Read more to vote for the operating system that should have been the Next Big Thing (TM), but that never happened for whatever reason. Please make sure you vote an OS based on its *technical capabilities*, not because you used to be its user when you were 16, or because you like its background color, or because you heard good things about it once. Vote for the one that you truly think it was technically superior at its time.Note to Web Masters:
Please do not link to this article. We are not interesting in altering the results of the voting poll by linking this page and directing a very specific crowd to vote for the OS you advocate. OSNews attracts a very large crowd from all OSes, so please let this poll be as close to the larger public opinion as possible. Thank you.
Note: The poll is now closed. Thanks to everyone who voted.
No one has yet mentioned the Lisa Office System- quite advanced, with features that a lot of desktop machines still don’t have today- definately more advanced than the classic Mac OS, especially that of 1984! I’ll leave research an exercise for the reader.
“> Also I knew Amiga was doomed when I saw an Amiga 3000
> running UNIX in hi res with only 16 colors when macs
> already had 16 million colors by default.
The Amiga 3000 was released in 1990 and was voted by computer experts to be the most revolutionary machine released
that year. You should have bought yourself an Amiga graphics board
instead.”
That was indeed the defining moment. We had A3000s and Mac IIs side by
side. The Amiga could only display 16 colours at a time (from a total
of 4096) at 640×512. The Mac was displaying in 8-bit colour at almost
as high resolution.
When it came to image processing or paint, there was no contest.
The Amiga did have on-screen rendering of outline fonts before the Mac
had Adobe Type Manager, but not long before. And then Photoshop
arrived for the Mac, with a true soft airbrush.
It was another two years before the Amiga could offer a screen display
equal to the Mac II, and by that time any hope of it being used in
design studios was gone. Yes, there were expensive 3rd party cards,
but they were very expensive.
Commodore simply stinted on R&D, and that was what killed them.
We have a similar situation today with audio. The Mac can handle 24/96
sound, Amigas are limited to 16/44.1
Once and for all… Mac OS X is not NeXTSTEP 10.0! Nor is it NeXTSTEP 5.0! Or 6.0! If you’re going to draw comparisons like that- do it right. If anything, Mac OS X is OpenStep 7.0. Repeat after me: NeXTSTEP is not the same as OpenStep. OpenStep 4.0 isn’t just NeXTSTEP 4.0, rebranded. Binary compatibility for AppKit &c was lost between NS and the major overhaul that was OpenStep.
Jeeze Louise kids! Uff.
When OS 9 toasted my HD, I had to use my NeXT cube for a while before I had to the time to try to restore the HD and install Debian, whiping OS X and OS 9. On a 25 MHz 68040 with 24 MB of RAM, that thing sure flew! No joke- a lot of operations, especially in how fast the UI felt, was just as fast or sometimes more responsive on my 25 MHz cube than on my 500 MHz iBook under OS X. Fine proof that pervasive objects and a microkernel doesn’t mean poor performance.
————–
Now compare that to the Amiga 3000 standard offerings in 1990:
In addition to lower resolutions screenmodes it offers
4096 colors at 640×512 or 64 colors at 1280×512
————
I think this specs are not quite fair. Since the only use for HAM graphics were wathing pictures or dra them with a special program, however you couldn’t use it throughout the system, I mean you couldn’t run the Workbench or a Wordprocessor in HAM mode.
The same goes more or less for that “Extra-Halfbrite” (or how was this 64 color mode named?). There were not many applications/games using it.
However, since I don’t know the Mac I can’t say how it works on their side.
However: Amiga rocks! Of course I voted for it. After the Amiga I never seen such a innovative, fast and generally usuable and cool OS.
There were a few good choices like NeXTStep, AmigaOS, BeOS, and OS/2.
NeXTStep was revolutionary using a totally new language, Brad Cox’s Objective-C, to give it life. Its use of Display PostScript was ingenious. AmigaOS was created with BCPL which wasn’t used much outside Cambridge University, but it wouldn’t have gone far without Jay Miner’s special chip designs. BeOS was more like a proof of the desire for a MultiMedia-enabled O.S. A few new ideas thrown in, but the same old story.
When OS/2 first arrived, it looked like VM from the mainframes with a PC-DOS shell tacked on. It did many things well when dealing with text. It took forever to get a graphical user interface but that also was nice. It was only when version 2.0 arrived that it was great. It was the next big thing–32-bit O.S. on 32-bit hardware. It could have done well in several markets and industries, if IBM had marketed it well. Instead, it languishes, still probably running a large percentage of the ATMs in the U.S.A.
Oh, and MULTICS? It was never the next big thing. It was just another big thing.
> Since the only use for HAM graphics were wathing
> pictures or dra them with a special program, however you
> couldn’t use it throughout the system
That why we had screens didn’t we? (Macs do not!) A workbench in 16 colors wasn’t that bad (MagicWB with only uses 8 colors and looks great http://www.sasg.com/mui/gallery/Stefan_Stuntz/Pic_2.gif ). In fact at the time having icons and GUI in more than 16 colors would have costed alot more processing power and memory, which could better be used to process graphics or do other more important things.
