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.
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?
> At this point, they could likely decompile MacOS classic and rework it to give it modern memory protection, virtual memory, preemptive multitasking, and networking.
You'd lose compatibility with the applications, though, so you'd have to decompile and rework those as well. And even if you did, you couldn't legally distribute any of it.
An alternative approach is high-level emulation. Running a separate instance per application gives you process isolation (via the host OS) for free.
> 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.
How did you implement that? Is it like a modified emulator with your enhancements added? How does the System 6 cooperatively multitasking stuff interoperate with the posix stuff?
68030 on a 16-bit bus, max 10MB RAM, no expansion slots so nothing except SCSI.
So, I put 10MB in it, a bigger SCSI HDD, a SCSI Ethernet adaptor on the back, and built both OSes up from scratch.
MacOS 6.0.8 with all the extras: a menu bar clock, hierarchical Apple menu with modular Control Panel, MacTCP, etc.
And MacOS 7.6.1, which doesn't officially support the Classic II as it wants 12MB RAM minimum -- but I had RAMdoubler. OpenTalk, Netscape Navigator 3, Communicator 4, some early Internet Explorer, etc.
Honestly, there was little difference. It was usably quick on 7.6.1 and more stable. So many things that are extras on 6.0.8 are built in to 7.x that it doesn't need that much more disk or memory.
7.x did more, made it easier, and ran well.
But, as an example, on roughly 1MBs ADSL, it took about half an hour to render the top-left quarter of https://slashdot.org/.
Perfectly usable machine, could do email, FTP, Gopher, but forget it on the WWW on of the noughties (2000-2009).
> 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.
> You are describing attributes of the NeXT-based OS X but calling it MacOS 9.
You're mistaken.
> MacOS 9 [had] no preemption
Classic Mac OS has had vertical retrace (VBL) interrupts since System 1.0 (which are a form of preemption). But suppose we disregard that.
>> MacOS 9 had a preemptively scheduled kernel.
The GP is correct. Applications run cooperatively within the Blue task, but the Blue task itself runs preemptively with other MP tasks (which an application can create).
I know about the nanokernel, yes. Without following the links, Gary Davidian (is that spelled right?) did amazing work.
Very very little used it. About the only classic app I ever heard of that could even use pre-emption and background execution were some demanding Photoshop filters. Enough that Daystar Digital built multiprocessor Mac clones just for that alone:
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.
> The distinctive tabbed window titles look neat, but they have a reduced draggable area, so I’d have to think harder every time I wanted to move a window.
Now imagine macOS progressing to the point where title bars have been replaced with toolbars, and buttons no longer have borders, so you have to guess what part of the window will drag it.
The feature those provide isn't immediately obvious in a static screenshot, the tabs are "magnetic" and you can take your "word" application and "stick" it's tab next to your email tab, and now you have a "tabbed application" with the email app tab on the left, and the word app tab on the right. You might have one "window" that is your front end dev workflow (firefox, vscode, 2-3 term windows) with 5 tabs, and then a second window that is your backend workflow of vscode + 4 terminal tabs, and a database workflow that is pgadmin + 2 terminal tabs. For example. I haven't seen anything like it, and I'm not sure how it handles windows with a smaller fixed window size, like winamp.
Haiku made them magnetic. In classic BeOS you had to manually position the windows on top of each other, then hold shift and manually drag the tab over from the left. And they wouldn't be tethered together: moving one window wouldn't move the other. It was annoying enough that I never bothered. By the end of BeOS's life I was mostly using the Mac OS 8 titlebar style (accessed by holding down all the modifier keys and pressing the Be menu).
Yep, reeeally nice feature, used it on Linux. After that I wondered why apps bothered to implement their own tabbing when you could just stack Windows as tabs (assuming more WMs would adopt that feature).
It would just stack the windows of different sizes, so if you hit the Winamp tab the smaller Winamp tab would be at the top of the stack. Pretty simple and intuitive.
I really like the linux solution here. My windows have no titlebar/borders at all. To move a window hold the window key and drag the window from anywhere, to resize hold the window key and right-click drag.
And yes I know it's not really a linux specific thing, but that gets the point across. It is very common on linux. I could twirl my os/desktop hipster mustache and say "my obsd/spectrwm desktop handles no window chrome really well" but then I feel really pretentious instead of only slightly.
