PalmSource ain’t gonna make a birthday party for BeOS but it would only be fair if the rest of us, [ex-]users, remember the “media OS” as the innovative operating system of the late ’90s, still used by some. Depending on how you count, it was early 1994 when the first BeOS version left the Be, Inc. offices and headed toward Be’s “partners” and “developers”. It was 1994 when the word started to spread around among geeks about this “new and exciting” OS and soon, external devs got access to it.Be started out around 1991 by ex-Apple employees (including Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée and Newton’s inventor Steve Sakoman — who now is back at Apple managing the iPod division). Some ex-NeXT and ex-Apple engineers and Amiga developers joined Be later on too. The “father” of BeOS (in terms of the original OS code), Benoit Schillings (these days working at Openwave), joined the company around 1992-93 and started working on many parts of the OS. Legend says that BeOS was only text-mode back then and the company needed money. It was Friday night and JLG asked Benoit to put together something “fancy and graphical” before Monday in order to show it to venture capitals and impress them. And that’s how the first app-server for BeOS (a graphical server like X11 or GDI+ or Quartz) got created: in under 3 days.
Mipsys, Raphael Moll and later Beatware were the first people among those who received BeBoxen (the first two got the H0bb1t version, while the Motorola PPC-based BeBoxen started shipping after 1995). “The OS was “BeOS 0.99 exp”, codenamed “shark”, it was regularly updated via a couple of floppies. The next year we received the first blue PPC BeBox, though I can’t remember the exact date. The OS came on a CD; I had been told we were the first ones to receive it” Raphael remembers.
Here is the only known screenshot of the “shark” version of BeOS, 0.99-EXP from 1994 running on a H0bb1t machine (which used 6-7 AT&T DSPs instead of regular CPUs). Around the time I joined BeNews.com in 1999, the site published a great timeline article presenting all BeOS releases from 1994 until 1999, but because BeNews is now down indefinately you can read the english text on web.archive.org (note: it’s very slow but it does load) and check out the screenshots at a Lithuanian site which has translated that article.
While I personally started using BeOS on March 2nd 1999 (thanks to the PCPlus printed UK magazine for including a live CD with the R4 version) I later met a lot of people who had been using the BeOS already for years. It is kind of romantic hearing all these stories, for example, a developer who later became a Be engineer had to carry his BeBox to his house from the post office in his arms (and the BeBox was a very heavy machine compared to PCs), my husband (who was actually one of the first Be developers worldwide and later also became a Be engineer) spending crazy amounts of time with his BeBox in 1996 instead of… studying or sleeping, etc.
I probably owe BeOS some gratitude myself: I was arguing about some tech details of the nvidia TNT2-Ultra card and its BeOS 2D driver in Feb 2000 on the BeNews forums with a Be engineer. Later, we took our disagreement over email and then moved it on IRC, on the #BeDev channel. A year later, we were married and we’ve been happy ever since. Today, JBQ works at Openwave along with 4 more ex-Be engineers.
Back on topic, here is another story I love: It was 1997-8 when Dominic Giampaolo (from SGI, later worked at QNX and now he is at Apple) was testing his baby, the 64-bit BFS file system which earned him lots of fame for BeOS and for himself. There was a specific QA stress test that would use BFS to write on a floppy disk, erase, rewrite, erase etc for a whole night. For some reason, according to the debugging logs, the write procedure would bail out always around 6 AM. Engineers would gather and analyze the problem, but no one could figure out why the test would always bail out at around 6 AM, every morning. So, Dominic decided to stay up all night and have a watch at the machine personally. What Dominic found as the culprit was really funny: apparently, a ray of sun light would enter the window and would fall directly on the floppy drive and that would cause the drive itself to fail for the duration the sun light was upon it!
And here’s another story: Baron Arnold (the person that “owns” your files on the single-user but somewhat POSIX-compliant BeOS if you do an “ls -l” on your files) was known to be able to find bugs… easily. He never followed pre-defined QA methods but used his intuition and his skills to find bugs during his time as the main QA person at Be. Many ex-Be engineers still remember Baron finding a bug on the BeBox itself: inside the Motorola CPUs. Motorola even flew an engineer at Be to track down the problem. He earned having his name on Motorola’s errata! Today, Baron and a bunch of other ex-Be engineers are working at Danger.
Here’s another kinda-funny one: It was early 1999 and Be was preparing the R4.5 release. BeOS, which was targetted to be a MacOS replacement around 1994 naturally had to resemble MacOS a bit on usability (so it could get more switchers). So, to do a copy/paste you had to use ALT+C/V, which are the Mac shortcuts for the operation. However, in 1999 BeOS was not targetting the Mac anymore, but the PC market. Many PC users found the ALT+C/V –instead of CNTRL+C/V– very annoying and were becoming vocal about it. JLG asked Dominic and some other engineers to add the functionality to be user-selectable of which shortcut to be used. Half of the Be engineers didn’t even want to hear about it because the BeOS architecture was not able to allow this as an option. JLG pretty much had to pull rank and ordered the engineers, in an angry manner, to pull this through. Finally, it was implemented and to this day, it remains a hack. Legend says that if you were outside the Be building that day, you could hear a lot of kicking and screaming…
Disagreements on how to implement proper multi-user functionality were also present, mostly between kernel engineers, Dominic and Pavel Cisler, the creator of the BeOS desktop/filemanager, Tracker. Pavel came from General Magic and later worked at Easel developing Gnome’s Nautilus while today he works for Apple on Finder. Half of the engineers were citing kernel/fs changes and other half filemanager ones. Multi-user functionality was finally implemented but was never shipped because it was breaking a lot of apps that were created with single-user in mind (BeOS already had about 1500 applications at that point, today it has about 3,200) and that was a business risk Be didn’t want to take.
