BeOS was such an amazing experience back in the day. It really felt magical. Too bad it got shutdown. I wonder what the evolution of it would be like today

▲

eightman 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

	▲	AlecSchueler an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I love Haiku but I feel it's quite different than where BeOS would be today had BeOS continued to exist. In that alternative world there might have been considerably more influence from BeOS going into the rest of the industry much sooner, and that effect could have snowballed.

▲

silisili 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My first memory of BeOS was that it could play media independently. You could play a video in one window, and an MP3 or another video in another, and they'd both play audio at the same time.

I don't know exactly why, but child me thought that was so interesting, since every other OS at the time seemed unable to.

▲

pjmlp an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For me it felt like it was going to be my next Amiga, in kind of experience, something that GNU/Linux never did it to me, where CLI reigns and multimedia was always looked down upon, Windows and Mac OS weren't quite there as well.

Another cool one that was around was QNX.

▲

setopt 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If I recall directly, Apple was between buying BeOS and NeXT. Would be interesting what would have happened if they went the Be route instead of the Unix route. (But given that MacOS and BeOS were both fringe at the time, perhaps they would just have gone bankrupt…)

	▲	ab5tract an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Considering that Steve Jobs came with NeXT, the general consensus has been that their recovery would not have been nearly as significant. The real what-if for me is pondering what might have been had HP and other vendors not caved to the Wintel cartel in abandoning their plans to include BeOS as a preinstalled OEM option. Microsoft was sued by Be in civil court and Be won their case, but it was too little too late.
	▲	panick21_ 42 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think at the time everybody agree that BeOS would need a whole lot more work put into it compared to NeXT. That said it still took a huge amount of work to evolve NeXT to OSX. So I can well imagine Apple fucking this up and getting aquired.

▲

ErroneousBosh 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can pretty much just use Haiku as a daily driver these days, if your demands aren't too great. It runs really well on older hardware too.

And of course you can just spin it up in a VM if you only want to play a bit.

▲

innocentoldguy an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I just found my BeOS 5 and BeProductive CDs from the late 90s. I wish I had something to run them on.