability and GUI were quite advanced for its time. For 1995, it was quite a step forward.
"Anyways, I was surprised at how little OS/2 did in the polls. I can't help but think that it is because it is too old and not enough
voters were aware of OS/2 in 1995 when OS/2 Warp was released. Its multitasking ability and GUI were quite advanced for
its time. For 1995, it was quite a step forward."
How did OS/2 multitasking in 1995 compare with Amiga multitasking in
1985?
I voted for NeXT for one single reason: objective-C. You'll notice that almost all the listed OSes have the usual "modern" features (i.e. SMP, multithreading, memory protection, etc.), but only one pushed the object-oriented paradigm to a new height: NextStep. BeOS was a very good OS and it was a joy to program (I received my BeBox in '96 and I still have it), but the fragile base class problem has never been solved, making the few softwares available from DR8 incompatible with R5.
I would like to praise Apple for having the balls to promote the NeXT legacy as Cocoa with Objective-C. After spending years in different development environments, such as SGI, VMS, Sun, Windows, Mac and BeOS, I think NeXT was and still is the next big thing (with Cocoa). Even if I never worked with the original NeXT cube :-(
Arnaud
I viewed this more as
"What OS do I want back from the dead that I know I can't have anymore?".
BeOS.
If BeOS still had a future, I'd be there in a minute. I'm a Windows guy, not by choice. Most Windows users know Windows sucks and are looking for something better, but there is nothing out there that's feasible. BeOS was the one for me, despite many shortcomings that bugged me sometimes. I knew they would've been fixed soon. But now they never will be, and the community has shrunk down to nothing. Even the hardcore BeOS gurus are gone, like Scot Hacker, Eugenia, etc. Sad. BeOS was the only OS I've managed to switch to 100% and get off Windows for more than a week. Sadly, the lack of apps made me go back. I've got to do my work, so anything but Windows is usually a no-go. I've tried Linux, but what a pain. Hopefully OpenBeOS gets it right and improves on the original BeOS. I'm ready to switch whenever they are.
Joel may be right about Plan9 being the most revolutionary - and I also think NeXTSTEP had some revolutionary aspects to it too. And Anonymous wrote saying Be has such a huge lead because Eugenia and so many came here from BeNews. Well, I'm sure there is truth in that. However, I really do believe that much of it still has to do with timeframe and actual use of the OS's. So many of us were/are heavy BeOS users. At Be's apex, what we had to compare it to was Mac OS 9 and Windows 98/Me as far as real GUI OS's were concerned. So, Be really seemed revolutionary when put up against those two.
when was the last time you saw an OS that wasn't a knock-off of UNIX/Multics (cheap, high-quality, or otherwise)?
Last week, when I last used my Newton 2100u running NewtonOS before I sold it (sad, I know ) and not 20 minutes ago when I used Dynapad (http://dynapad.swiki.net/1) and 1 minute ago in Squeak (http://www.squeak.org).
Joel said:
Seriously Plan9 is probably the most _revolutionary_ OS of the ones listed.
Plan 9 is probably one of the most interesting, but not terribly revolutionary. But then again, considering the general lack of revolution or innovation of the other OS options, it probably does take the cake. However, like the others, Plan 9 mostly improved on the ideas of Unix and others before it, or took those ideas a little farther. One of the most touted innovations of Plan 9 is that all resources are represented as files. Yeah, that is cool. However, Unix and QNX (moreso than Unix) have been representing resources as files for a long time, just not to the extent as Plan 9. Plan 9 just took that idea a little farther. Fascinating technology yes, but nothing new, and especially not revolutionary.
rajan said, in bold; what he replied to in italics and bold:
Display PostScript...
And it was also the reason why NeXTStep was slower than Windows and Linux on the same machine. Was also the reason why GNUstep decided to go for X11.
Have you ever used NeXTSTEP for any period of time? I've run NeXTSTEP, OpenStep and Rhapsody DR2 on both black (NeXT) and white (intel-based) hardware as well as DOS, Linux and Windows on those boxes (with the exception of the NeXT cube). Windows 95, NT 4, and RedHat 5.2 are both substantially slower on the same 486 DX2/66 with 16 MB of RAM, crappy video card, and slow IDE harddrive. I shudder to try turning on "show window contents while dragging/resiszing" on either Windows I ran on that machine. NeXTSTEP does it perfectly, far better than I can drag full-contents-windows around in Win 98 SE on the 400 MHz Celeron I use at work. Granted, Win 98 sucks, but NeXTSTEP could easily outperform Windows on this machine.
GNUstep didn't go with X11, per se. They are layer Dispaly GhostScript (equivalent to Display PostScript, but GNUstep's is far from as optimized as NeXT's DPS) on top of X11. No implementation of the OpenStep API would be complete without many of the PostScript-related API calls, to do direct PostScript script runs and such. Quite a few OpenStep apps rely on this.