For those who loved the platform, remembering these and many other stories that I won’t mention here, it leaves a taste of melancholy: “aaah, those were the days…”
Anyway, later, Be published the last major version of BeOS, 5.0 in March 2000. A year and a half later Be’s assets were purchased by Palm and its source code and engineers moved to PalmSource, Inc. PalmSource made it clear that they have no plans to utilize the BeOS in any fashion, but a German company created by ex-Be third party developers, YellowTAB, is aiming to release its BeOS-based OS, Zeta, later this year. Zeta is based on the unreleased updated code of what it would be a “BeOS 6” and it is currently on version 1.0-RC3 pending release. More info here for their latest news (in Japanese, but shots are provided).
The BeOS legacy might live on via the Zeta product and/or OpenBeOS, however it will never feel the same as it used to feel in the 4.5.2 days (according to many engineers, the best version of BeOS ever released — for its time). The OS just felt like it had a soul, like it would know what you were thinking when using it (even if BeOS does have its own technical problems). It felt pure. I am not using BeOS anymore (I boot to it once every 1-2 months or so) but I will always keep with me this feeling, a feeling that no other software ever given me.
To all the fine minds and creative spirits that were at Be, Inc.
Never doubt that your work was appreciated.
but Amen to that.
It is indeed incredible and it was a fantastic feeling using the OS. Maybe some of the beauty seems gone to a certain extent, but as you know, many of us like to think that the soul isn’t dead just yet.
Lots of things are happening still and the saga definitely holds more surprises in it’s hands.
Many of us willl celebrate 10 years though and thanks for a nice article =)
I job shadowed at this non profit organization that is multimedia oriented that lets kids come in to do multimedia stuff. They had several BeOS systems doing stuff. None of them worked. All of them were crashing all the time. It wasn’t a hardware problem, the OS was just a pos.
Yes, I can KDL BeOS pretty easily too. Depends a lot on the kind of applications and drivers you use. My husband was only using Be-derived software and never had problems. I, on the other hand, wanted to download the latest and greatest apps from BeBits.com and there I had it: my BeOS was always more unstable than his. Not many programmers could grasp the viciously multithreaded nature of BeOS: read previous stories on osnews and comments from ex-Be engineers about the problem itself.
Looking back, I was so naive to think that the experience people had of BeOS was enough to convert the masses. I couldn’t understand why anybody would want to stay with another OS after they had seen BeOS. Hehe.
I loved Amiga, and I loved BeOS. There are so many books on the history of MS, Apple, Xerox, etc. I wish there was a book that chronicled the history of Be, Inc. I’d buy it.
Nice article Eugenia; even though I came “into” BeOS way later (I don’t know, a year or two (?) ago) I totally understand how you feel: BeOS has this “something” no other OS has.
And reading your article; I wish I was born a few years earlier
Congratulations and thanks to all the Be-engeneers for creating a wonderful OS
It’s really sad to see the logo “Microsoft Certified Gold Partner” on Beatware’s website and no mention to BeOS: IIRC, Beatware was just going to release AppSketcher (a visual IDE for BeOS development) when they announced abandoning BeOS after the “focus-shift” towards BeIA.
ePicture and Mail-It were really pro-level applications, even if not so really responsive (Beatware developed FreeStyle, its own extension to the Interface Kit for supporting themes and a mature table widget, among others).
IIRC, however, the people of yellowTAB weren’t developers but only the publishers of BeOS-Magazine, an amatuer magazine badly printed and much inferior compared to the one designed by BeNews stuff.
>the people of yellowTAB weren’t developers
>but only the publishers of BeOS-Magazine
You are very wrong on this. Bernd –who started YTAB– was porting a very-very well known pro audio application for BeOS (that I can’t mention ’cause of NDA reasons) that was never shipped in 1998-9 (it was among these “big”, well known apps that Be managed to get the source code or contracts to get ported, but they never got shipped for different reasons each). The other executive person at YTAB today is an ex-Be engineer and all their other developers are BeOS third party developers, each with many apps posted on BeBits the last few years.
I think BeOS has got its good name because the developers had point to reach the hearts of the users. If you start to create a thing with:
1) clear ideas
2) true love of what are you doing
3) good skills and people to do it
Something of great should happen. I think many products (OSs) starts with good ideas and purposes but there’s so much work to do that the quality and completeness(arrive to do the same things planned at the start) level degrade with the time.
Be has showed us that there’s the possibility to do great things even without an MS dev squadron. An OS that’s is not perfect but that after 10 years is again in the heart of the most of the people that have used/are using it.
Bad is that in a world like this one we are living, there’s a lot more space of moneys that for good projects. The “free” competion of the market kills this and that company without regret. There’s not enough space for grown. And this is one of things i most hate.
In a better world people (the community) would not to lose a valid product, a good team of developers, a good set of ideas and future things planned. We are no talking about food companies (that are however important) but of ones that research, invent hard things, intellectual things that after ARE USED by people, they are not only geek things, or a drawing to put on a wall and watch. Doesnt help this but choosing the way of the dollars it’s like hurting ourselves.
It’s the system that need a change, not only some corrections, i think
Because also opensource projects have their problems, of time (we’ve to work to live, for gain MONEY), people avaiable to spend their free time, money for books, hardware, connections, etc.
Let’s hope that Be has marked good the way to follow to evolve BeOS into a modern OS, in its new forms.
> You are very wrong on this. Bernd –who started YTAB–
> was porting a very-very well known pro audio application for BeOS
I apologize for my poor English and my bad memory. I correct myself: yT’s magazine was called “Inside BeOS” and I intended to write “BeNews staff”, not “stuff”.
I just updated the article and added 3 more paragraphs with info…
I am still an user. A funny story as a matter of fact, a year of so ago I’ve finally got myself a machine with enough disk space to actually triple-boot
I had a BeOS PE before, but the previous machine suffered from a serious case of disk space shortage and I mostly just wanted to check what’s up with all those R5 PE spin-offs. So, I put on the DevEd on one of the partitions “for the afternoon”. After turning off the SMP support, which is obviously of no use to me anyway (the same problem I had on the old machine), I was quite surprised to hear the sound of a succesfully installed OS through my crappy speakers! Everything just worked. After one year, that BFS partition is not going anywhere anytime soon! I admit I use BeOS mostly for listening to the music and checking out a thing or two concerning C++ programming. As a matter of fact, doing something from the moment of powering-up your PC, and considering all the alpha, 0.something versions of software and drivers it is amazingly stable!
