{"id":30560,"date":"2020-10-30T15:20:02","date_gmt":"2020-10-30T19:20:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=30560"},"modified":"2021-05-20T10:56:10","modified_gmt":"2021-05-20T14:56:10","slug":"25-years-ago-beos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/10\/30\/25-years-ago-beos\/","title":{"rendered":"25 Years Ago: BeOS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Benj Edwards<\/a> (via Daniel Sandler<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

BeOS was unique among the computer operating systems of the ’90s due to its lack of legacy code. By the mid-’90s, Windows, Mac OS, OS\/2, Solaris, Linux, and even NeXTSTEP, were evolutionary operating systems with at least a decade of history. With BeOS, though, Be dared to create an entirely new operating system from scratch to meet the needs of the era: multimedia and internet support.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

BeOS supported multi-threaded applications and included support for multiprocessor machines from the start. After an upgrade, it also included a multi-threaded, 64-bit journaling file system called BFS. This had a built-in database designed to support digital multimedia recording and playback, which was novel in the mid-’90s.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Today, you can download and use a functional modern descendant of the desktop BeOS called Haiku<\/a>. This free, open-source project is still in beta, but it’s compatible with legacy (and new) BeOS applications. It’s a joy to experiment with, on either a virtual machine<\/a> or as a direct install on Windows-compatible hardware.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Bill Bumgarner<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I was on the pre-order list until I got the dev docs.<\/p>\n

Everything C++ — OK.<\/p>\n

Every app starts as one window w\/three threads; main, window draw, window event handler.<\/p>\n

“Concurrency is difficult. Use locks sparingly. Good luck.” was basically the docs.<\/p>\n

No, thanks.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Alastair Houghton<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I keep looking back at screenshots of the old Mac “Platinum” UI, the BeOS\/Haiku UI and a handful of others of similar vintage and thinking that they’ve aged remarkably well by comparison to newer UI designs (XP, Aero, early Mac OS X).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Benj Edwards (via Daniel Sandler): BeOS was unique among the computer operating systems of the ’90s due to its lack of legacy code. By the mid-’90s, Windows, Mac OS, OS\/2, Solaris, Linux, and even NeXTSTEP, were evolutionary operating systems with at least a decade of history. With BeOS, though, Be dared to create an entirely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2020-10-30T19:20:05Z","apple_news_api_id":"1c69e1bc-54ec-40ae-b766-0914c7b163f9","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2021-05-20T14:56:14Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AHGnhvFTsQK63ZgkUx7Fj-Q","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2070,1190,326,800,77,295,74],"class_list":["post-30560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-anniversary","tag-beos","tag-c-plus-plus","tag-concurrency","tag-design","tag-history","tag-opensource"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30560"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30561,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30560\/revisions\/30561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}