Distributed Objects ... time without all the mass of something like CORBA.
Nice to see someone precieving something that is wrong: CORBA isn't slow.
Nice to see someone who can't even read the text to which he is replying. CORBA is very large and fat, and quite complicated to use. NeXT's DO is not. Being bloated and complicated, like CORBA, doesn't mean it cannot be fast. Nowhere did the original poster claim that CORBA was slow. However, to do similar things in NeXT's DO and CORBA, you have to write 10 times as much code in CORBA, including the IDL, server, and client code. Indeed, one of CORBA's design goals was to be accessible from other languages, while DO was designed to work well with Objective-C and to do it well. However, because of the fact that Objective-C has various dynamic, reflective and introspective features a binding to allow other languages to use the NeXT DO framework can be done in a very straightforward manner. Perhaps you like writing IDL- that's fine, use CORBA. I'd much rather take the simpler more intuitive method that achieves the same result with a lot less dicking around.
Aaron
Display PostScript - ...
And it was also the reason why NeXTStep was slower than Windows and Linux on the same machine. Was also the reason why GNUstep decided to go for X11.
I'll not argue that DPS is slower than a more direct imaging model (though I never complained about repaints et al on my NeXTStation), but I imagine that GNUStep punted towards X becuase X is a lot more simpler and established than DPS, the GhostScript project wasn't heavily focused on DPS, and Adobe DPS requires a license.
Distributed Objects - Nice, lightweight, easy to use with minimal boiler plate. Hardly perfect, but it made for some interesting software at the time without all the mass of something like CORBA.
Nice to see someone precieving something that is wrong: CORBA isn't slow. The speed of it depends on the ORB. And personally, it is pretty fast (OmniORB with Fresco). But it is very nice to see someone comparing something to basic with something so complex and all rounder. With CORBA, a lot of things would be much more consistent in NeXT, besides having things like language independant and so on.
Never said CORBA was slow. But there's a lot of cruft, boiler plate, and code overhead to get simple DO functionality with something like CORBA over DO. NeXTSTEPs Distributed Object were very elegant, and built in to the system.
quote "The current Amiga Inc team even had to pay 5 million dollars for the remaining Amiga company, 8 years after the last classic Amiga model appeared on the market!"
5 million? palm paid only 12 million!
i wonder if the current amiga team can raise $5 million and offer it to Palm inc to opensource its be os code, the part of the code that was not cross-licensed and proprietary,
and improve on that.
i can't believe palm paid $12 million for be os IP, only to have it languishing.
quote: "The main reason behind OS/2 death is that IBM charged for their OS a much higher price than Windows. Reason: to have a price advantage over other hardware companies. They thought people would dismiss Windows as OS/2 was a million times better. In other words, IBM turned their backs on most of the PC market. And to add that their hardware market share was going down"
other reasons should not be ignored.
m$ had ISV signed a NDA whereby they could not participate in m$ licensing program if they also participated in OS/2.
so if you are an ISV and if you write software for win3.1
you could not also write software for os/2.
nintendo had a very similiar contract against sega with the nes v.s sega master system.
additionally, m$ had oem contracts that required that oem's pay for windows whether it was installed or not. so why pay additional for os/2?
in short, bill gates killed the alternative os market. what i wonder is whether these decisions could be described as "ethical" even by the rather low standards set by the oxymoron "business ethics."
quote: "that BeOS, which was just evolutionary. All BeOS did was bring the right ideas together, with some of their own ideas."
that's funny. if i were to define a revolution, it would be to "bring the right ideas together, with some of their own ideas."
if i were to describe evolution, it would be dos 1 dos 2 dos 3 dos 4 dos 5 dos 6 win 1.0 win 2.0 win 3.0 win 3.1 win 3.11 win 95 win 98 win 98se win me, etc.
quote
"Even the hardcore BeOS gurus are gone, like Scot Hacker, Eugenia, etc."
actually i thought that most of the traffic from www.benews.com migrated to www.osnews.com
one only needs to think of a "chrish"
>most of the traffic from www.benews.com migrated to www.osnews.com
Not really. Only a few hard core beOS users have "migrated". The rest, migrated to other operating systems as well. They left BeOS too.
In the last few glory days of BeNews, it did not serve more than 2,000 page views per day.
OSNews today serves 50,000+ page views. It really attracts a huge audience from all platforms.
As for me, "gone" from BeOS, it is true and untrue at the same time. I am not into BeOS the way I was, neither I am as active as I used to be. I do have a BeOS partition around, not because I need BeOS anymore, but even the fact that I run OSNews dictates that I should have a partition with it around. As I also have Linuxes, BSD, OSX etc.
that's funny. if i were to define a revolution, it would be to "bring the right ideas together, with some of their own ideas."