Since we’re kind of celebrating, I’ll just sum up the pros of using BeOS in 2004 from my POV. There are many cons too, make no mistake, but _today_, that’s off topic
!!!
a) The “Damn that was fast” feeling that just persist throughout all that years, no matter the hardware.
b) A true, pure breed desktop OS. It is quite fashionable nowadays to run some modified server OS or server wannabees on our desktops, with all the multiuser crap and so on. BeOS is designed and optimised for one’s OWN computer ONLY – very much like the now extinct home computers from the 1980s, only much more powerful.
c) A modern, Right Thing design. I especially like BFS and the excellent, elegant API (i.e. the Kits). Micro kernel, Translators, global MIME and etc. are also very cool.
d) No bullshit. The OS tries its best to keep the low profile. For instance, PnP: if you got the drivers, not even neccessarily the right match, the OS spares you the crap of what it’s installed and what not – if everything is ok, it will work. When installing software, it often enough to just put it somewhere and run it – its data type will become the registered type for opening files – to uninstall, you simply delete the app alltogether and the app will automagically unregister for opening files without jerking you around… To put it another way: you won’t be seeing many “wizard” dialogs you would have totally defaulted and skipped over anyways.
e) For Windows and Unix types, BeOS is definitely the best of both worlds. A totally integrated GUI, yet with automatic or manual mounting, binutils, bash and gcc development.
All in all … Thanks BeOS, thanks for the computing experience the way it should Be!
That’s what i find when i look backwards…
It seems like it was yesterday when a friend of mine gave me a cd with BeOS 4 to take a spin.
Great article, BeOSian master.
Thank you for the work you did on BeNews
Ooops! That “As a matter of fact, doing something from the moment of powering-up your PC” should read
“As a mmater of fact BEOS is the fastest way around for doing ….”
I’ve been using BeOS since 1998 when Be contacted me and asked was I interested in porting my Amiga audio software. At the time I had started using windows and was wondering why it sucked so much, I was previously an Amiga user so I was used to a much more stable and faster system than Win 9x.
I installed BeOS and it was just like the Amiga: fast, responsive, multitasked very well and didn’t crash. It’s been the main OS on my PC ever since, the Mac I did the review of a while back wasn’t actually mine so when it went back a couple of months ago I switched back to BeOS as my main OS.
The good timing I refer to is the fact that I was planning on switching to OS X – today!
You may not be my OS of choice anymore, but you’ll always be my favorite love…
I know replying to myself is a bit strange but…
One other thing BeOS had was the fact it was so advanced technologically. There are features in BeOS which only now the rest of the industry are waking up to – i.e. Metadata & the value of a good API.
I think it will be still some years to come before everything has been fully caught up with.
I had to sneek back for a peek while doing some on-line research for a project concerning some antiquated multimedia OS I still find useful in many ways.
To Eugenia:
“I love the additions! It’s interesting to find out how and why some things were done in this or that way and decisions were made that brought BeOS to our systems as we knew it for those of us not “inside”.”
I would also like to add (+ apologies for not listing all of you!):
“To Eugenia, Oliver, and all the rest at BeNews,
Damn I miss reading that stuff!!!
You all did an excellent job.”
Thanks DLazlo, we had indeed some great time at BeNews… I sorely miss it too…
Hello,
I think you mean Lithuanian not Letonian
. But I don’t know, mayby, you use this word too. I one of the users that tried this OS after the best BeOS times, but I liked it very much. Just I can’t use it very often because of lack of programs.
I just wanted to say Thanks, Eugenia. *HUG*
You’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for your dedication, in all the time I’ve known you, from the early days in BeShare, etc.
Nice article, I didn’t realize it –HAD– been 10 years, gosh darn it! heh. I myself had just written about my using BeOS for six years, and I can totally understand how you feel about BeOS being that “special feeling” OS, etc.
Anyhow. Before I get all mushy or something… Cheers.
-Chris Simmons,
Avid BeOS User.
The BeOSJournal.
Just changed my MSN alias to “Happy 10th birthday to the BeOS!!” That oughta stirr up some questions… 99% of my MSN list doesn’t even know there’s something else besides Windows
I’m a loooong time beos user myself.
Been using BeOS since 1996. Still using Zeta RC2 and BeOS R5.03 Pro.
Cant see why i should get rid of it. LOVE IT – LOVE IT 🙂
I miss my beloved BeOS buuhuuu huuuuu buuuhuuuu…..
Used BeOS 4.5 up to BeOS 5 PE back home, mainly for mail, web, irc and entertainment. (now studying oversea). Really missed that Pentium 166MHz. The system was 100% compatible with BeOS. It was FAST, compared to an extensively speed-tweaked Win98SE on the same machine. I recall booting back to Win98SE only when I need to use MS Office. Linux’ was just technically-challenging for me back then, and I just needed something cheap and fast to browse, play music and watch animes.
Haven’t booted in to BeOS for 4 full months now. Deleted the partitions, since animes are eating the real estate very fast. VESA-only mode and no sound drivers are the reason of me not booting frequently. (nvidia geforce2go, yamaha ac-xg [hint: toshiba laptop]). If Zeta’s final release would include support for my laptop, then I might spend my savings on it. Maybe I’ll build a desktop and buy it anyway.
My bets are on OpenBeOS. No grudge on yT, but OBOS’ approach is much more promising, in terms of continuity and technicality (or so I think
). And SkyOS too, if you count hobbyist OS in.
