[Wolves] BeOS

[Chris Ellis]

On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 4:09 PM Adam Sweet via Wolves
<wolves at mailman.lug.org.uk> wrote:
>
> 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.

You need to get to Series 4 of Halt and Catch Fire ;)

>
> 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.
>

BeOS was one of those OSes I remember reading about in Linux <insert
name> magazines back in the day.  I never got around to playing with
it.

IIRC BeOS also had quite an interesting file system, where it was
essentially a relational database as the file system, a bit like some
of the strange IBM OSes.

Maybe I'll fire it up and have a look.

> Ad
>
> --
> Wolves LUG mailing list
> Homepage: http://www.wolveslug.org.uk/
> Mailing list: Wolves at mailman.lug.org.uk
> Mailing list home: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/wolves