Then you obviously don't know what the word revolution means. To help you out, let's ask dictionary.com. I'll even throw in evolution to make it even more clear for you. Below I have compiled the relavent definitions:
rev·o·lu·tion. n.:
1. A sudden or momentous change in a situation: the revolution in computer technology.
2. A total or radical change; as, a revolution in one's circumstances or way of living.
3. a drastic and far-reaching change in ways of thinking and behaving; "the industrial revolution was also a cultural revolution"
ev·o·lu·tion. n.:
1. a. The process of developing. b. Gradual development.
2. a process in which something passes by degrees to a more advanced or mature stage
Now, if you really think hard and apply yourself, you will notice that BeOS (as well as the progresion from DOS 1 to DOS 6) is an evolution of the operating systems before it. The second definition of evolution as above especially seems to apply. BeOS is very much a result of operating systems like MacOS and Windows, taken to the slight next degree, being more advanced and more mature at what doing what MacOS and Windows did.
On otherhand, OSes like the Newton OS and AmigaOS can be thought of as slightly more revolutionary:
For example, the NewtonOS (originally) had no keyboard, but used pervasive handwriting (not character) recognition; no file system, but an object database; the first OS designed for be actually personal and not something to be worked around.
The Amiga on the otherhand demonstated a different way to doing desktop computer hardware (many specialized chips, &c) and software. The Amiga multitasked and it did it well. It had a GUI more advanced than the Mac at the time. Etc etc.
Some of the concepts in the Newton and Amiga had been seen in other systems, perhaps within the walls of a University or as a company prototype, etc. But they were revolutionary, and some aspects still are, because they are signifigantly different than the status quo. The NewtonOS in especial is still revolutionary because it does things very differently than the status quo.
Having PnP that works a little better than it did in Windows isn't revolution or innovation. Likewise with having a C++ based API. Or being able to play two videos at once without skipping frames. Having a clean UI that actually followed the design guidelines most of the time. All great features, but not innovative or revolutionary.
Repeat after me: BeOS is a great OS, but it's not revolutionary. Say it with me: Being evolution isn't bad, it is oftentimes better than revolution.
Maybe I should just get over it and accept the fact that people don't seem to know what revolution is. *sigh*
Aaron
Eugenia:
>The poll is in the same page with the rest of the article
>after you click "read more". In order your browser to be
>able to render the poll, you need Javascript.
>Learn to READ the article before your start swearing.
Thanks for clarification.
But you should maybe LEARN to accept, that there is not only
people with Mozilla,Opera&IE in the world.
I use AWeb3 and my Browser does support Javascript, at least
major portions of it. But the poll did not come up and since
my browser is supposed to do most Javascript I was not thinking
it would be on the same page.
BTW: I am doing this on AmigaOS 3.9 running on an Athlon 1.2GHz
;-) In fact, I am booting directly into the AmigaOS from GRUB.
AmigaOS is by far the best OS I have ever used and programmed for.
Though, I used only Win3.1, Win2k, WinME, MacOS7.5, BeOS,
MS-DOS, (and C64 Kernal ;-)).
Well, everyone is raving about the Amiga.
I haven't paid the Amiga any attention since it first appeared, maybe because I jumped on the Macintosh bandwagon.
At the time, the Amiga, to me, distinguished itself from other machines because of its custom hardware. I was a big fan of the Atari 800 series, because of its hardware, but for whatever reason, the hardware wasn't enough to draw me to the Amiga. It may have simply been the crisp B&W display and the compact form factor of the Mac that swayed me.
In its day, folks reveled at the Mac Toolbox and the capabilities it provided. It's novel TRAP system allowing ROM extensibility, the wide array of utility functions, etc.
I never heard that "buzz" about the Amiga. I've never seen a rundown or summary of its OS.
So, I'm curious, can someone summarize the great features of the Amiga OS? Not the hardware, mind you. As BeOS and NeXTSTEP/OpenStep showed, the hardware may be important to the System, but not particularly important to the OS. Both systems were ported away with good success to other hardware.
So, how does the Amiga OS, as an OS, distinguish itself?
RevAron - are you jocking about evolution from Windows?
When BeOS started (early 90-s) - Windows couldn't be even considered as "OS". It was like flaky toolkit for some apps - no ideas, no look, no maturity, no functionality - nothing. And they evolved in parallel, not in consequence.
So only MacOS is worth to be discussed as starting point of BeOS "evolution".
I'm not jocking about anything that I know. Not sure what jocking is, but I don't think I'm doing it.
It's so hard to have rational discussions when everyone is hung up on their emotionally based dislikes or likes for Windows, BeOS, Mac OS, etc. I don't like Windows either, but I know that somewhere along the line, BeOS took a few ideas from Windows. It doesn't make BeOS worse, Be had the wisdom to only take the ideas worth taking.