Currently dual-booting between FreeBSD 4.10 when I need to get work done and Windows XP for music/videos (sound doesn’t work on fbsd).
its been quite some time. i started drooling over BeBox’s back in the day, watching them go from 66Mhz to 133. I jumpped on R3.0 when it first came out, and built a spesific box with ‘supported’ parts at the time. I used R3.x for a while off and on, but with R4 i completly switch, and have Never gone back.
i even corrupted my work place and write all my code on BeOS.
i must say, for what i do, and how i use my computer, Be has always made it easy and fun. but like Eugenia, i could KDL my system with my eyes closed if i wanted to
well, here’s to you BeOS. may your days last long.
I remember that it as the R4 demo that caught my attention – a few days later, I ordered the full version and decided to sell my Amiga in favor of a BeOS-powered x86.
Be Inc was a cool company too – it had that certain ‘geek’ flair, and the employees were great people too (I had the pleasure of meeting some Be engineers and visiting Be Incs offices shortly before they closed).
I still profit from having learnt C++ on BeOS – in contrast to most of the rest, I learnt to deal with threading issues from the beginning and that helps me a lot when programming on other systems using threading.
Current development? If I were going to try BeOS, or E-Commerce Station, or QNX or any of the non-Linux/BSD/Unix examples of X86 OSs, I would want to go with something that gets the current development.
Another quality I would look for is ease-of-use, which would encompass ease-of-installation and necessarily support for a wide-range of hardware.
Ah, the Good Old Days… how I miss them.
– chrish
I do not understand why people use Windows, unless it can do something essential that BeOS cannot do. Even more so when BeOS is scrutinized according to such a high degree of purist standards. Is Windows a “retard-OS”, to be scrutinized by lower standards? And is the outcome of a double-standard comparison enough to “boot BeOS every once-twice a month or so”?
I first heard of BeOS in a norwegian computer magazine back in 2000, and I have been using BeOS ever since (with a little break in 2001). Now I use BeOS R5 Pro 99% of my computer time (which is a LOT), and I boot up in Windows for some Office (when we use Excel at school), and when watching movies from my laptop to the TV.
A Great OS!
Congratulations!
Petter Juliussen
BeOS User Group Nordic
“Disagreements on how to implement proper multi-user were also present…”
This is still relevant today.
Good article Eugenia. I loved BeOS. I started using it in late 1999. I was just about the biggest Be advocate you could find (I was so proud when I bought the bundle of the BeOS Bible and BeOS 5.0!). Very sad when they closed doors.
I’ve always been a huge OS nut, which probably explains the current project I’m working on.
Still happy with my R5 but sad the BeOS story is over
Still happy with my R5 but sad the BeOS story is over
Well, I’m not sure if the story is over… I’m a post-focus-shift BeOS fan, so… If there are still people switching to the Be…
Cut it out you guys! 8|
I have 3 computers at home:
Mac G4 running OS X, Homemade PC running Fedora Core 2 and of course, a Homemade PC with both R4.5.2 and R5.0.3.
Been using BeOS since 1997-1998-ish (I have a copy of “Preview Release 2” lying around somewhere – I think it was R4) off and on (more on). Best OS ever! Really, I mean it. The BEST. It just works and it does it in a logical, intuitive way.
Mike
BeOS is and always will be an absolute Legend. Nothing comes close – and I think the major reason is the sense of humour incorporated into both the apps (Poof! anyone?) and the API – no my computer isn’t on
Eugenia; As you pointed out, there are forum threads and other resources available, for researching the multi-threading issues with BeOS. But, being somewhat lazy, and not sure if I would understand the discussion, anyway, what’s your take on the crux of the problem? Is it programmers not implementing multi-threading properly, or the OS not handling the multi-threaded app? I’ve gathered that there are aspects of the OS that could be improved, but is it anything that a few billion dollars in R&D couldn’t solve?
I still love BeOS and use it as my primary OS. almost never crashes and always runs fast. I had it lockup yesterday for the first time in months and that was because I was using alpha quality FS drivers
Long Live BeOS!!
I joined as a developer enthusiast back in 1996. In fact I’ve kept those emails. I was so excited about being apart of something so new a fresh. It was fun to boot an OS off of a 100MB ZIP disk!
One of the first things I noticed was how creative the “about box” was for each app. And it kinda became the signature to the app and the team. It’s creative and shows a side of freedom I hadn’t seen anywhere else.
Memories <sigh>
Anyone knows what happened to him?
Phil
The kernel handled multithreading pretty well. Not everything was perfect, but the issues were well-understood and were to be taken care of if Be had continued to focus on it (I can remember the issues of the giant semaphore spinlock, the giant vm lock, the giant loader lock and the single-threaded psycho_killer). One of the other Be kernel engineers implemented his own kernel on his spare time to experiment with solutions for some those problems, I remember discussing those quite a lot since we were living in the same house at the time (sharing houses was fairly common among Be engineers). The only other thing I’d have liked to see would have been an explicit mutex (as opposed to a semaphore) so that the scheduler could inplement priority inheritance, but once again there wasn’t any fundamental issues that prevented from doing that.
There were a few issues with the way some user-space code used threading. One of them was related to the messaging code (BMessenger and BLooper), which by default gave developers lots of opportunities for deadlocks or lost messages. Another one was that the part of a BWindow that communicated with the app_server used exactly the same lock as the BLooper part of the same BWindow, causing lots of pain when porting software from other OSes. Worse, either of those issues could have been taken care of by developers (maybe with a bit of covoluted code), but the way they interacted caused lots and lots of problems, which (just like any threading issues) were often extremely hard to diagnose and/or reproduce. Even worse, solutions for those problems weren’t straightforward to implement if Be wanted to maintain backward compatibility *and* and easy migration path for existing code.
Take all that with a grain of salt, I haven’t really written any code for BeOS for approximately 5 years (my last 15-months-or-so at Be were mostly spent re-writing the Makefile system, which I was and am very proud of).
Read the article, follow the link under his name. He works at a VC.
If they’d open-sourced it Beos would still be going strong. And probably Be Inc. too.