Yes HAM modes were too slow and used too much memory to be used with most games. But actually almost any of the games from that period of time were far better on the Amiga compared those found for Apples, anyway. Did you guys ever do a color count on the amount of colors used in for instance a game like Lion Heart? Due to copper tricks this game and loads of others displayed hundreds of colors simultaniously at amazing speeds.
Anyway as I stated before if you wanted a more colorful workbench you should have bought a 3rd party graphics card for your Amiga 2000 or 3000.
Here are some better looking examples of 8 color MagicWB icons. (Note that although some screens are likely to display higher color depths the icons and pictograms themselves only use 8 colors)
http://www.sasg.com/mui/gallery/Stefan_Stuntz/PSI.jpeg
http://www.sasg.com/mui/gallery/Stefan_Stuntz/Prefs_PSI.jpeg
Rhapsody
http://www.osdata.com/oses/rhapsody.htm
Anyone have a copy?
*not my real email address …duh.
I have a copy of Rhapsody DR2 for X86. I have no idea where the floppies are, however.
I ran it on my K6-2 350 before I followed my NeXT fetish to the logical conclusion of a G4 Tower. 
Funny how Rhapsody DR2 was faster on that 350 MHz than DP3 was on my G4. 
Not so with 10.1 though (as it should be).
If anyone knows where to get disk images for the 2 (or more?) boot floppies, I’m sure there’s a long line of people itching to try it out… but i don’t have the bandwidth to host it… well, email me and we can discuss vintage computing in a very legal way.
Personally, I liked Rhapsody and OS X Server more than OS X 10.0. Not that I dislike Aqua, but I liked the NeXT way of doing things, and Rhapsody was simply a skinned version of OpenStep.
Aaron
Several of these could be said to have been revolutionary *in ther time*, so are we trying to decide which one was the most revolutionary?
This was a tough one, but I choose Amiga, because it had something really different from what the rest of the desktop systems were doing and it deserved better than what it got.
BeOS was a close second, but there was nothing really revolutionary about it. It was good, because it put all the right technologies together really well.
Irix shouldn’t be on the list, because it isn’t dead or dying.
Click on *Read More* and read what we’re voting on.
The poll question is a bit off. BeOS shouldn’t have “won” over the other guys because it was the most revolutionary, but simple that it was evolutionary. The same goes for most of those OSes. They all made computing the way you were used to a bit better. There are exceptions, sure. People seem to associate “revolutionary” with “well done” and not so revlutionary as a bad thing. If BeOS was truly revolutionary, most of you geeks used to Mac, Win and Linux wouldn’t want to use it. Why? Because it’s not just an improved version of what you were doing before, which is the reason that most computer users and adept geeks alike don’t bother with the truly revolutionary stuff.
> We have a similar situation today with audio. The Mac
> can handle 24/96 sound, Amigas are limited to 16/44.1
No Don, we are not.
Take for instance the Repulse Zorro II Card expansion soundcard:
Sampling Rates from 8 to 48Khz including 44.1Khz and 96Khz S/P-DIF
Supports 16, 18, 20 and 24bit (S/P-DIF) samples in mono and stereo
Enhanced Full Duplex Recording
For information on more Zorro based sound cards go here http://www.amigau.com/c-amiga/hwsound.htm
However should be noted that the AmigaOne will ordinary off the shelf PCI based souncards. Drivers are already finished and have even been demonstrated on classic Amiga hardware using Zorro-PCI bridges at Amiga shows.
Apple has never put a good sound chip on any of their machines as far as I know. Or even a good DAC.
Even the vaunted AV Macs weren’t that spiffy.
Apple has always been the cheapest company when it comes to giving their customers good sound.
It’s hard to find a PC system that doesn’t have some form of 6 channel sound via C-Media, Realtek, Avance, etc.
And then when it comes to PCI sound, the PC has far and away more choices than Mac.
Even today, no Apple computer is available with a good sound chip. On a $1000+ eMac/iMac, that is inexcusable. On a $4000 Powermac, it is criminal.
Maybe someone at Apple can tell everyone why they are so cheap.
#m
AmigaOS4 will certainly ship with Soundblaster Live! drivers. According to Martin Blom (AHI) Soundblaster 128 drivers may become available as well.
Perhaps “evolutionary” is the best term for this. And there is the historical context to deal with. I would still vote for Be. However, in the time frame where the Amiga came together and was ahead of the curve, it was the most evolutionary. I think the same is true of Be. Be did not invent anything new, except itself. And, in a sense, having done that and done it so well, was revolutionary in that it showed what could be possible in an OS that was both fast/lean and capable of doing anything, capable of handling any file size, etc. And lastly, because Be almost made it. Apple was desperate when they were negotiating with Be. There’s enough blame to go around, but I think JLG really blew it. He should have made an offer Apple couldn’t refuse.
Sorry folks, I lost the IQ-test.
But where the #@?! is the URL to the poll ?
Thanks !
Guys, all the stuff GEOS crammed into a Commodore 64, how could any of these other systems be considered as revolutionary? Remember the pc-geos that you may be thinking of wasn’t the first version (and it would run on a 640k 8088). GEOS started on an 8bit 1mhz 6502 processor machine and was comprable in features to the classic Mac.
Stomps all the rest of list to smithereens.