BeOS wasn't based on Windows. Never claimed it to be. However, BeOS, by virtue of coming out after it, surely borrows an idea or two from Windows. Many more from Mac OS, sure. However, nitpicking doesn't refute the fact that BeOS evolved from the GUI operating systems before it- it's nothing new.
Aaron
To all those who are pretending to know what they're talking about with the ST, but really dont, quit it. The Atari ST isn't the Atari 400. Or 800. Or 2600. It's a different class of machine. The Atari ST was a 68k processor. That's like having the option in the poll being "Macintosh," and raving on about the Apple ][.
I'm no Atari ST junkie, but I know the difference enough to call the bluffs of some of you out there.
Now, if only someone could get me an Atari ST Notebook... mmmm, 4 pounds. Oh, do you mean STacy or ST Book?
Well, the ST Book is what I was talking about (newer, newer version of TOS, lighter, probably better battery life), but I'd gladly accept a kind donation of a STacy.
> So, how does the Amiga OS, as an OS, distinguish itself?
First you need to tell what version of AmigaOS you want ot know more about, v1.0 was truly revolutionary for its time in 1985, v3.9.2 is a very fun OS but in terms of features still is far behind compared to MacOS X and Windows XP. For more info on the history of the Amiga and what AmigaOS 3.9.2 currently offers read the following OSNews story: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=604&page=8
For more information on what AmigaOS4 (Port of AmigaOS3.9 to PPC with loads of enhancements) will offer, read the following OSNews story: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1356
Also, try downloading UAE (the Amiga emulator to use) and run Workbench 1 with Kickstart 1 ROM images. It won't look too flashy now a days, but considering that you could do it back in 85, when the other guys were either just single tasking or still without any semblence of a real GUI.
RevAaron, you have given excellent reasons why BeOS is not revolutionary in the true meaning of the word. But, I think you have to get over the fact that, for many who used BeOS, it was revolutionary in the smaller context, compared to using Windows 98 and Mac OS 8-9.
I would have to concur with Jay, technically BeOS may not have been revolutionary in the communist sense, more so in the socialist sense. It did adopt most of the good ideas from all the experiences of the developers. But when I saw it 1st time on a Mac & used it 1st time on a PC, the speed did blow me away. All the baggage that Windows, Linux & MacOS had to slow them down was gone. That was radical, cool, awesome, revolutionary perhaps not. The fact that it wasn't too far off the beaten track in that most of what I found there I already knew from the other 3 OS's was good. What was really good was that BeOS shamelessly accepted the best ideas from those OS's with out some stupid idiot dictating, 1 button, or use the cmd line, or 8.3 file name hell.
Then Be did a cultural counter revolution & wiped out most of the developers.
"He was targeting an processor (I can't remember..."
Wasn't it the Hobbit chip? :-)
BeOS's GUI does borrow from the best features of the current OS's....but that is your external view of what is going on. Look into what is going on internally in BeOS and you begin to realize it's potential. Load up both memory and cpu's as you wish; it still responds to input. Move / delete thousands of files within seconds. Indexed and journalled filesystem which is searchable for virtually any aspect. The command line and GUI are tied together seemlessly in real time. Media moves through the system's data streams with extremely low latencies. Personal data is kept in public directory locations (e-mail, PIM info, etc.) available to every program at any time. It's revolutionary in it's power and simplicity. A measure of efficiency I use in engine mechanics is power to weight ratio. I will be impressed to see what the next level will bring.
rev·o·lu·tion. n.:
1. A sudden or momentous change in a situation: the revolution in computer technology.
2. A total or radical change; as, a revolution in one's circumstances or way of living.
3. a drastic and far-reaching change in ways of thinking and behaving; "the industrial revolution was also a cultural
revolution"
BeOS's technology is revolutionary, check it out.
i agree hard decision
"I voted BeOS because it was SO good compared to the others in it's time but only lacked industry support and non-shareware apps."
I'm sorry to see that the OS which missed out most of all wasn't represented at all!
I'm thinking of Penpoint by the GO corporation, back in 1990/91 They had a tremendous vision for a pen-based operating system, but with some truly innovative aspects to the UI (no applications, just "notebooks" to which you could add "pages" of any kind of page handler you had - graph paper, plain (scribbling) paper, lined paper). No opening or saving of files, no user knowledge of the file system. Dynamic network stacks so that if you walked into a wireless office the Penpoint computer automatically sent everything in your outbox, and filled your inbox with new stuff.
Two things killed it really. Firstly Microsoft brought out the brain-dead "penwindows" as a spoiler product, and secondly the hardware wasn't available and cost effective at that time.
As a might-have-been product though, I can't think of anything better. It would have been a truly new paradigm in OS design and usability.
Ah well.