Eugenia: In the article you claim that the AT&T Hobbit CPU’s were DSP’s, which is nothing further from the truth. The Hobbit’s were full fledged CPUs in fact they were designed to support HLL’s such as C since they were stack based and had almost no user visible registers. As such the ISA was tuned for compiler designers and not for math intensive apps like a normal DSP would. It makes little sense to use a DSP as the CPU for a general purpose computer anyways
Between my new G5 OSX box, and my P4 w/a gig of ram, I don’t have a PC capable of running BeOS any longer (as far as a primary PC is concerned. The PC’s I own that can run it are waiting to be sold or given away).
Maybe some day one of the BeOS derivitaves will allow me to run it on my newer hardware, but until then, the OS is dead to me. 8(
Which is ok… Competing OS’s have caught up and passed BeOS a long time ago.
Now if Zeta can run on my current systems, I’ll give it a try, but the last I heard is that they’re bogged down by the same limitations of the original Be. And for that matter, they still haven’t came clean on whether they own the source to the kernel or not (which is needed if they hope to support newer systems & technologies). Last I heard they’re still alluding to them having the source, without saying one way or the other, and without doing anything which would indicate they do. Kinda sad really…
I remember back in ’99 i was looking on the internet about something else than Linux, i simply type OS and found the Be’s website.
I read all the specification of BeOS, saw thoses beautiful screenshot.. and i was already in ‘love’, i quickly bought The R4.5. Sadly, my video card was unsupported but i was amazed by all the capabilities, i changed my card few days alfter and BeOS was my primary OS.
I’ve advocate BeOS so much, BeNews was obviously my homepage, i even browse with the crappy port of Opera 3.6.2 during months.. I’ve support financially Be,inc and still believe the switch wasn’t a fault.
Well, you all know what’s happen alfter, i’am still ‘tear off’ on the inside.
Gratefully to yT, i’am back with Zeta, even though it’s not my primary OS, i still feel the BeOS spirit and i know some guys are doing a remarkable work to bring it back with OpenBeOS, i’am sure it’ll be even better.
Thanks indeed to the Be’s engineers, to JLG, to Steve Sakoman, to yT, to all the guys on OpenBeOS well to all people commit to this feeling.
I remember back in 1999, I had just started playing with Linux and decided to get adventurous. Sometime in early 2000, I don’t remember how I had even heard of BeOS, but I downloaded it (I still called it “Bee-Ose” back then), and within an hour, had it on my NT4 domain talking to shares. It was such a joy – so easy to use, so fast, so perfectly useful. I immediately loaded it as the main OS on my home PC. I wrote every post-graduate paper of my life in Gobe Productive.
I starting hanging out in comp.os.beos from time to time. Who can forget the USENET spamming troll, Bob. Eventually, someone helped me fix a few problems. Within a year or two, she’d invite me to become an editor on her new site, OSNews.
It is pretty interesting how the BeOS community was tight, as compared to some of the other, larger communities. You could always count on getting help if you had a problem. More than anything, it really was special – it sucks that that piece of it is gone.
>porting a very-very well known pro audio application for BeOS (that I can’t mention >’cause of NDA reasons) that was never shipped in 1998-9 (it was among these >”big”, well known apps that Be managed to get the source code or contracts to get >ported, but they never got shipped for different reasons each).
-During that period it was rumored that both Steinberg’s Cubase and
Emagic’s Logic Audio were being ported to BeOS.
Also there were quite a few open-source audio programs awaiting
porting, but that was more or less stopped when Be decided to move
its OS into the ‘internet utilities’ direction…
AvS
It was great! … of all the OS I have used, BeOS will always
be the one I loved the most …. Many kudo/mahalo to all the
folks at Be for the hard work and the great quality they put
into there product.
Eugenia, thanks for remembering us of this bday … caught in
so many things most of us will have forgotten … 🙁 (Nice
article BTW …)
Hi Adam,
You think the BeOS community was tight ??? Come see the QNX’s
one !!!
… It’s so tight you will only need an uint8 to
store that number 😉
jl
quite late (2000 i think), after reading an article Eugenia wrote for the PAIN demoscene diskmag about the benefits of using BeOS to write demos. I was impressed with what I read and downloaded a copy of R5 from Be.com and was one of the lucky few where everything worked out of the box (modex, graphics, everything). A month later and I bought GoBe Productive and BeOS 5 from gobe.
I only wish I had found out about it sooner as I just managed to catch the dieing gasps.
Happy Birthday BeOS.
If it hadn’t been for BeOS and BeNews, I never would have found OSNews!
I remember trying two different versions of BeOS. The first one I ordered directly from the company on a cheap promotion. I don’t remember if it was R4 or what. Unfortunately my hardware didn’t support it so I couldn’t run it. I kept promising myself that I would upgrade and build a compatible box, but I never did.
A year or two later, R5 came out and I got it on a coverdisk. I had change my CPU, so I could get it to work but only in black and white. I found the VESA driver on BeBits and I was able to get it to work properly.
Anyway, coming from an Amiga background I always thought that BeOS was the successor to the Amiga.
Back to 99 i bought R4 and, for my surprise, i received R4.5 in my door for free!
Then i had some problem that i can’t remember right now and BGA said to me “Write them”. So i did and i was surprised again because they actually answered my e-mail in the same day! ;D
We can’t find that easily nowadays…
(confession) i still watch “BeOS_DemoVideo_20minutes.mpg” from time to time (/confession)
Many thanks for you all who helped (and are still helping) to keep BeOS alive =)
—
François Vincent
http://www.bug-br.org.br
Hi Francois,
Do you know where I can download that video ? 🙂
Thanks.
jean-louis
Linux just isn’t the same
I tell you, I truly believed in BeOS as the One True OS. I don’t care how ‘niche’ it was, if Be was still updating it, I’d still be using it, and developing for it.
I discovered and first installed the BeOS when 5PE was released. It was my only workstation OS until about 6 months after Be went to Palm. It was quirky at times and the apps weren’t all there, but it didn’t matter – it was so pleasant to use something so much closer to perfection than anything I’d seen before.