The poll is in the same page with the rest of the article after you click “read more”. In order your browser to be able to render the poll, you need Javascript. Learn to READ the article before your start swearing.
The fact that some one was adopting newer ideas was “revolutionary”.
Besides the obvious clean interface and multimedia capabilities, BeOS had many other nice features.
My favorite was the hardware detection. I could just drop a new video card, and it would boot up like normal and just work. Provided I check the compatibility, I could take the harddrive, drop it in a different PC, and it would just boot up like nothing happened. Try that with Windows or Linux. You’ll be looking at alot of reconfiguring.
Be Inc. really shot itself in the foot with thier obsession with Internet Appliances. If instead of sinking all their resources into that ‘white elephant’ and instead focused on delivering real applications to their already impressive r5, maybe they’d still be around today. Truthfully I wonder what they were smoking sinking so much effort into promoting it for Internet appliances when it didn’t even have a capable browser (since mozilla is just a crappy port (for Be it really should have been a re-write), netpositive is barely more functional than Lynx, and Opera is just pathetic).
Two years ago, R5 was one of the most impressive OS’ I had ever used or programmed for. To this day sight few OS short of Solaris make as good a use of multiple processors, were ever as stable, or isolate memory/devices/processes and programs as well. My OS experience ranges from CP/M through to XP, with experience on easily two-thirds the OS listed in the vote. From that I can say that having written a couple simple apps under Be, it is easily one if not the most powerful multithreaded OS I’ve ever used, and that it’s fully journalled filesystem and placement of I/O handling in user space provide a level of stability and ease of hardware support/installation that every OS should aspire to.
Besides, BeOS proved what I’ve said all along. Hardware detection doesn’t take five minutes, so what the @#$% are all these other OS’ wasting their time on during boot. The excuse people use as to why Mac’s boot so quick (hardware support in rom per item installed) as opposed to on x86 hardware where you have to detect then load+start the driver, stopped holding water with Be’s quick hardware detection and driver selection. Even Linux these days seems to take forever to start, so much so that Mandrake takes longer to start than WinXP on my box, by about a factor of three, and don’t even get me started about dead hat! Well, that and XP is more stable with better hardware support. Wait, checking, no, I’m not stoned, why am I praising an M$ product??? Hmm, posession maybe? Alien abduction? Maybe I was replaced by a pod.
… is OS/400.
I don’t know any other OS platform where the underlying hardware was changed from 32bit CISC processors to 64bit RISC without the need to recompile the applications.
(if anyone is still reading this far down)
what this means is that init sets up an initial name space, consisting of /, /bin, /proc, /share, etc… then each program which starts can modify the namespace, passing it on only to its children. this doesnt mean i can delete /etc/passwd, because if i did, all that would happen is that files I started wouldnt be able to access that file (plan9 did implement unix permissions also, so i wouldnt be able to delete it but i might be able to union a file over the top)
eg: when you were in 8 1/2 (plan9 window system), 8 1/2 would define the /dev/window device which was a handle to pipe stuff into the window manager. eg: the X window system uses TCP/unix sockets, 8 1/2 defined a file system handle which was recusively available, but only to descendant processes. hence no need to MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE, as noone could even see /dev/window, let alone access it, unless they were you.
its this kind of simple, powerful and extensible techniques that are missing in common OSses: windows has about a million APIs and linux has about three million inscrutble ioctl()s…
What’s more interesting than the result of the pole is just how many superb/revolutionary OSs there have been.
I reluctantly voted for BeOS because, as the title for the poll states, hearsay isn’t valid for a vote and, of the varying OSs I have used (Linux, MacOS …, Win-whatever, BeOS, DOS Operating System), it was the most technically sound. Otherwise I would have voted for Amiga. For something so “old,” it generally appears to have been a competitor for mid-90’s computers instead of mid-80’s ones!
once upon a time there was a website called
http://www.benews.com
that website got quite a bit of traffic but osnews was dead.
then eugenia came from benews to osnews.
benews died, osnews took off
she brougth with her be os user base.
hence that is why be os is in the lead
If the Amiga OS was such a great OS then why did it lose out to the Mac OS?
both used teh same 68k hardware. amiga had custom circuity that blew away apple’s mac.
so why did amiga lose but mac win?
Time to market is critical in the computer industry.
Why didn’t JLG, be’s ceo and founder, recreate OS? why didn’t he just take over commodore or buy commodore’s IP,
and build on the Amiga OS and hardware. offer workstations on the SGI model. then port amiga os to x86,
he would have gotten what be inc had never had – a solid revenue base and a mature product.
rewriting be os from scratch when amiga already had most of that functionality costed him time to market advantages such as printing and internet and networking functionality.
plus he lost the opportunity to enjoy an installed base of applications, games, and OS code.
Technically, I think it was the first OS out there that had the built-in ability to run dual-OS applications from competing products (OS/2, DOS AND Windows apps)… This was a great step.
No, it’s not revolutionary to slightly improve on the ideas of all those that have come before you. Having prettier icons, a more consistent interface or plug-and-play isn’t revolutionary. It may have done those things better (or worse in some situations) than that the Mac OS or Windows, but that’s no revolution, that’s evolution.
