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.

MomsAVoxell 11 hours ago | parent | 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 6 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 9 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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throwaway270925 3 hours ago | parent | prev | 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.

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majorchord 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm fairly certain that BeOS never supported the 486

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nrr 11 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.

	▲	alberth an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Whoops, you're right. I was confused which machine I had BeOS on. This was my Pentium III. My 486 was the machine immediately before my Pentium III. I installed BeOS when I got my new Pentium III in 1999/2000.

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cosmic_cheese 14 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 7 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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mdp2021 5 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.

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multiplegeorges 15 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.

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ErroneousBosh 5 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 5 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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15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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