I’m a fulltime GNOME user now, and while 2.6 is quite pretty and Nautilus has improved tremendously (yay spatial mode!), the “feel” just can’t compete. BeOS was truly ahead of its time.
Eugenia, thanks for the article – it brought back a lot of good memories. Please continue to fire messages at the GNOME community on the mailing lists – most every time I have an issue with something, I check the archives and find you’ve already taken it up with the developers. If we can just get them to do a BeOS-style file type control panel…
I too adored BeOS .. I was awfully young (12) when I started to tinker with it, it was the first non-windows OS I had ever heard of, I utterly enjoyed all the years I spent with it
.
I really should try Zeta sometimes ..
I’m gettin’ all emotional an’ shit.
It is funny how companies like Bugatti and Lamborghini (sp?) can stick around, selling just a handfull of products per year. Mind you, I’m not comparing BeOS to a super car, but I guess there really isn’t a place in the computing market for a niche desktop platform. It would be wonderful if there was as much choice and variety in operating systems as there is in the auto market.
Ten years, am I really that old? Be was really my favorite operating system for a long, long time. I started recieving Be cds at the PR1 stage, and was a registered developer in college (though I never really produced much).
My favorite BeOS memory:
One time I was testing out a custom app I had written (in PR2?). There was some kind of GPF or some such bug in my code which caused the app to crash. I had been running from the command line, and on std out came the following messge:
“Oh f*ck. You should never ever be here.”
I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. I never had an OS swear at me before, and I never have since.
Good times.
Sorry, couldn’t resist…[/MS-bashing]
Suck it up, people! No more sniveling… It ain’t dead!
To quote Rambo: “Nothing is over!!! Nothing!!! You just don’t turn it off! It wasn’t my war! You asked me, I didn’t ask you! And I did what I had to do to win! But somebody wouldn’t let us win!”[/JLG-bashing][/ok-really-no-more-MS-bashing]
Happy Be-day!
Eric
Melancholy indeed. Reminds me that I should be spending more time on IRC with the people that I met back in those days.
Thanks Eugenia – I really appreciate the contribution that you have made to the community these past years.
I just wish that I had a bit more time to make some more useful applications, and perhaps a bit more journalistic work than I did. Alas, those days are gone. Kudos to everyone at Be for making a great OS, and giving me some memorable years during university. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Zeta…
Here’s my first contact with Be: Nuts&Volts-Jan96
http://www.nutsvolts.com/toc_Pages/jun96toc.htm
I think there was a centerfold…I was smitten.
Eric
can be found here :
http://perso.local/~ludo/beos/112594/
Those are the images of the floppies Ralf got while at mipsys. Hub got the disk when ralf moved to the us, he made the images because I broke the disk inside my hobbit powered bebox. The screen shots foudn around the internet of that early shark beos where the ones from that bebox they where taken at a geektea by Sebastien Bouchex, hub and me when we booted the machine.
Ludo
the url is
http://perso.hirlimann.net/~ludo/beos/112594/
was in late 1999 when I was running BeOS 5 Personal from with Windows. What I remember most was getting incredibily high frame rates per second, higher than anyting on any other OS I had used at the time, on an OS that I believe wasn’t using GPU assistance (I could be mistaken).
>was in late 1999 when I was running BeOS 5 Personal from with Windows
BeOS 5 PE was released on March 2000
>was in late 1999 when I was running BeOS 5 Personal from with Windows
BeOS 5 PE was released on March 2000
Yeah, I was just going to double that :S
😀
Hello Jean-Louis,
I got this link from Bebits (http://bebits.com/app/2704):
http://bebits.com/bob/16900/beos_demovideo.mpg
There’s a VCD too, but the link doesn’t work.
You can find that video and a lot more on eMule. Look for “BeOSVideo”. There’s one very cool from someone who went visit Be, Inc. and they showed him BeIA. It’s called “Inside Be, Inc and BeIA footage”. Enjoy
—
François Vincent
http://www.bug-br.org.br
You’ve brought a tear to my eye, Eugenia. You’ve really summarized the love we all feel for BeOS. I’m going to read this article to my grandkids someday
Hey, does anyone else have any stories about the good old days that you’d like to share? I’m thinking about writing a book about be, kind of in the same spirit of “the pirates of silicone valley”. If I can get enough people to share their stories, this could be a reality. Please email me if your at all intested, you can click on my name to get it.
I had some Be shares left, never sold them. It so happens that they were paid out this week @ 58 ¢ each! Curiously I in addition got one Be escrow share for each Be Inc share – would there be more to come from the liquidation?
A memorial service would be a more fitting analogy…
Thanks for the nice article, Eugenia. Some nice new info in there for me.
It’s funny how big a deal was made out of the modifier key. I really don’t think it’s such a big deal. I have a second or two of discomfort when I move from one OS to the other (Mac/BeOS or Windows) before the appropriate habits kick in. No big deal.
I will always have a special feeling for BeOS, even though I don’t use it much these days, with my focusing on media work. Though I do use it 100% for writing (which I hope to focus on some more before WalterCon in case anyone asks me for a work in progress on the User Experience Guide).
I started with BeOS at a beta of 3.1 for Intel. JLG sent it to me after I emailed him about my interest in BeOS (I learned about it through the fading Apple-buyout talks). BeOS’s lack of SCSI support kept me from using it (all my drives are SCSI). Ah… to have someone at that level be interested in your interest in their product. That’s so nice! Those were the days indeed.
Best hopes for OpenBeOS. I also harbor a little hope that something useful comes from yellowTAB, too 🙂
I didn’t start using BeOS until 4.5 but the only reason I started was because I found an old DR7 (?) cd in my new desk so I want to the web site and read those icon stories and I was so impressed that I bought the BeOS bible and would read it for ages waiting for the next version to come out. Then when 4.5 came out I bought it and loved every minute of it. One day I will return to it though, I am sure I will!
