Comment by alberth
3 days ago
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.
3 days ago
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.
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..)
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
1 reply →
"I don't have a Start Menu. This is a Haiku install, but that's not import--" https://m.xkcd.com/806/
I'm fairly certain that BeOS never supported the 486
Specifically, the BeOS required support for the rtdsc instruction for its timing, and that was only available on the Pentium chips or later.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Try MiDesktop (modern port of KDE 1.x/QT 2.x) - had the same experience, everything is LIGHTNING fast, going back to standard xfce/plasma/whatever feels glacial
> 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.