Submitted by Ars ‘reviews’ Haiku, and concludes that “at the end of the day, Haiku may not be much more than an interesting diversion, something to play with on a spare bit of hardware on a rainy afternoon just for a bit of fun. But even if it amounts to no more than that, Haiku is still worth checking out.” The article is a bit scant on content, but it does give me the opportunity to link to my review of Haiku alpha 1 from 3 years ago. I try Haiku every now and then to see if that review needs an update, but it always amounts to ‘it got a bit more stable’ – which is fantastic, but not a reason to redo it.
Makes you miss the good ol BeOS days…
Yes.
A cool multimedia OS coded in C++, which wasn’t another UNIX clone.
Sometiems I wonder how would Mac OS X turned out to be, if BeOS was the chosen one.
Sadly I have to agree with Ars, as I don’t see anyone really willing to invest on it.
Fairly sure Apple would no longer exist as a public company.
Most probably, although I think they have more to thank to the iPod than Mac OS X.
Apple’s “openness” to open standard and collaboration in some open source projects was only a matter of survival and the integration of the NeXTSTEP engineers.
I clearly remember how the company used to behave in the old days.
As they are now going back to, actually.
iPod release was post Jobs return though. Whether the iPod would have ever emerged from R&D or even been anything like it actually turned out is anyone’s guess…
I think in the end it was actually NeXTSTEP that bought Apple and not the other way around.
If it wasn’t for him, Apple would most likely be gone, taking into consideration how tiny the European market was in the late 90’s. In Portugal there were a few LCs in the universities and that was about it.
Damn, such a waste of wonderful opportunity.
Let’s see if Microsoft is as diverse a Company in 10 years, or just sells XBox consoles.
If you truly think Apple is some kind of exemplar of diversity (with their whopping 7 or 8 or products), then maybe you should visit reality occasionally – instead of just getting your information from iFanboy echo-chambers.
Oh, grow up. I own a Nexus 7 (as well as an iPad), I’m typing this under Windows 7 on a Lenovo Thinkpad and I own 2 XBoxes, and a Wii which I use for Nexflix (no AppleTV here…) <sarcasm>Yes, obviously I’m such a fanboy it hurts.</sarcasm>
If really you have to reduce everything to a black and white argument over 2 companies, that’s very sad for you. People can, you know, like more than one thing without being specifically biased… (I know shocking revelation!!!)
Rant aside – Microsoft are desperately trying to do Hardware like it is going out of fashion. If they carry on at a similar rate, 10 years from now I see it as perfectly feasible there will be no more software, outside of their potted ecosystem.
Yes.
The big boys seem to try to go back to the days of Hardware+Software systems, like Apple always did.
It is one way out of the OEM bloatware mess, and allows for bigger margins.
Now the question is how prices will get affected and if the consumers buy into it.
Haiku (like BeOS) is amazing from a technical and architectural perspective. I wish I could use it as my daily OS.
I will so get modded down for this, but I would love to have Haiku underpinning with a Metro-like UI
if they created a nice new (and beautiful) UI experience I would happily switch and start making stuff. As it stands now though the OS still LOOKS a bit like a toy OS with all those cartooney icons and the old ‘Iron Grey’ theme. Is the UI functional, yes, but it doesn’t look overly pretty, even from a minimalistic view.
I think it looks pleasant enough… sure, it could look better, but does appearance really take higher priority than functionality? I don’t think so. Right now, their main focus is actually getting the damn thing done. Ready for beta and then an actual release. I see nothing revolting about its appearance, its theme does the job.
What the hech is good about a beautiful UI?
Yesterday I had to transfer some files on a Mac and the good look UI some how made drag & drop less useful than on Haiku’s Tracker – click on folder – drag to icon of USB drive – release – yet the first two times it refused to copy the folder, and then worked perfectly the third time I tried. I don’t know how something that simple can be made to not work but that is what happened.
Windows 7 also looks great until you and to quick dive into some folder structure – a piece of cake in Haiku – a royal pain in Windows.
Working and easy to use functions are more important than good looks.
And don’t tell me the users want the looks, because a good part of their problems with computers seem to come from the details hidden from them by good looking software!
Blasphemy!! Actually, I think you could implement something like that as an option, the way Stack & Tile works.
As for the article, it’s much like other Haiku ‘reviews’ I’ve seen in mainstream tech press, apart from the backstory bit which kind of came across as if Haiku first started off once Zeta had bit the dust. Maybe it’s just how I read it.
