| ▲ | BeBox is a Haiku application that emulates Be Inc.'s BeBox(github.com) |
| 80 points by rguiscard 15 hours ago | 27 comments |
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| ▲ | alberth 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I recall dual booting BeOS circa 1999/2000, on my 486dx2-66. It was shockingly performant, especially with anything graphical. The difficulty was no apps. Brings back fond memories, nonetheless. |
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| ▲ | throwaway270925 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > It was shockingly performant, especially with anything graphical. I had the same experience. Only few things came close since: QNX, my M1 MBP when it was new and a fresh MXLinux installation (no idea how they do it, maybe some low latency scheduler?) Those felt similarly instant GUI-wise as BeOS did, while unfortunately current MacOS and Win11 feel glacial compared to it. | |
| ▲ | MomsAVoxell 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There were a few apps, a word processor, a 3D modeling and rendering application, some media players, a basic DAW and so on .. but the web browser situation kind of wasn’t so great, and there were still holes in the OS where future features had been promised, a bit too long imho .. (Disclaimer: you can pry my still-functioning BeBox from my cold dead hands.. okay, I admit, I only use it a couple times a year just to be sure it still boots..) | | |
| ▲ | JKCalhoun 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I've been told that, circa 1996 or so, there were a lot of holes in the OS. It demoed well, but… Related: I've been enjoying, the Designed in California podcast [1]. Link below is "Part 3" wherein Apple is circling the drain in the mid 1990's (when I started at Apple, BTW) and is desperately looking outside Apple for the operating system they hope will save the company. Be (and Jean-Louis Gassée) look like they will win: [1] https://youtu.be/5IFxwnXASyQ | |
| ▲ | ardenpm 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Reminds me I should probably make sure mine still boots, been a few years now. Everytime I have to re-find all of the adapters for the keyboard, mouse and monitor. Always amazed how fast it boots when I do get it going. |
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| ▲ | majorchord 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm fairly certain that BeOS never supported the 486 | | |
| ▲ | nrr 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Specifically, the BeOS required support for the rtdsc instruction for its timing, and that was only available on the Pentium chips or later. |
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| ▲ | mdp2021 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > difficulty was no apps Well, how fortunate we are now, being able to do simplified coding through LLMs. AROS and Haiku and MenuetOS (etc.) could get a boost in software availability soon. | |
| ▲ | cosmic_cheese 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It was ridiculously fast on my family’s Dimension 4100 tower, which had a 750Mhz PIII in it. The 98SE install that machine shipped with was glacial in comparison, and though Win2K shrunken the gap dramatically it still wasn’t as fast as BeOS. I was able to find a decent number of apps on BeBits but a lot of stuff was missing. | | |
| ▲ | d3Xt3r 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Was blazing fast even on my 450MHz PIII. But QNX was equally fast too on the same machine, if not faster. I think I enjoyed using QNX more at the time overall. Oh, and DOS too, late 90s/early 00s DOS was surprisingly decent with tons of cool thirdparty apps. There was even a quirky graphical web browser called Arachne that I thoroughly enjoyed using. |
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| ▲ | multiplegeorges 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It had a decent number of apps, I drove it as my primary OS for a while. Ended up using Linux, but it was a great OS for its time. | | |
| ▲ | ErroneousBosh 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I've moved back to Haiku as my daily driver for a lot of stuff. Unfortunately it doesn't really have a good video editor yet, so I'm stuck with Linux for that at least. | | |
| ▲ | mdp2021 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Haiku as my daily driver for a lot of stuff Can you expand? What works well, what may need more work, what is not there... |
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| ▲ | 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | cbm-vic-20 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The BeBox was so cool. I'm surprised no gaming-oriented PC builder has replicated the CPU activity LEDs. The GeekPort was also fun- in my dorm someone on my floor had a BeBox and used the GeekPort to control a robot arm. At least that came back in the form of the Raspberry Pi GPIO connector. |
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| ▲ | YVoyiatzis 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If only for the UI. Back then, all bring white and beige and Windows blue screenofdesthblye. Be OS was pure joy, if only to play around with. Many third-party developers (remember sharewsre) took s liking to the Be aesthetic and ran away with it. |
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| ▲ | hexapus 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I really do need to play with Haiku more. |
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| ▲ | alfiedotwtf 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What the hell happened to BeBox and QNX?! They were the pinnacle of blitz. I’ve got a beefy machine to run large LLM models, but recently installing a new Debian, Gnome struggles after booting because of their packaging manager running 100% for a few minutes, following by random lag. Like wtf we had speed 26 years ago :( |
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| ▲ | thinker5555 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I was just telling my 10 year old about QNX last night, and how it was an amazing feat to have a whole graphical desktop with apps all fit on a 1.44mb floppy disc. Since he's missing so much of the context of "the ancient times", he didn't exactly share my enthusiasm, but at least he humored me a bit for my trip down memory lane. | |
| ▲ | mdp2021 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I understand that part of the latest efforts in Linux have been to use NNs to analyze code in order to speed up subsystems. |
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| ▲ | mlmonkey 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Be" .... now that's a blast from the past! :-D |
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| ▲ | ranger_danger 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Now just combine it with Cosmoe[1] so you can run it from Linux too. [1] https://pappp.net/?p=95060 |
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| ▲ | thisislife2 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Check out https://v-os.dev/ - it's been adopted to create a new Linux distro that's a hybrid of Linux and Haiku. Pretty light on resource and the Be / Haiku GUI feels so good. | | |
| ▲ | 0x445442 an hour ago | parent [-] | | However the kernel differences between Linux and BeOS/NewOS are really part and parcel of Be/Haiku. It's like running Smalltalk in the terminal. |
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| ▲ | PAPPPmAc 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | How odd to come into a thread and find a link to my share-with-note (see name/url) instead of a link to the OSNews article it's a share of. |
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| ▲ | bazingaedward 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| [flagged] |
