[Wolves] BeOS

[Adam Sweet]

On 27/05/2020 19:16, Chris Ellis via Wolves wrote:
> On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 4:09 PM Adam Sweet via Wolves
> <wolves at mailman.lug.org.uk> wrote:
>>
>> 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 ;)

Ha! :) A great series for anyone interested in a drama based on the
explosion of the 80s-90s PC and Internet era.

>> In development since the demise of BeOS is Haiku - an Open Source
>> reimplementation of BeOS from scratch:
>>
>> https://www.haiku-os.org/
>>
>> Anybody else ever tried BeOS or Haiku? If you're bored, now might be a
>> good time to try.
> 
> 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.

While I was trying to set my BeOS VM up, I had an example of this in
practice. I needed to locate a file, I don't really understand the BeOS
filesystem layout or where it should be so I just typed the filename
into the file browser search and the results were instant. No waiting
while it crawled the filesystem. I believe the Haiku filesystem
implements the same thing.

That might not seem like much today, but this is Win98 era. With Windows
you sat and waited while it searched. On Linux you either used 'find'
and waited or 'locate', which depended on a daily cron job to index your
filesystem to update the locatedb.

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