Discussion BeOS The forgotten 90's operating system.

[NeoMorpheus]

Interesting video explaining a bit of the history of BeOS and how it was killed by MS.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzosnPSETzk

 

[NeoMorpheus]

@bit_user Funny as we were talking about this.

 

[bit_user]

Don't forget about the BeBox. It helped popularize multi-CPU machines among the public, although I think multi-processor Pentium boards were already a thing. The BeBox was PowerPC-based, of course.

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It also had that 37-pin "Geek Port", which might be regarded as the spiritual predecessor to the Raspberry Pi's GPIO port.

And user-controllable "Blinkenlights" LED strips a couple decades before PCs started to dabble with configurable RGB.

 

[bit_user]

In the late 1990's (before Be even ceased operations), a friend of mine observed that maybe Linux killed BeOS. He thought that a lot of Amiga users would've naturally migrated to BeOS, except that it came along a few years too late. So, he guessed that most of them who didn't go to Windows had migrated to Linux, instead.

 

[NeoMorpheus]

Weird, never heard of that theory, about users moving to Linux.
I think that the real reason was pointed in the video.
MS was really scared and went all the way out to block them.
A While ago, I bumped into this:

GitHub - bbenchoff/Raspi-BeBox

Contribute to bbenchoff/Raspi-BeBox development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

But didn't do anything with it, especially that HaikuOS doesn't run on Pi (last time I checked).

I think that the HaikuOS guys are making a mistake in not embracing Pi, but I don't know their reasons.

 

[Rokinamerica]

Apple bought NeXT after BeOS and Apple could not agree to terms. That is how Jobs came back to Apple. That is when MS got involved.

 

[bit_user]

I think that the HaikuOS guys are making a mistake in not embracing Pi, but I don't know their reasons.[/B]

Writing a custom OS is a lot of work and supporting a different CPU ISA and system architecture is a heck of a lot more involved than just recompiling for it.

Porting to ARM might just be lower on their priority list, or maybe they have their eyes on RISC-V, instead.

 

[hotaru.hino]

I don't think you can't talk about BeOS and not share the original demo for the x86 version:

 

[NeoMorpheus]

Apple bought NeXT after BeOS and Apple could not agree to terms. That is how Jobs came back to Apple. That is when MS got involved.

Yeah, I mentioned that on the other thread.

But I think that apple was going to choose Next over Be because of Jobs and the price being to high was an excuse.

 

[NeoMorpheus]

Writing a custom OS is a lot of work and supporting a different CPU ISA and system architecture is a heck of a lot more involved than just recompiling for it.

Porting to ARM might just be lower on their priority list, or maybe they have their eyes on RISC-V, instead.

That might be the case but I do think that they should target Pi/ARM more, I think it's a good pairing.

I don't think you can't talk about BeOS and not share the original demo for the x86 version:

That being tears to my eyes.
RIP BeOS.

 

[bit_user]

That might be the case but I do think that they should target Pi/ARM more, I think it's a good pairing.

Agreed. I wasn't trying to take sides - it was just a random guess.

 

[NeoMorpheus]

Agreed. I wasn't trying to take sides - it was just a random guess.

I understood and yes, your response makes perfect sense.