Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Fri 4th Jun 2004 06:22 UTC
PalmSource ain't gonna make a birthday party for BeOS but it would only be fair if the rest of us, [ex-]users, remember the "media OS" as the innovative operating system of the late '90s, still used by some. Depending on how you count, it was early 1994 when the first BeOS version left the Be, Inc. offices and headed toward Be's "partners" and "developers". It was 1994 when the word started to spread around among geeks about this "new and exciting" OS and soon, external devs got access to it.
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I am still an user. A funny story as a matter of fact, a year of so ago I've finally got myself a machine with enough disk space to actually triple-boot
I had a BeOS PE before, but the previous machine suffered from a serious case of disk space shortage and I mostly just wanted to check what's up with all those R5 PE spin-offs. So, I put on the DevEd on one of the partitions "for the afternoon". After turning off the SMP support, which is obviously of no use to me anyway (the same problem I had on the old machine), I was quite surprised to hear the sound of a succesfully installed OS through my crappy speakers! Everything just worked. After one year, that BFS partition is not going anywhere anytime soon! I admit I use BeOS mostly for listening to the music and checking out a thing or two concerning C++ programming. As a matter of fact, doing something from the moment of powering-up your PC, and considering all the alpha, 0.something versions of software and drivers it is amazingly stable!
!!!
Since we're kind of celebrating, I'll just sum up the pros of using BeOS in 2004 from my POV. There are many cons too, make no mistake, but _today_, that's off topic
a) The "Damn that was fast" feeling that just persist throughout all that years, no matter the hardware.
b) A true, pure breed desktop OS. It is quite fashionable nowadays to run some modified server OS or server wannabees on our desktops, with all the multiuser crap and so on. BeOS is designed and optimised for one's OWN computer ONLY - very much like the now extinct home computers from the 1980s, only much more powerful.
c) A modern, Right Thing design. I especially like BFS and the excellent, elegant API (i.e. the Kits). Micro kernel, Translators, global MIME and etc. are also very cool.
d) No bullshit. The OS tries its best to keep the low profile. For instance, PnP: if you got the drivers, not even neccessarily the right match, the OS spares you the crap of what it's installed and what not - if everything is ok, it will work. When installing software, it often enough to just put it somewhere and run it - its data type will become the registered type for opening files - to uninstall, you simply delete the app alltogether and the app will automagically unregister for opening files without jerking you around... To put it another way: you won't be seeing many "wizard" dialogs you would have totally defaulted and skipped over anyways.
e) For Windows and Unix types, BeOS is definitely the best of both worlds. A totally integrated GUI, yet with automatic or manual mounting, binutils, bash and gcc development.
All in all ... Thanks BeOS, thanks for the computing experience the way it should Be!