Happy Birthday BeOS and thank you for showing me that OSs can be fun and very powerful too!
It was so nice back then. I remember me and my friends had removable HDD’s. So when we visited eachother we just inserted our private BeOS disk in a friends PC and restarted it. Everything worked without one singel question or mockup, Despite the fact that we all had different hardware.
“according to many engineers, the best version of BeOS ever released — for its time” – that would be compared to the other versions released — in its time? Perhaps the most backhanded uncompliment I’ve read in a while.
There is nothing “backhanded” about it. Many ex-Be engineers agree that the best version of BeOS released was 4.5.2. It had the most hardware support for its time (second half of 1999) and it was stabler than 5.0. Of course, it was not as feature-rich as 5.0 was, but the overall satisfaction-meter was better than 5.0.
I started using Be R4.5.2 in Jan. 2000. It absolutely blew me away. I had been pulling my hair out trying to figure out Linux. I’m surprised I did not hear about Be before. In 1998 I was working at a company that was designing HP motherboards, and were required to test with about every commercial OS known. I remember talking to engineers about Next, SCO Unix / x86, OS/2, etc. But not BeOS.
Years later, I’m still a fanatic. Still try do write code for it. Theres still a huge following. Drivers are still being released. Patches written, etc. Still runs on all my current hardware. Software is coming very slow for it these days, but I still enjoy it. I have a PowerMac dual-G4 and a PS2 that fill the void that BeOS doesn’t quite fill.
It seems to be Be made the focus shift right when they were getting noticed for the years of work they did. I wonder if staying private would have changed the outcome.
I started using BeOS after using Linux. I was amazed by the fact that I could Dump Hardware Drivers and Addons in either /Boot/BeOS/system/Addons or /boot/home/config/Addons (IIRC) and the drivers would work appropriately. These two Addon Directories, and the Directory Structure enclosed were identical (except for the files contained in each. It was just the Way it aught to be. It was simple; put that there and immediately, it works. No Rebooting, no Kernel Recompilations, It just worked.
I remember creating a custom FileType image/x-comic which i would assign to my Archive of Online Comics, which had metadata support for Artist, Inker, Writer, etc etc.
I remember that my TV Tuner card still worked in BeOS long after the Windows Drivers were no longer available, and when BTTV-on-linux wouldn’t recognise it.
I remember playing Corum III, using Portishead as the Background Music.
I remember Chatting about Politics, Technology and Music for hours with people on BeShare. Music which wasn’t available anywhere else was available on BeShare.
I remember accidently opening all 27-tracks of an album up in SoundPlay at once, (rather than adding them to a playlist) and have SoundPlay play all the songs at the same time, without any complaints, on my K6-2/450.
Then I remember finally giving in an Buying an iBook, on advice from Scot Hacker, and thinking “It’ll do for now.”
I’d like to relive those Memories again. What is the most Powerful Computer on which I could run Vanilla BeOS R5.03? I presume it would be a Quad P3-Xeon with 1Gb RAM, a Yamaha or TurtleBeach SoundCard and a Matrox G500 dual-head Video Card…
You are correct on the Xeon and the sound card (get an old version or get the Yamaha YMF-754 with the driver from BeBits), but 1 GB is too much for BeOS. To be on the safe side and avoid random KDLs, make sure you don’t have more than 512 or 768 MB of RAM maximum.
Also, the Matrox G500 won’t work on a vanilla BeOS. Get either an AGP or PCI Voodoo4 or a TNT2 (BeOS doesn’t support the AGP functionality, it works with it in PCI emulation mode, so it doesn’t matter if the card is a PCI or an AGP). Unfortunately the Matrox G200/G400 BeOS driver has bugs.
I haven’t run BeOS for a couple of years now, though it was certainly the core of my technical life for half a decade. Recently dusted off my old laptop (an early generation dell pentium, 64MBs) and booted Win2K. It was so slow I simply could not use it. All I really needed was a shell and a text editor for the day, so I booted its BeOS partition for the first time in a long time and was amazed all over again. The exact same hardware, but the OS was easily 10x faster. Such a treat. I’m committed to OS X these days, and mostly love it, but will alwasy consider BeOS my only OS “tru luv”. Thanks for the memory walk, Eugenia.
Just got my settlment money US$406.00 for 700 shares of Be Inc.
Love and money don’t mix well 🙁
Still using BeOS for security reasons, internet browsing and e -mail 🙂
Thanks Be people !
Don
Eugenia, the “backhanded” part is a sarcastic comment on the confused syntax. You attempt to praise version 4.5.2 but modify that with “in its time.” As I said in the original comment, that would make it the best version of BeOS released in September 1999. Care to tell me what other versions were released in Sept. ’99? You realize that you’re implying that there were multiple versions of the same OS released at the same time?
The “for its time” means “around its time” not “Sep 1999”. So, between 1998 and 2000, there was R3, R4, R4.5 and R5. And from all these, R4.5.2 was the best — comperatively to each season’s hardware and stability.
I loved beos, but on the PPC environment. I even had a web page about it with screenshots of the 4 CPU macintosh that it was running on.
Anyhow, I had read about the fact that on the first friday of every month, BE had an open house at 800 el camino where their offices were (and where they throw the screens off the roof in the beos demo folder movie). Except that their offices are in Melno park, and I was in Roseville at about 2pm. Without traffic it would have been fine, but its Friday remember? I am from Montreal, so travelling to California does not happen all the time
Anyhow, I am driving like a madman, knowing I would only get one shot at this. I took the reserved lanes (even if I was the only person in the car). I was cutting off people. I raced to the office. It was 5:45pm and I am still not there. The rental car engine is red hot. I didn’t see the speedbumps in the back parking of their offices until too late. OOPS!
Anyhow, I rush in through the back door, and who do I literally run into? JLG of course. A fellow Frenchman, I start a panting conversation in french, which he politely continues and then excuses himself from. Off he goes in his black BMW.