I’m glad that BeOS worked for you- it did for a lot of people. Almost no one who used it disliked it. However, BeOS wasn’t revolutionary.
I’ve done your harddrive swapping trick on PowerMacs. It’s not revolutionary with BeOS, nor is it on the Mac. It’s just a slightly more improved version of the hardware detection schemes that was already in place.
Aaron
i was just thinking the funniest thing. if windows never cought on and if everyone was using something else. i would wonder how it would effect the list and if anyone would of cared. course everyone would of just blown it off and voted for something significant.
just a what if i had in the back of my mind.
trakz.
> If Amiga was so great, then why did Amiga lose to Mac
In short, Commodore bankrupted. During the period June 1992- June 1993 Commodore lost 356 million dollars mainly on unsold PC hardware and expensive PC marketing compaigns. After that many different investors claimed to own the right to the Amiga platform, many years of lawsuits and bad luck followed.
Meanwhile there still was a huge demand for Amigas in Europe. In the US professional companies like Disney quickly snatched themselves hundreds of A4000s to be used as spare parts (Most Disney movies like i.e. the Lion King were animated on Amigas). Companies even placed ads in Amiga magazines, asking people to part from their machines, as they would pay *MORE* money for them secondhand then then originally costed brand new!
> Why didn’t JLG, be’s ceo and founder, recreate OS? why
> didn’t he just take over commodore or buy commodore’s
> IP, and build on the Amiga OS and hardware. offer
> workstations on the SGI model. then port amiga os to
> x86
He probably could not. There were tons of Commodore investors claiming the rights to the Amiga platform. Also it would have cost them alot of money. The current Amiga Inc team even had to pay 5 million dollars for the remaining Amiga company, 8 years after the last classic Amiga model appeared on the market!
Be Inc was a small company when they built the BeBox and moving AmigaOS to PPC would have cost them huge amounts of money as well.
But, of course Be was smart to promote themselves as the new Amiga at Amiga shows. Most of the developers and users who bought themselves a BeBox were Amiga users. Personally I don’t view BeOS as being a better AmigaOS, but rather a better MacOS with Amiga inspired features.
“when was the last time you saw an OS that wasn’t a knock-off of UNIX/Multics (cheap, high-quality, or otherwise)?”
The last time ? well … the last time I visited the Symbian OS home page
I voted BeOS. I’ll always vote BeOS. Period.
Didn’t used to see the EPOCH option (Psion handheld OS). In my opinion it was the most impressive handheld OS I ever seen (including WinCE, PocketPC, PalmOS, etc). A real shame the company fell down…
Because EPOC is making it big in smart handphones.
Once Windows 95 started to took over the best chance for an alternative OS was gone.
The main reason behind OS/2 death is that IBM charged for their OS a much higher price than Windows. Reason: to have a price advantage over other hardware companies. They thought people would dismiss Windows as OS/2 was a million times better. In other words, IBM turned their backs on most of the PC market. And to add that their hardware market share was going down…
Display PostScript – The fact that you used the same imaging model for both screen and hardcopy is truly a wonder to behold. The only real differences were the DPI and color model between print and screen, rather than some arbitrary printer driver making the choices for you.
And it was also the reason why NeXTStep was slower than Windows and Linux on the same machine. Was also the reason why GNUstep decided to go for X11.
Distributed Objects – Nice, lightweight, easy to use with minimal boiler plate. Hardly perfect, but it made for some interesting software at the time without all the mass of something like CORBA.
Nice to see someone precieving something that is wrong: CORBA isn’t slow. The speed of it depends on the ORB. And personally, it is pretty fast (OmniORB with Fresco). But it is very nice to see someone comparing something to basic with something so complex and all rounder. With CORBA, a lot of things would be much more consistent in NeXT, besides having things like language independant and so on.
The excuse people use as to why Mac’s boot so quick (hardware support in rom per item installed) as opposed to on x86 hardware where you have to detect then load+start the driver
2-3 years ago, Mac boots really fast compared to Windows-based PCs. Right now, with OS X, it looks like a slog compared to Windows XP-based machines in terms of boot time.
Why didn’t JLG, be’s ceo and founder, recreate OS? why didn’t he just take over commodore or buy commodore’s IP,
and build on the Amiga OS and hardware. offer workstations on the SGI model. then port amiga os to x86
He was targeting an processor (I can’t remember), and since Amiga OS was mostly non-portable, it would be easier and cheaper writing from scratch that porting it. Plus, BeOS was mostly portable, enabling it to be ported to PPC just when the PPC hype was going on, and then to x86 just before Be died.
Technically, I think it was the first OS out there that had the built-in ability to run dual-OS applications from competing products (OS/2, DOS AND Windows apps)… This was a great step.
It actually could do this because it has the Windows code, nothing amazing about that. If they didn’t have any Windows code, I would be amaze, like you, if they have 100% for Win16 apps.
I voted BeOS. I’ll always vote BeOS. Period.
Even if the vote is for world’s worst OS?
PS: I voted for Amiga, even though I prefer BeOS over it. Amiga is much more revolutionary that BeOS, which was just evolutionary. All BeOS did was bring the right ideas together, with some of their own ideas. In other words, it was just an improvement to current OSes out there. Multics was a close second, followed by OS/2. I never tried the rest (I also never tried Multics, but I know what it was).
