BeOS Demo Video (1998) [video]

I was lucky enough to have a friend working at BeOS at the very end. This is when they abandoned all hope of getting bought by Apple (erm... I mean gaining presence on the desktop) and focused on "Internet Appliances" like eVilla.

BeOS was really amazing at the time, especially in comparison to 'next generation OSes' like Windows NT, the vaporware that was Copland, Linux (which was unusable for mortals) or Solaris. It was clear to me that the future was going to look like BeOS or NeXT, but I could actually easily download and run BeOS on my mac. It was incredibly useable... I installed it and was able to use it for months. It just needed apps.

When Apple went with Jobs (and thus NeXT) I thought that made sense. But when I saw the early releases of Rhapsody I really thought they had made a huge mistake. BeOS was just so much better.

It's really fun to fantasize about what the world would have been like if BeOS made it big. There's still a lot of tech there that has not yet made it into desktop OSes.

For anyone who is prone to ignore vertical dynamics, keep in mind that this OS was competing with Mac OS 8, Windows 98, and GNU/Linux in the Lesstif/GNOME 1.x era. In short, it trumped all the rest in speed, development environment, multimedia, stability...

But the Wintel cartel was stronger than ever. Microsoft even settled with Be years afterwards for colluding to keep their OS off of any vendor computers. But that can't ever commit backwards into history what computing would be like if the best OS at the time had been given a fair shake.

I remember installing BeOS a long time ago, when I was fiddling with old linux distros which were almost impossible to install (what is the model of your RAMDAC? which is your interrupt controller? manually configure your modem!)

I was absolutely amazed at the ease of install, running the software and the powerful GUI. I even ran it for some months as my only OS, since it had a web browser and e-mail client and the dialup config was very straightforward.

After that time, I started missing a lot of software, especially browser updates, so I tried linux again and found that it had improved a bit, so I stuck with it.

But I'll never forget how probably the best OS at that time failed into misery for the lack of software and a bit of promotion.

In early 2008, having graduated from college the year before, I was living in the midwest working at a company making warehouse management software. I decided I really wanted to work at Be. I sent them my resume for a position that was posted (I think I actually snail mailed it). I called the recruiter and she politely informed me that I wasn't qualified for it. Shortly after, I saw another position posted and applied again. Over the next 7 months, I continued to bug the recruiter regularly until someone finally broke down and gave me an interview. I bought a new suit just for it. When I showed up to interview, an engineer walked in with long hair and ripped up jeans.

I ended up getting the job and worked there through the end of 2000. Even though it ended up imploding, it was a great experience. I learned an incredible amount and I'm still friends with a bunch of people I met there. Many of the people from Be ended up at Android.

I found my BeOS install CD and floppy the other day.

I never really had hardware that could really use something like BeOS back then.

If you liked this then you should consider supporting the Haiku project. They are keeping BeOS alive.

https://www.haiku-os.org/

I'm wondering though if anyone here can speak to how much C++ was used in writing the kernel? I've heard multiple stories...some say that all of it was very OO, some say it was C with classes kind of stuff.

If you like BeOS, you should check out Haiku which is an open-source OS inspired by BeOS [0].

[0] https://www.haiku-os.org/

I ran BeOS for almost a year around that time. I remember it as fairly stable and packed with neat little features that made it feel lean and modern. Then I started to get disappointed that the community didn't seem to be growing fast enough... It felt a bit like computing while stranded on a desert island

This video always makes me wish Apple would have bought Be, Inc. instead of NeXT. The BeOS was much more interesting than NeXTSTEP!

Ah the nostalgia. In 1999 I was a sophomore in college and built my first PC that was all my own. I used the legendary Abit BP6 Motherboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6 I had a pair of Socket 370 Celeron 366a processors overclocked to 100mhz, which made the system think it had a pair of P3 550mhz cpus.

BeOS was a great OS for experimenting SMP. The CPU monitor in the video would show you the loads for each CPU and you could click the left side to toggle a CPU on and off. You could immediately see frame rates drop and the remaining cpu's usage spike.

I had an original BeBox, which I upgraded to the faster CPUs when available. I bought the BeOS team a case of champagne when they shipped a major release.

I'm happy Apple bought NeXT.

Ah this brings back memories! I happened to go to the Be developer conference back in summer 1996 - didn't know anyone, wasn't even a developer, just a curious high schooler interning at a mac user group down in LA. Hopped on an airplane alone to come out to San Jose because why not?