He did make note of the slow speed of Webpositive, this is something I’ve wondered myself, why is it slow? It’s the ‘same’ webkit that powers other browsers so I can only assume that there is something in Webpositive’s page loading that makes it slower?
Anyway, a nice enough article, always good seeing Haiku getting attention in the tech press.
The issue is the network backend that’s in use. Currently the backend that Haiku’s port uses is one based on libcurl, and that particular backend isn’t particularly well maintained, no other port uses it any more. There’s work in progress on a replacement but free time to work on it more and finish it is an issue.
Missed this, thanks for the heads up. Great hearing that the problem is identified and that a remedy is in the works.
That is called BeIA:
http://raptureinvenice.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/beia_webpad.j…
Though it was completely customisable, so that is just some random pic I happened to find. The default layout was beautiful. I wish I had a screen grab of it!
No, it was “announced” in October 1995, the first 100 developer boxes didn’t ship till 1996.
Or 133MHz… the 133’s are the ones still worth having. The 66’s are horribly underpowered.
This implies to me it was just a magic drop in OS for the Mac, when clearly it wasn’t. It was a hard slog. But, the Mac port was well established by the time hardware production was dropped. Mac’s ran a version of DR8, after all. I had a copy of PR1 that would boot on Mac or BeBox.
That’s very apologetic with regards to BeOS… truth was, at the time the OS didn’t meet the specs and Openstep was far closer. BeOS was also hampered by some of the internal code – given it was either licensed from a third party or shady GPL usage.
You can also never underestimate Steve Job’s power of sales, once he got wind of an opportunity.
Yes – personal version. With giant restrictions. Like not supposedly being able to be installed to a real partition (as that was actually a selling point of Pro.) The fact that droves of users used the partition install loophole was only a minor part of the reasons Be Inc failed. Because…
NO! Total fantasy. Thom and I are now screaming, “FOCUS SHIFT!!”
What really happened:
Web Appliances became a buzzword, everyone circa 1999 – 2001 was trying to launch some kind of net enabled appliance – be it a semi computer or tablet or toaster. Be saw this, decided to change focus and create BeIA, BeOS for Internet Appliances. Except, that failed dismally because no average consumers actually wanted the overpriced underpowered boxes and Sony bailed on BeIA almost before the eVilla was released. Compaq did the same thing with the Cliper. And the WebPads all later shipped with WinCE.
Secondly, BeIA is NOT BeOS. BeOS is NOT BeIA. BeIA shares a lot of the core OS with BeOS, but it is as like BeOS in reality as iOS is to MacOS X. There’s a compatible API in the earlier builds (I’ve personally seen a lot of pre BeIA 1.0 builds running, and played with the dev kit.) BeIA did a lot different. It had a compressed file system (CFS), it had a special kernel that allowed ELF executables to be compressed (CEL format), which then used a master symbol table to uncompress the exe to run it. It was a bunch of extra drivers, such as touch screen and wireless. I personally owned a DT300 webpad and it ran BeIA from a 16MB CF card (yes MB, not GB.) The browser was the main app – Wagner (an Opera 4 based monstrosity) and there were COM like abilities and various cool comms features in the underlying OS (i.e. Binder.) Yes, one could trich the OS in to booting to a severely limited and very crippled Tracker, but it didn’t really work very well and wasn’t all that useful.
I’m not going to go on, but just that alone made me sceptical of the rest of the article.
Wait, what?
😉 <– this is all you are getting on this forum.
A number of network drivers, PCMCIA support (likely not around at the time of the Apple possible purchase though) and similar were either lifted wholesale from Linux with some vague code releases that didn’t always compile and rarely gave compatible binaries; or licenced from their original copyright holders for the Linux version.
There was also Intel licenced code in the USB stack (again, later than the Apple era), Metrowerks licenced IDE, licenced MIDI stack, the 3D rendered, some other drivers were written and bought in from external sources.
What Be could have sold was about 80% of an OS with a lot of licencing issues to sort out.
“licenced MIDI stack”
Uh?
By stack, you mean software MIDI synth here, right?
The MIDI *stack* as you called it, actually called Midi Kit 2, was fully designed by Be Inc.
The fact that the out-of-box software MIDI synth was using licensed technology never tainted the MIDI *stack*, as that synth was just a plain application intercommunicating with the MIDI kit, like any other MIDI applications.
“the 3D rendered”
Yeah, right, like NeXTStep wasn’t using OpenGL licensed code too.
There is many reasons for the NeXT vs Be choice made by Apple at this time, but licencing issue was never a major one.