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1) Exec – Carl Sassenrath produced a piece of code that was functional, efficient and beautiful in its implementation. I’ll be interested to see if the AmigaOS4 folk can keep that beauty whilst adding stuff like full memory protection and virtual memory. Not that the Amiga really needed memory protection, after Commodore released their testing and debug tools, Amiga software became much more stable, and I only ever crashed if I ran out of memory (so guess virtual memory would have been useful :-).
2) AmigaDOS – OK, the actual code may ahve been a bit clunky and rather out of step with the rest of the OS (having been written in BCPL), but the power… OK, many modern OSs can do similar things, but AmigaDOS probably did them more simply. Virtual devices (assigns) were wonderful things. And devices allowed for stuff like FTP (or even raw TCP, I wrote a simple SMTP server in AmigaDOS script using the TCP: device) and multiple filesystems on a single physical device (very handy for floppies or other removable media).
Seriously Plan9 is probably the most _revolutionary_ OS of the ones listed. The others didn’t do much new (except for AmigaOS) — just old things a bit better. More people (especially OS designers and developers) should take some time and read about plan9.
my 2 cents/ören
I haven’t been able to look at all the comments, so I am not sure how much it applies, but that never stops folks, does it?. Anyways, I was surprised at how little OS/2 did in the polls. I can’t help but think that it is because it is too old and not enough voters were aware of OS/2 in 1995 when OS/2 Warp was released. Its multitasking ability and GUI were quite advanced for its time. For 1995, it was quite a step forward.
“Anyways, I was surprised at how little OS/2 did in the polls. I can’t help but think that it is because it is too old and not enough
voters were aware of OS/2 in 1995 when OS/2 Warp was released. Its multitasking ability and GUI were quite advanced for
its time. For 1995, it was quite a step forward.”
How did OS/2 multitasking in 1995 compare with Amiga multitasking in
1985?
I voted for NeXT for one single reason: objective-C. You’ll notice that almost all the listed OSes have the usual “modern” features (i.e. SMP, multithreading, memory protection, etc.), but only one pushed the object-oriented paradigm to a new height: NextStep. BeOS was a very good OS and it was a joy to program (I received my BeBox in ’96 and I still have it), but the fragile base class problem has never been solved, making the few softwares available from DR8 incompatible with R5.
I would like to praise Apple for having the balls to promote the NeXT legacy as Cocoa with Objective-C. After spending years in different development environments, such as SGI, VMS, Sun, Windows, Mac and BeOS, I think NeXT was and still is the next big thing (with Cocoa). Even if I never worked with the original NeXT cube
Arnaud
I viewed this more as
“What OS do I want back from the dead that I know I can’t have anymore?”.
BeOS.
If BeOS still had a future, I’d be there in a minute. I’m a Windows guy, not by choice. Most Windows users know Windows sucks and are looking for something better, but there is nothing out there that’s feasible. BeOS was the one for me, despite many shortcomings that bugged me sometimes. I knew they would’ve been fixed soon. But now they never will be, and the community has shrunk down to nothing. Even the hardcore BeOS gurus are gone, like Scot Hacker, Eugenia, etc. Sad. BeOS was the only OS I’ve managed to switch to 100% and get off Windows for more than a week. Sadly, the lack of apps made me go back. I’ve got to do my work, so anything but Windows is usually a no-go. I’ve tried Linux, but what a pain. Hopefully OpenBeOS gets it right and improves on the original BeOS. I’m ready to switch whenever they are.
Joel may be right about Plan9 being the most revolutionary – and I also think NeXTSTEP had some revolutionary aspects to it too. And Anonymous wrote saying Be has such a huge lead because Eugenia and so many came here from BeNews. Well, I’m sure there is truth in that. However, I really do believe that much of it still has to do with timeframe and actual use of the OS’s. So many of us were/are heavy BeOS users. At Be’s apex, what we had to compare it to was Mac OS 9 and Windows 98/Me as far as real GUI OS’s were concerned. So, Be really seemed revolutionary when put up against those two.
when was the last time you saw an OS that wasn’t a knock-off of UNIX/Multics (cheap, high-quality, or otherwise)?
Last week, when I last used my Newton 2100u running NewtonOS before I sold it (sad, I know
) and not 20 minutes ago when I used Dynapad (http://dynapad.swiki.net/1) and 1 minute ago in Squeak (http://www.squeak.org).
Joel said:
Seriously Plan9 is probably the most _revolutionary_ OS of the ones listed.
Plan 9 is probably one of the most interesting, but not terribly revolutionary. But then again, considering the general lack of revolution or innovation of the other OS options, it probably does take the cake. However, like the others, Plan 9 mostly improved on the ideas of Unix and others before it, or took those ideas a little farther. One of the most touted innovations of Plan 9 is that all resources are represented as files. Yeah, that is cool. However, Unix and QNX (moreso than Unix) have been representing resources as files for a long time, just not to the extent as Plan 9. Plan 9 just took that idea a little farther. Fascinating technology yes, but nothing new, and especially not revolutionary.
rajan said, in bold; what he replied to in italics and bold:
Display PostScript…
And it was also the reason why NeXTStep was slower than Windows and Linux on the same machine. Was also the reason why GNUstep decided to go for X11.
