You’re likely familiar with the old tale about how Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple and started his own company, NeXT. Apple then bought NeXT and their technologies and brought Jobs back as CEO once again. However, Jobs’ path wasn’t unique, and the history of computing since then could’ve gone a whole lot different.
In 1990, Jean-Louis Gassée, who replaced Jobs in Apple as the head of Macintosh development, was also fired from the company. He then also formed his own computer company with the help of another ex-Apple employee, Steve Sakoman. They called it Be Inc, and their goal was to create a more modern operating system from scratch based on the object-oriented design of C++, using proprietary hardware that could allow for greater media capabilities unseen in personal computers at the time.
Not much new information in here for the regular OSNews reader – and these articles get published about once a year – but it’s always nice to see the best operating system of all time get some love.
I dabbled with beOS a bit, I ran it off a Zip disk when it released for free. I think it was R5. I closely watch Haiku OS and run it from time to time in a virtual environment. Snappy, and if it ever does become stable (1.0), I would love to run it on bare metal.
It runs well on real hardware, if you get the right hardware. Graphics support is limited, but the VESA driver is more than capable, and the intel graphics driver supports a lot of hardware.
Despite it’s beta status, it’s surprisingly stable. The trick is finding apps for it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATwT4DwoXnM&t=0m26s
I played with it at a point of time, and it seemed fairly cool. Similar to Motang, I’m also curious how the end result of Haiku turns out. An OS doesn’t need to be good looking and shiny for it to be productive.
The article isn’t that great. Especially the part about Tim Berners-Lee is just flat out wrong and non-sense.
However, some of the comments in the related HN thread are really good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22002062
“but it’s always nice to see the best operating system of all time get some love.”
But this article is about BeOS, not AmigaOS… 😀
While I will be the first to say that I love AmigaOS. I end up spending most of my time trying to get a coherent Icon set. 😛
Like many here, its the reason why I’m here. I’m not deep into Haiku, but maybe I should dive back in. But even then it would be for old times sake. The original BeOs made my bare metal computer better. It ran applications faster than windows could, with far fewer crashes. Its only flaw was the lack of an affordable and good word processor.
I bought the BeOS/Gobe Productive bundle not long before Be was bought out by Palm, and I always found the Gobe software to be more than adequate. Maybe it wasn’t good enough for a Microsoft Word power user, but for everyday word processing it got the job done and was a pleasure to use (like most BeOS apps at the time).
Of course, 20 years later it may not be up to par anymore, but for Haiku any modern web-based office suite (like Microsoft Office 365, ZoHo Office Suite, Google Docs, or OnlyOffice) should get the job done.
Haiku has Libreoffice now, or Wordgrinder, Vim, and Emacs if you do your word processing that way.
IMHO the original BeOS’ problem was lack of drivers. True, it was easy enough to configure a compatible machine. It was a stumbling block, though.
I still use BeOS on a old Packard Bell Pentium 3 machine, it makes a great music player for my shed! 🙂
Fitted with a Geforce 2 video card and a Audigy 2 sound card it’s fully compatible. I tried Haiku on it via a separate hard drive and that runs fine too except for the lack of video acceleration. That is Haiku’s biggest problem, lack of accelerated video, specially when BeOS had it over 20 year ago and Haiku is supposed to be a copy of it!
Maybe that will come in future though, in the meantime it does run fine without it for most software and tasks.
Here is a contemporary article on the BeBox. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1–lF9TYCZDQEnxiaTwKpGsOrS8MJH3r0/view?usp=sharing . The archived PDFs seem to only go back to 1997 so scanned this with my phone. The author loved the BeBox and that includes that the user has to write all their own software, more or less. Very 70s.
Thanks for the sharing!