Except if you’ve considered Steve Jobs a “technology licence”…
Have you actually *seen* the source code?
The entire font rendering subsystem was also another part that was licensed. I believe the Dano version might have moved to Freetype, or maybe that was just Yellowtab, but the original code was licensed.
The difference with Next and Openstep was that Jobs had a lot more clout than Gasse. Next also produced hardware for a longer period with actual user take-up, where as Be never really got past “developers and extreme geeks” before cancelling the BeBox. Next’s OS was ported to SPARC, HP RISC, X86 and obviously ran on 68000 – plus was also running internally on PowerPC in some shape (as the next slew of Next workstations were to be PowerPC based.) There was also the Openstep standard (rather than OS), which cemented the API as being a “standard” amongst a number of vendors. I know we all love to believe Be Inc was robbed, and BeOS should have been the basis of MacOS X, but that is utter bunkum. It was miles behind Openstep (both in maturity and coverage of software) and Gasse severely overplayed his cards.
I prefer to not reply to such question.
Put me under the 5th amendment protection, please.
🙂
True, the original font rendering was licensed from Bitstream IIRC.
But that doesn’t make my comment about BeOS’s Midi Kit not being a licensed code any less valid.
Regarding the rest of your comment, I agree.
My reaction was regarding Midi kit and OpenGL licensing (if any) vs NextStep equvalents ones as being one major point behind the choice of Apple.
It was clearly not. Never was.
As I said, there were many reasons, many very valids indeed, Steve Jobs, OS frameworks maturity, Unix at the bottom, code portability and Gassée was blind when he made this now cult comment.
But neither Midi or 3D technologies licensing issues were ones of the reasons, as claimed.
Edited 2013-01-10 15:26 UTC
Shall we all take the 5th? 😉
It’s all cumulative. But, I’m with you on your points! Indeed, Next had display Postscript, which was licensed from Adobe.
The BeOS Personal Version was part of my multi-boot system featuring 6 operating systems. I seem to recall that to boot BeOS I needed a boot floppy. The rest could be booted from a boot menu.
It seemed like a cool idea, until you realize you don’t use most operating systems and they are just a waste of space.
I think it was BeOS, MS-DOS, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Linux and ehm… another one, not *BSD. Ah, I think I counted Windows 3.1 as the 6th, it started from the MS-DOS install.
…boots… but within a minute after booting it freezes and crashes.
I wish they’d do a PowerPC port of this. Would be perfect for my old G4.
“Old G4” more or less sums up why they aren’t.
More: I guess it’s safe to say that the focus Be had on the niche PPC platform …greatly contributed to the downfall of BeOS, it was what killed that OS the first time around – when BeOS was finally ported to x86, it was basically too late.
Directing efforts at new PPC port would be largely a repeat of past mistakes.
Yes and no. The BeBox, had it succeeded, would have been a very nice platform. The hardware was lovely at the time. The standard ISA and PCI BUS was fantastic, it could use standard 72pin RAM, almost any graphics card that had a driver – PC or Mac… these things were great. PowerPC as a platform was also a good bet at the time. The real mistake was porting to Intel in the first place, because it ate up all of the available resources. The PC is a hungry beast and the Intel port was a never ending cycle of hardware issues and driver revision. Would we be here discussing BeOS, or even Haiku, had they not? Probably not. Make of that what you will. But the only hardware I still own that runs BeOS is PowerPC.
No, untrue. I think you missed my point – PowerPC Mac’s are a dead end. If there was a viable PowerPC platform still in production, I’d be all for a PowerPC port. This is why the ARM port is so important.
So BeBox was just like a PC …except using weird CPUs?
(could it be that my dual Pentium II 266 is a better BeBox than BeBox? 
)
And while PowerPC perhaps seemed like a good bet at the time, we now know it really wasn’t one… Pentium and Pentium Pro were probably good hints of things to come, potential viability of other platforms.
Apple CEO at the time thinks it was “probably one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made, not going to the Intel platform,” ( http://www.macworld.co.uk/mac/news/?newsid=7045 ) and instead opting for PPC.
At least ARM seems really viable now …oh well, we’ll wait and see.
If you want to try a alternative OS for PPC I would suggest you look to see if MorphOS is supported on your system (http://www.morphos-team.net). I use it on a old Mac Mini PPC G4 and it looks great, is fast (5 second boot, 1 second shutdown) and does what I need for a limited purpose machine (web browser, jabber client, and SSH). I even have Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X on the same machine, and MorphOS is so much faster.
Just a suggestion.