Have you ever used NeXTSTEP for any period of time? I’ve run NeXTSTEP, OpenStep and Rhapsody DR2 on both black (NeXT) and white (intel-based) hardware as well as DOS, Linux and Windows on those boxes (with the exception of the NeXT cube). Windows 95, NT 4, and RedHat 5.2 are both substantially slower on the same 486 DX2/66 with 16 MB of RAM, crappy video card, and slow IDE harddrive. I shudder to try turning on “show window contents while dragging/resiszing” on either Windows I ran on that machine. NeXTSTEP does it perfectly, far better than I can drag full-contents-windows around in Win 98 SE on the 400 MHz Celeron I use at work. Granted, Win 98 sucks, but NeXTSTEP could easily outperform Windows on this machine.
GNUstep didn’t go with X11, per se. They are layer Dispaly GhostScript (equivalent to Display PostScript, but GNUstep’s is far from as optimized as NeXT’s DPS) on top of X11. No implementation of the OpenStep API would be complete without many of the PostScript-related API calls, to do direct PostScript script runs and such. Quite a few OpenStep apps rely on this.
Distributed Objects … time without all the mass of something like CORBA.
Nice to see someone precieving something that is wrong: CORBA isn’t slow.
Nice to see someone who can’t even read the text to which he is replying. CORBA is very large and fat, and quite complicated to use. NeXT’s DO is not. Being bloated and complicated, like CORBA, doesn’t mean it cannot be fast. Nowhere did the original poster claim that CORBA was slow. However, to do similar things in NeXT’s DO and CORBA, you have to write 10 times as much code in CORBA, including the IDL, server, and client code. Indeed, one of CORBA’s design goals was to be accessible from other languages, while DO was designed to work well with Objective-C and to do it well. However, because of the fact that Objective-C has various dynamic, reflective and introspective features a binding to allow other languages to use the NeXT DO framework can be done in a very straightforward manner. Perhaps you like writing IDL- that’s fine, use CORBA. I’d much rather take the simpler more intuitive method that achieves the same result with a lot less dicking around.
Aaron
Display PostScript – …
And it was also the reason why NeXTStep was slower than Windows and Linux on the same machine. Was also the reason why GNUstep decided to go for X11.
I’ll not argue that DPS is slower than a more direct imaging model (though I never complained about repaints et al on my NeXTStation), but I imagine that GNUStep punted towards X becuase X is a lot more simpler and established than DPS, the GhostScript project wasn’t heavily focused on DPS, and Adobe DPS requires a license.
Distributed Objects – Nice, lightweight, easy to use with minimal boiler plate. Hardly perfect, but it made for some interesting software at the time without all the mass of something like CORBA.
Nice to see someone precieving something that is wrong: CORBA isn’t slow. The speed of it depends on the ORB. And personally, it is pretty fast (OmniORB with Fresco). But it is very nice to see someone comparing something to basic with something so complex and all rounder. With CORBA, a lot of things would be much more consistent in NeXT, besides having things like language independant and so on.
Never said CORBA was slow. But there’s a lot of cruft, boiler plate, and code overhead to get simple DO functionality with something like CORBA over DO. NeXTSTEPs Distributed Object were very elegant, and built in to the system.
quote “The current Amiga Inc team even had to pay 5 million dollars for the remaining Amiga company, 8 years after the last classic Amiga model appeared on the market!”
5 million? palm paid only 12 million!
i wonder if the current amiga team can raise $5 million and offer it to Palm inc to opensource its be os code, the part of the code that was not cross-licensed and proprietary,
and improve on that.
i can’t believe palm paid $12 million for be os IP, only to have it languishing.
quote: “The main reason behind OS/2 death is that IBM charged for their OS a much higher price than Windows. Reason: to have a price advantage over other hardware companies. They thought people would dismiss Windows as OS/2 was a million times better. In other words, IBM turned their backs on most of the PC market. And to add that their hardware market share was going down”
other reasons should not be ignored.
m$ had ISV signed a NDA whereby they could not participate in m$ licensing program if they also participated in OS/2.
so if you are an ISV and if you write software for win3.1
you could not also write software for os/2.
nintendo had a very similiar contract against sega with the nes v.s sega master system.
additionally, m$ had oem contracts that required that oem’s pay for windows whether it was installed or not. so why pay additional for os/2?
in short, bill gates killed the alternative os market. what i wonder is whether these decisions could be described as “ethical” even by the rather low standards set by the oxymoron “business ethics.”
quote: “that BeOS, which was just evolutionary. All BeOS did was bring the right ideas together, with some of their own ideas.”
that’s funny. if i were to define a revolution, it would be to “bring the right ideas together, with some of their own ideas.”
if i were to describe evolution, it would be dos 1 dos 2 dos 3 dos 4 dos 5 dos 6 win 1.0 win 2.0 win 3.0 win 3.1 win 3.11 win 95 win 98 win 98se win me, etc.
quote
“Even the hardcore BeOS gurus are gone, like Scot Hacker, Eugenia, etc.”
actually i thought that most of the traffic from http://www.benews.com migrated to http://www.osnews.com
one only needs to think of a “chrish”
>most of the traffic from http://www.benews.com migrated to http://www.osnews.com
Not really. Only a few hard core beOS users have “migrated”. The rest, migrated to other operating systems as well. They left BeOS too.