I remember talking to some Apple exec sitting next to me in the presentation room as some Be people finished their speech. I asked about their prospects and he said something like 'yeah its been tough for us but Gil Amelio is going to turn things around'. Gil had just joined as CEO back in February. I remember thinking that the guy didn't sound like he really believed what he was saying though - there was a a certain resignation, or just a moment where he didn't feel he had to keep the 'everythings great' performance up for a high school kid. After the NeXT acquisition I remember thinking about this guy and that he probably didn't have a job anymore. Who knows, maybe that was actually Jonny Ive.

At the conference there was a whole group of Apple people checking things out and talking to everyone. I don't remember if it was public knowledge that they were negotiating with Be at the time, but it was no secret why they were there. There was a lot of excitement among the developers there, but also a lot of trepidation - there was just loose talk of being useful for really specialized AV fields but no path or believable / clear idea of how this could go to mass market. Even a 15 year old knew that. Plus, Microsoft was unstoppable back then. A fair amount of talk among the devs was about how this could be the next Apple OS, and I think that's what excited people. But everything hinged on acquisition.

Afterwards I think I exchanged a few emails with Dominic, because I was interested in BeFS. I didn't really know how to talk to him so I think I just offered him access to my mp3 server. Meanwhile when I got back to the mac user group, I installed the developer preview CD on some PowerComputing macs we had and they just transformed into beasts. BeOS was otherworldly, using it felt like you were 5 years in the future but in an alternative universe (full of tiny yellow title bars). Because all of the apps were just apps to show off Be's capabilities, it was also vaguely reminiscent of the 90s demoscene, with Be one-upping Future Crew by dropping an entire OS.

History shows NeXT was the right move. But Be... they were something special.

OMG brings back memories and makes me sad at same time it failed to gain ground. I was a BIG BeOS fan. In fact I'd probably be able to dig up from my storage the actual purchased BeOS package and the "The BeOS Bible" book I bought too. It was the "Opera Browser" of operating systems at the time to me. Lightweight, nimble, fast and just completely felt it was well thought out by brilliant engineers that weren't tied down to legacy.

I remember pitching it to my co-workers and praising its ability to still play multiple movies smoothly in a dragging window even with other tasks running in the background, which at the time was really cool considering same hardware Windows/Linux could not. And to this day, it had my favorite all-time newsreader (can't remember the name but it was threaded news that used multiple windows)

In the end, it just didn't the apps and the world was Microsoft centric and this thing called "Linux" was the buzz, along with Apple gaining ground.

Wow, I haven't seen this video in a long time.

Buying a BeBox was one of the best things I ever did. I took out a loan for about $2,000 from my bank to get one and start writing apps. Not a lot materialized out of it financially but the experience was invaluable. I met a lot of people from the community that I still chat with to this day.

Be, Inc had some really good ideas.

BeOS is a good example why if you're already big you can be proprietary but if you're small it's better to release as open source (when there are big players in the market.)

If BeOS had simply released its source early on it might still be very much alive and healthy today. Given that it achieved on the desktop what Linux still has not, it might have bested Linux in at least the desktop arena. It's main mistake was trying to make it in the proprietary OS market, up against both Microsoft and Apple. Certainly after Apple had failed to buy BeOS, their next best bet was transform BeOS into a GPL or BSD-licensed project.

Now, we have Haiku OS, but it is a bit late, and can only ever be an approximation of the original experience / API.

When I was a kid I was running BeOS and it was really cool at the time.

I remember being impressed that the BeOS media player could play audio CDs backwards in real-time. Not really sure why you'd want to but it was quite a good party trick.

Is it time yet for a new OS that emphasizes immutability, security, concurrency and other functional-language paradigms?

I feel like even today, we are not seeing the true possible performance of our hardware due to all the "sediment layers" (as Jean-Louis Gassée put it) of our popular OS'es. We're also not seeing the possible reliability and security, either.

I feel the same watching this or Shawshank redemption. There's some lost beauty in it. Even BeOS source code / API was beautiful. I remember some code to query and filter FS results based on metadata, not far from a tiny SQL C++ eDSL.

At 13:00 he demonstrates positional audio. Whoever uploaded this to Youtube reversed the channels so the sound pans right when he moves the source to the left.

Twenty years later and why doesn't my computer come with a 3D mixer already?

Running BeOS on my Pentium II Celeron 333 MHz was pure joy. It's such a shame it didn't amount to more than it did.

That and OS/2.

This is the perfect example as to why we need to focus on the customer problem not the technical solution.

I remember that. I also remember all the excitement around it and then it fizzled.

Are current Linux distributions as good as this yet?