[Wolves] BeOS

Adam Sweet adamsweet at gmail.com
Tue May 26 15:09:20 UTC 2020


I've had this email mostly written in my drafts folder following a
conversation with Richard at our last in person meeting and just
came across it so I thought I'd finish it off.

I first heard about Linux after about 3 months of owning my first x86
PC. I started buying loads of PC magazines as I tried to understand how
a PC worked and how to use it. In one of those magazines I came across
an 'OS Shootout' between Windows 98, Mac OS 9, Linux and BeOS. Another
magazine had something else about Linux shortly afterwards, then I saw
the first issue of Linux Format magazine which had a list of all of the
UK Linux User Groups at the time (which is how I came to find and join
Wolves LUG).

Yet another magazine shortly afterwards had a copy of BeOS 5.0 Personal
Edition for Intel PCs on the front cover, which was their last ditch
effort to encourage wider adoption before the company died out. Unlike
the Pro version, the Personal Edition was installed and started through
Windows and it would reboot your PC into BeOS.

At its peak, BeOS was considered to be a fast, progressive OS that
excelled at multimedia and implemented new concepts which were later
adopted by other popular OSes. Unfortunately it ultimately didn't find
wider market adoption and the Personal Edition give away didn't save them.

20 years later, BeOS is considered historically notable because Apple,
in dire need of a new OS to replace OS 9 offered to acquire Be Inc but
the main guy kept upping the price. Eventually Apple gave up and instead
purchased NeXT, another OS vendor which was run by then-former Apple CEO
and founder Steve Jobs. The deal brought Jobs back to Apple and led to
the NexTSTEP OS being the basis for what became Mac OS X.

Be Inc was later purchased by Palm and BeOS ultimately disappeared.

Anyway, it's possible to install BeOS in Virtualbox:

https://learn.adafruit.com/build-a-bebox-with-beos-and-virtualbox/

I set it up a while back and once installed, it's quite a nice OS to
play with but ultimately you can't do much with a 20 year old OS these
days. As an example, web technology has moved on an awful lot in 20
years and the included browser can barely render a modern web page.

In development since the demise of BeOS is Haiku - an Open Source
reimplementation of BeOS from scratch:

https://www.haiku-os.org/

After years of development I believe they're at 1.0 beta release stage.
There are Virtualbox images, unfortunately last time I tried it kept
crashing on my machine and wasn't usable. Richard said he didn't have
that problem. Last time I tried it before that was about 10 years ago.

I met some of the developers of Haiku back in 2008 and I said what a
shame it was that the BeOS source code had remained closed source and
they said that it wouldn't be useful to them anyway since operating
systems, hardware and Haiku itself had moved on so much by that point.

While they're not Linux, BeOS and Haiku may be interesting to the
nostalgic nerds amongst us if you have an hour or two, or an afternoon
to kill on a geeky journey.

Anybody else ever tried BeOS or Haiku? If you're bored, now might be a
good time to try.

Ad



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