The very first BeOS story OSNews ever published – from 23 January 1998. Here’s the same article rendered in the then-current OSNews website.
More of the fallout from Apple’s decision to bump off its cloners last Fall has settled over the Valley recently, falling particularly hard in Menlo Park, home of Be Inc.. It seems Apple has been loath to hand over the documentation for the “Gossamer” motherboard line of PowerPC 750 machines (popularly referred to as the “G3” line) that began shipping last November.
In the past, Apple had been more than happy to hand over the documentation to its various motherboard designs, each having colorful names like Alchemy, Tanzania, and Tsunami. But the return of Jobs has chilled the once congenial relationship the two companies had, although both Motorola and IBM are more than happy to provide the BeOS team all the technical specs they desire.
The result for Be users on PowerPC machines (right now they’re the only kind, although BeOS for Intel is due in March) is that Apple’s gradual improvements in motherboard design are forever off limits, forcing them into an upgrade path (if they choose to even stay on the PowerPC platform) dependent upon the processor upgrade cards offered by companies like Newer Technologies and PowerLogix.
Steve Jobs closing off the entire company and cutting off access to its specifications is one of the four times Be, Inc. died. Fitting it is the subject of our very first BeOS story.
I have an old Beige G3 and the thing that stops BeOS from booting is the actual boot loader. The box can’t see the SCSI/IDE controller, so whilst it boots to the 3d logo it can’t go any further. If someone could have hacked the boot loader, it’s possible it might be able to work.
I spent a few long nights in my school days (circa 2001) slogging Forth on an oldworld 7600 trying to get the Be kernel to load without the MacOS bootloader. NathanW and I were ‘sort of’ working on it with some help from a fromer Be Engineer. I got to the point of building up the kernel args structure in memory before my brain finally hurt too much from the forth, the lack of sleep, and I got distracted by Railroad Tycoon II…
The goal was to get an OF loader working, then start trying to migrate that to a beige G3 (which I had access to at the time) and then perhaps new world boxes.
Instead I got Gold in every campaign in RRT2 and a kidney stone from all the Mt. dew before finals. 🙂
The real problem I was trying to solve at the time was not being able to boot BeOS from Mac OS 9…
The fact that it would have potentially opened up the door for loading on machines with gestaltIds not in the bootloader was a bonus.
Ah, so you think it might have been that simple as the gestalt Id?
My G3 is a desktop, and I can boot to the 3d logo and holding whatever modifier key it is, will show the boot menu. But the code that scans for a bootable volume can’t see anything. I can’t remember it attaching a valid SCSI drive to the internal BUS made any difference. I was going to pull the personality card and look at the kernel log, but I kind of had a similar burn out.
I did have a copy of the PowerPC builds’s bootloader code at one point, and I did have a copy of the correct version of Codewarrior (4??) so I was just going to rebuild it… except I seem to recall the creator id’s on all the files were borked and I didn’t get round to sorting that out. I think I had the windows version of Codewarrior (6?) too, so maybe it can be cross-compiled, rather than jumping through classic MacOS hoops?