In the last few glory days of BeNews, it did not serve more than 2,000 page views per day.
OSNews today serves 50,000+ page views. It really attracts a huge audience from all platforms.
As for me, “gone” from BeOS, it is true and untrue at the same time. I am not into BeOS the way I was, neither I am as active as I used to be. I do have a BeOS partition around, not because I need BeOS anymore, but even the fact that I run OSNews dictates that I should have a partition with it around. As I also have Linuxes, BSD, OSX etc.
that’s funny. if i were to define a revolution, it would be to “bring the right ideas together, with some of their own ideas.”
Then you obviously don’t know what the word revolution means. To help you out, let’s ask dictionary.com. I’ll even throw in evolution to make it even more clear for you. Below I have compiled the relavent definitions:
rev·o·lu·tion. n.:
1. A sudden or momentous change in a situation: the revolution in computer technology.
2. A total or radical change; as, a revolution in one’s circumstances or way of living.
3. a drastic and far-reaching change in ways of thinking and behaving; “the industrial revolution was also a cultural revolution”
ev·o·lu·tion. n.:
1. a. The process of developing. b. Gradual development.
2. a process in which something passes by degrees to a more advanced or mature stage
Now, if you really think hard and apply yourself, you will notice that BeOS (as well as the progresion from DOS 1 to DOS 6) is an evolution of the operating systems before it. The second definition of evolution as above especially seems to apply. BeOS is very much a result of operating systems like MacOS and Windows, taken to the slight next degree, being more advanced and more mature at what doing what MacOS and Windows did.
On otherhand, OSes like the Newton OS and AmigaOS can be thought of as slightly more revolutionary:
For example, the NewtonOS (originally) had no keyboard, but used pervasive handwriting (not character) recognition; no file system, but an object database; the first OS designed for be actually personal and not something to be worked around.
The Amiga on the otherhand demonstated a different way to doing desktop computer hardware (many specialized chips, &c) and software. The Amiga multitasked and it did it well. It had a GUI more advanced than the Mac at the time. Etc etc.
Some of the concepts in the Newton and Amiga had been seen in other systems, perhaps within the walls of a University or as a company prototype, etc. But they were revolutionary, and some aspects still are, because they are signifigantly different than the status quo. The NewtonOS in especial is still revolutionary because it does things very differently than the status quo.
Having PnP that works a little better than it did in Windows isn’t revolution or innovation. Likewise with having a C++ based API. Or being able to play two videos at once without skipping frames. Having a clean UI that actually followed the design guidelines most of the time. All great features, but not innovative or revolutionary.
Repeat after me: BeOS is a great OS, but it’s not revolutionary. Say it with me: Being evolution isn’t bad, it is oftentimes better than revolution.
Maybe I should just get over it and accept the fact that people don’t seem to know what revolution is. *sigh*
Aaron
Eugenia:
>The poll is in the same page with the rest of the article
>after you click “read more”. In order your browser to be
>able to render the poll, you need Javascript.
>Learn to READ the article before your start swearing.
Thanks for clarification.
But you should maybe LEARN to accept, that there is not only
people with Mozilla,Opera&IE in the world.
I use AWeb3 and my Browser does support Javascript, at least
major portions of it. But the poll did not come up and since
my browser is supposed to do most Javascript I was not thinking
it would be on the same page.
BTW: I am doing this on AmigaOS 3.9 running on an Athlon 1.2GHz
AmigaOS is by far the best OS I have ever used and programmed for.
Though, I used only Win3.1, Win2k, WinME, MacOS7.5, BeOS,
MS-DOS, (and C64 Kernal ;-)).
Well, everyone is raving about the Amiga.
I haven’t paid the Amiga any attention since it first appeared, maybe because I jumped on the Macintosh bandwagon.
At the time, the Amiga, to me, distinguished itself from other machines because of its custom hardware. I was a big fan of the Atari 800 series, because of its hardware, but for whatever reason, the hardware wasn’t enough to draw me to the Amiga. It may have simply been the crisp B&W display and the compact form factor of the Mac that swayed me.
In its day, folks reveled at the Mac Toolbox and the capabilities it provided. It’s novel TRAP system allowing ROM extensibility, the wide array of utility functions, etc.
I never heard that “buzz” about the Amiga. I’ve never seen a rundown or summary of its OS.
So, I’m curious, can someone summarize the great features of the Amiga OS? Not the hardware, mind you. As BeOS and NeXTSTEP/OpenStep showed, the hardware may be important to the System, but not particularly important to the OS. Both systems were ported away with good success to other hardware.
So, how does the Amiga OS, as an OS, distinguish itself?
RevAron – are you jocking about evolution from Windows?
When BeOS started (early 90-s) – Windows couldn’t be even considered as “OS”. It was like flaky toolkit for some apps – no ideas, no look, no maturity, no functionality – nothing. And they evolved in parallel, not in consequence.
So only MacOS is worth to be discussed as starting point of BeOS “evolution”.