I rush upstairs, and the tour is finished, but there is an open session and a QA roundtable. Because I was more interested in the PPC architecture than the intel one, I ask a tall fair haired BE employee, that certainly there must be a imac in the office somewhere that you have unofficially ported beos to, but cannot release right? He smiled and said to me “Whatever gave you that idea?”.
Still apps each day on bebits.com
yeah, new 1gbit NIC driver, a new version of open transport tycoon, a GO game and a new version of relauncher_daemon added just today. Be developement is still pretty active.
I was ready to leave AmigaOS to BeOS (“Amiga 94” like said JLG).
I bought a powerfull (at the time) dual PPC 604 mac clone. The OS is a masterpiece but unfortunately BeOS did not offer as much application as my Amiga did. So I ended up using more my Amiga than BeOS. Then it was the end of the road for the PPC version. Since then the PPC clone has been running Linux and later OSX.
Unfortunately it looks that the best designed products always fail vs the mediocre products.
This is why most people end up on PCs with windows …
I still use BeOS on an almost daily basis. I use Windows out of necessity at work – we develop Windows only apps – but at home it’s BeOS.
However, I’ve been playing with BeIA a bit 😉 I have an old P200MMX running BeIA 1.0RC and am posting this using Wagner… BeIA rocks (for an IA OS)… Maybe OS news would like an article on it?
Sure, write one out and include a few shots too.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=168
> (I have a copy of “Preview Release 2” lying around somewhere – I think it was R4)
Nope – PR2 was the last PPC-only BeOS release. It worked (like DR8, DR9 & PR – forgive me if I missed one here) on post-Nubus PowerMacs (later than 6100, etc), and BeBoxen.
Then came R3 (The first x86 release), and then R4.
Matt.
PR2 was indeed PPC only (though there was an internal Be version for Intel which was basically unreleasable due to the fact that shared library support was missing and all exes were statically linked to all libs they needed – the install base was “massive” because of this..)
PR2 is a pretty stable OS. It’s pre-movable tabs (they came in R3 or R4 I guess), it still uses “disks” instad of mounting voulumes on the desktop, and the tabs themselves exhibit the starange “Apple MacOS Classic”-esque habbit of becoming flat and losing all definition except the title when they loose focus. In other words, for example, the zoom and close buttons dissapear)
The confusion with PR2 and R4 probably arises from the fact that PR2 was still on the CD given with the O’Reilly BeOS Developers Guide, even though R4 was the current version. I remember seeing written on a copy (in a Borders in Oxford St., London) something to this effect – even though I now own 2 copies of this book and neither mentions this.. lol.
@Eugenia… I’ll see what I can come up with… Screen shots are no problem… att+PrintScreen works just the same under Wagner 😉
I bought R5 Pro and used it for a year or two, and it was such a step up from Windows that it is hard to imagine for someone who’s never tried it.
The instant search results, the file attributes, and the responsive GUI was bliss. I curse Windows every time it locks up my GUI to do something in the background, since now I know that there is no reason for it, but stupidity.
Anyway, I remember having to leave it because I got a GeForce card, and there weren’t any drivers at the time. Dual booting with Windows to get access to Photoshop had also become rather tiresome (no matter what graphical applications BeOS has, Photoshop is Photoshop, and I simply can’t work without it).
Ahhh… trying to find that screen shot of pulse running on an 8 processor system. I know it existed…
I had been hearing about BeOS and built a machine for it in January of 99. I keep a system log on paper and I have these notes for my upgrade to BeOS 4.5 June 19th of 99, “10 minutes to install – 12 minutes to back in business”.
One of my amazing experiences with BeOS was when I upgraded to a dual processor motherboard. I basically built a new system with the exception of the hard drive. I powered up the system with all new hardware (but the HD) and up she booted and recognized both processors. I was stunned with the robustness. From that point I was hooked on BeOS.
I run it full time at home today on a P4 3Ghz. No virus updates and it just runs and runs. The BeOS community is still strong and seems to be even growing a bit.
Windows at work is tedious yet BeOS still gives me a kick.
Yes, I can attest to the 8 processor system running since I saw the pictures and read the story when it came about.
http://qube.ru/gallery/item/beos_r45_on_eight_ip3_550mhz_2/
http://qube.ru/gallery/item/beos_r45_on_eight_ip3_550mhz_1/
http://qube.ru/gallery/item/beos_r5_pe_on_six_ip_pro_200mhz/
at all – http://qube.ru/gallery – recommended.
btw, that Hobbit screenshot was initialy taken from there
thanks for this nice article!
i was using beos since version R5 was released. in my opinion the beos is indeed a kind of a very special os. creating programs for the beos was just completely different from programming for windows, linux or dos (in former times 😉
i hope that there will be at least another 10 years for the beos (openbeos/zeta)!
maurice
I plan on setting up an 450mhz p3 x8 cpu system soon. already have the cpus.. gotta get a mobo
Beos had so many good technical ideas. Today, still, with a machine capable of a _billion_ operation a second, I can still cause my audio file playback to stutter by dragging windows/menus. I guess people just want to run Office and print things.
Before the BeOS went with their ‘BeOS runs on refrigerators and toasters only’ push, they had a real chance of establishing themselves as the solution for audio related creative work…. sigh.. Oh well.
I understand that Be needed VC money, and the only money available at the time was from VC investors who wanted one thing only – the “internet applicance”.
That whole internet applicance thing sure has taken off. :/
Sadly, I have too much computer equipment, so if anyone is interested in obtaining an original BeBox….
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5100264540
I really wish Be was still around.
I have never used BeOS (due to age), but I really want to get the chance.
I have grown up in the age of The internet, Intel Pentiums, and Microsoft. Although its cool, i wish i could go back to where it all began….
Good luck to you all!
Ahh, remember it all well.
what would mac os x BE today if apple inc when with be os rather than next?
i would imagine os x would BE even better suited for apple’s current niche. jobs could have bought be inc for $12 million.
I own h0bb1t #39