Comment by renehsz
15 hours ago
To anyone who hasn't already: I really recommend checking out Haiku OS [1], the FOSS successor to BeOS. It's so pleasant to use and supports a surprisingly large catalog of software.
15 hours ago
To anyone who hasn't already: I really recommend checking out Haiku OS [1], the FOSS successor to BeOS. It's so pleasant to use and supports a surprisingly large catalog of software.
Claude built me a meta web/notes/code search engine with IOS and MacOS apps, and for fun I asked it to make a Haiku version [1], which it did in under 20 minutes.
With AI I feel like a lot of these bygone-era OS's could see a whole new ecosystem of modern apps within a very short period of time.
1. https://github.com/machiya-kobo/shiori/tree/main#haiku
Mmm. Or improve the OSes themselves.
At this point, they could likely decompile MacOS classic and rework it to give it modern memory protection, virtual memory, preemptive multitasking, and networking.
I assume booting an OS with a mere few megabytes of RAM footprint would only take milliseconds?
I am in the middle of doing this with apple's System 6 and adding a posix-compliant shell under the codename bluetail, and working my way up, i've got it booting with an os, busybox, openssh and stuff. Boots on a raspberry pi 3 A+ bare metal (And qemu, of course). And full usb MIDI support, because (I said so, and) there's actually an incredible catalog of early DAW software that will run on System 6. And pretty decent usb ethernet, sound, webcam etc etc. The future of hobby software is wild.
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> they could likely decompile MacOS classic and rework it to give it modern memory protection, virtual memory, preemptive multitasking, and networking.
It had most if not all of that.
It had networking from the start with AppleTalk, later Ethernet and internet with MacTCP.
MacOS 9 had a preemptively scheduled kernel.
The problem is having that and supporting the software ecosystem, which depended on cooperative scheduling without having memory protection.
MacOS 9 ‘solved’ that by running the classic OS in a single process. It had APIs for creating preemptively scheduled threads, but those threads were limited in what they could do.
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I occasionally spin up VMs with this and OS2. I miss the era of operating system options. But but linux. It has it's place, I run FreeBSD, but for desktop, options dimish. I like apple hardware, I like apple hardware trackpad support. Running Linux on a MacBook is not something I would ever do. I used FreeBSD on stinkpads for years.
Haiku is actually pretty usable these days, someone has a draft nvidia driver that's not completely terrible (as of maybe a month ago? still very DIY but neat), and there's a surprising number of retro games and shareware in their package manager catalog these days.
Last time I tried it on my old Thinkpad T440, it ran fairly well. Now with Firefox it's a serious contender for an internet machine.