I’m not jocking about anything that I know. Not sure what jocking is, but I don’t think I’m doing it.
It’s so hard to have rational discussions when everyone is hung up on their emotionally based dislikes or likes for Windows, BeOS, Mac OS, etc. I don’t like Windows either, but I know that somewhere along the line, BeOS took a few ideas from Windows. It doesn’t make BeOS worse, Be had the wisdom to only take the ideas worth taking.
BeOS wasn’t based on Windows. Never claimed it to be. However, BeOS, by virtue of coming out after it, surely borrows an idea or two from Windows. Many more from Mac OS, sure. However, nitpicking doesn’t refute the fact that BeOS evolved from the GUI operating systems before it- it’s nothing new.
Aaron
To all those who are pretending to know what they’re talking about with the ST, but really dont, quit it.
The Atari ST isn’t the Atari 400. Or 800. Or 2600. It’s a different class of machine. The Atari ST was a 68k processor. That’s like having the option in the poll being “Macintosh,” and raving on about the Apple ][.
I’m no Atari ST junkie, but I know the difference enough to call the bluffs of some of you out there.
Now, if only someone could get me an Atari ST Notebook… mmmm, 4 pounds. Oh, do you mean STacy or ST Book?
Well, the ST Book is what I was talking about (newer, newer version of TOS, lighter, probably better battery life), but I’d gladly accept a kind donation of a STacy.
> So, how does the Amiga OS, as an OS, distinguish itself?
First you need to tell what version of AmigaOS you want ot know more about, v1.0 was truly revolutionary for its time in 1985, v3.9.2 is a very fun OS but in terms of features still is far behind compared to MacOS X and Windows XP. For more info on the history of the Amiga and what AmigaOS 3.9.2 currently offers read the following OSNews story: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=604&page=8
For more information on what AmigaOS4 (Port of AmigaOS3.9 to PPC with loads of enhancements) will offer, read the following OSNews story: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1356
Also, try downloading UAE (the Amiga emulator to use) and run Workbench 1 with Kickstart 1 ROM images. It won’t look too flashy now a days, but considering that you could do it back in 85, when the other guys were either just single tasking or still without any semblence of a real GUI.
RevAaron, you have given excellent reasons why BeOS is not revolutionary in the true meaning of the word. But, I think you have to get over the fact that, for many who used BeOS, it was revolutionary in the smaller context, compared to using Windows 98 and Mac OS 8-9.
I would have to concur with Jay, technically BeOS may not have been revolutionary in the communist sense, more so in the socialist sense. It did adopt most of the good ideas from all the experiences of the developers. But when I saw it 1st time on a Mac & used it 1st time on a PC, the speed did blow me away. All the baggage that Windows, Linux & MacOS had to slow them down was gone. That was radical, cool, awesome, revolutionary perhaps not. The fact that it wasn’t too far off the beaten track in that most of what I found there I already knew from the other 3 OS’s was good. What was really good was that BeOS shamelessly accepted the best ideas from those OS’s with out some stupid idiot dictating, 1 button, or use the cmd line, or 8.3 file name hell.
Then Be did a cultural counter revolution & wiped out most of the developers.
“He was targeting an processor (I can’t remember…”
Wasn’t it the Hobbit chip?
BeOS’s GUI does borrow from the best features of the current OS’s….but that is your external view of what is going on. Look into what is going on internally in BeOS and you begin to realize it’s potential. Load up both memory and cpu’s as you wish; it still responds to input. Move / delete thousands of files within seconds. Indexed and journalled filesystem which is searchable for virtually any aspect. The command line and GUI are tied together seemlessly in real time. Media moves through the system’s data streams with extremely low latencies. Personal data is kept in public directory locations (e-mail, PIM info, etc.) available to every program at any time. It’s revolutionary in it’s power and simplicity. A measure of efficiency I use in engine mechanics is power to weight ratio. I will be impressed to see what the next level will bring.
rev·o·lu·tion. n.:
1. A sudden or momentous change in a situation: the revolution in computer technology.
2. A total or radical change; as, a revolution in one’s circumstances or way of living.
3. a drastic and far-reaching change in ways of thinking and behaving; “the industrial revolution was also a cultural
revolution”
BeOS’s technology is revolutionary, check it out.
i agree hard decision
“I voted BeOS because it was SO good compared to the others in it’s time but only lacked industry support and non-shareware apps.”
I’m sorry to see that the OS which missed out most of all wasn’t represented at all!
I’m thinking of Penpoint by the GO corporation, back in 1990/91 They had a tremendous vision for a pen-based operating system, but with some truly innovative aspects to the UI (no applications, just “notebooks” to which you could add “pages” of any kind of page handler you had – graph paper, plain (scribbling) paper, lined paper). No opening or saving of files, no user knowledge of the file system. Dynamic network stacks so that if you walked into a wireless office the Penpoint computer automatically sent everything in your outbox, and filled your inbox with new stuff.
Two things killed it really. Firstly Microsoft brought out the brain-dead “penwindows” as a spoiler product, and secondly the hardware wasn’t available and cost effective at that time.
As a might-have-been product though, I can’t think of anything better. It would have been a truly new paradigm in OS design and usability.
Ah well.