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A quick look back at BeOS, the PC operating system that tried to challenge Windows and Mac (www.neowin.net)

submitted 10 months ago by d3Xt3r to c/retrocomputing@lemmy.sdf.org

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[–] Stupidmanager@lemmy.world 25 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

This was a decent OS, came about in BeOS 5 when they started to run on intel. Just lacked apps. at least OS/4 Warp could run Windows apps, this was just a brand new OS with nothing yet. Shame it died out, but you can run an inspired version of it called Haiku.

[–] d3Xt3r 18 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Yep. I ran it on my 450MHz Pentium III back in the day - was incredibly fast and felt so ahead of it's time, especially it's multimedia and multitasking performance, as well as the fast boot speeds. It was my second favorite OS back then.

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

As it was explained to me, it could do full-motion video almost 30 years ago, it could switch around analog signals like cable TV and put them on screen in an app, it had ports for hardware hacking that you could control more low-level and directly. It was just better, by quite a lot. And Microsoft and network effects conspired to kill it before it got rooted and so it got thrown out with the trash.

[–] doubletwist@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Not only could it do full motion video, but it could, on a 200Mhz Pentium MMX CPU, rotate an OpenGL cube on any axis with a different video running on all six sides, and do so smoothly and without any lag or video stuttering. It was incredible what they were able to do back then. Hell I'm not entirely convinced Windows could pull that off now!

[–] wjrii@kbin.social 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I recall rumors that when it came to version 10 of Mac OS, Apple knew they needed outside help, and the choice came down to BeOS on the one hand, or NeXT (including ol' Stevie J) on the other.

[–] thehatfox@lemmy.world 10 points 9 months ago

Apple was negotiating to buy Be, but they couldn’t agree on a price. The rumours were that Be was asking too much.

The Apple board also favoured NeXT, and the rest is history.

[–] TheWilliamist@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago

I probably had some form of that at the time and was amazed that it could play two audio sources at the same time as well as have multiple running videos.

[–] stratosfear@lemmy.sdf.org -1 points 9 months ago

There was actually 2 * more warp than that....

I'll see myself out...