Comment by mark_undoio

6 months ago

This demo was so cool. There were lots of alternative OSes out there back then that felt very impressive.

Linux at the time was cool too but less polished than now. Lots of people were on the Win 9x series, which wasn't amazing - and Mac OS X was not yet fully baked.

These other OSes (QNX, BeOS) felt polished, amazingly fast - and slightly alien. The main sad thing from my perspective was that I couldn't get them online (my machine had a winmodem and nobody had open source drivers for those for ages).

Yeah, I'm still sad that my NeXTcube quit booting up and then I never got OpenStep running on Intel hardware.

BeOS was a hoot, but I was essentially bodily ejected from a demo/user's group meeting when I asked how the slides were printed (at that time it didn't have printer drivers).