I wrote something to do this 13 years ago, someone picked it up after 6 years of inactivity (since I don't own a Mac anymore): https://github.com/justjake/metamove
Yeah I do this too, though on macOS (through Rectangle, the window manager). Control+Option drags the window under my cursor. I picked that up from the Super key drag on Linux
How funny, this is exactly the control scheme I ended up with for a window-manager-esque system I was working on recently. I love finding out I've rediscovered something proven to work well :)
> I really like the linux solution here. My windows have no titlebar/borders at all. To move a window hold the window key and drag the window from anywhere, to resize hold the window key and right-click drag.
Speaking of which. It is not a Linux solution but stock X11 twm window manager features dating back into 1988, i.e.:
– replicates the described behaviour with the pin-point precision[0].
[0] m4 stands for the Mod4 modifier, now commonly assigned to the Super/Windows key. The equivalent 1988 configuration would have used m (Meta), since the original binding syntax supported Shift, Control and Meta only.
To me BeOS was and is still the best looking desktop OS ever, and it was so fast, it felt so good. I think in 2000ish (when it was released freely) I used it on my PC pretty much exclusively for a few months.
GNOME 3 was trying to built a clean modern minimalist desktop without all the clutter inherited from the design of Windows... But all they know is, very visibly, Windows and KDE.
RISC OS is that clean legacy free desktop. It's unlike anything else, built from scratch by a team not interested in what the rest of the world was doing.
And it's still alive and still updated and works well on modern hardware. Several separate efforts are building 64-bit replacements today.
It runs on all Raspberry Pi models up to the 4, and runs really well. As of version 5.30 it supports the Wifi chip in the Pi so it can connect to WLANs.
The owners of the IP are RISC OS Developments Ltd (ROD) and they have an enhanced version -- free on the Pi -- called RISC OS Direct, with an IPv6 stack and a modern WebKit browser:
There is another fork of the OS that is still proprietary. That's owned by 3QD. They used to sell upgrades for real Acorn-compatible kit but there's none of that that isn't vintage now, so it focuses on a software emulation that runs on modern x86 machines:
Search the Reg for "riscos" and you'll find interview with the original core team, looks at the last couple of FOSS releases, the Moonshot effort to go 64-bit and more.
> I wish that there was some edict from KDE Project management telling everyone working on the Plasma desktop to spend a week in Haiku or something.
The other thing is that it says right at the start of the BeOS Book - and this is carried across to Haiku - is that you shouldn't have a spinner or hourglass. It should do *something*, it shouldn't make you wait.
Some former Be employees have commented here in the past saying that Apple made the right decision to buy Next and not Be from a technical perspective, as BeOS had poor code quality and was far behind NEXTSTEP in important areas like networking and printing. They also implemented the OS API directly in C++, which tied them to a specific C++ compiler (some mid-90s version of GCC) due to the ABI getting broken in newer versions. The 32-bit version of Haiku (modern BeOS reimplementation) supports BeOS software, and as a result still needs to be compiled with that mid-90s GCC release.
Beyond that, I'm not sure if buying Be would have fixed the managerial problems at Apple. Would they have been able to add the required features to BeOS to turn it into a production OS without the project turning into another Copland? Would the existing Apple management have slimmed down the massive Apple product line that had dozens of nearly identical models? Would it have gotten rid of dead-end projects like Newton and Pippin? Etc.
Best example of how far BeOs fell short was that for a very long while it lacked printer drivers of any kind --- by contrast, not only did NeXTstep essentially get printing "for free" since it used Display PostScript, the implementation of that was such that Adobe demanded a modification to the user agreement limiting the output resolution so that print shops would not be able to purchase NeXT computers and use them as RIPs for imagesetters.
Former Be person here. Excellent summary. To further elucidate the management issue, some of the Be management went to Palm and they weren’t super effective there either. A fun alternative universe would be Apple buying Be, Apple going bankrupt or eaten by the clones, NeXT powering the internet with WebObjects, Microsoft crushed by antitrust and we are all running Linux using Eazel/GNOME.
Yeah it's interesting how similar what happened with Palm OS 6 was to Copland. They had a working, but outdated OS that had been hacked onto a new platform as a stopgap, then they couldn't get the rewrite meant to take full advantage of the new hardware out the door. Palm OS 6 was at least finished, but it never got used on a shipping device. There's an interesting Reddit post going over how the OS design was fundamentally flawed when combined with the ARM processors that were available at the time: https://www.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/1422bqy/palm_os6/jn5o...
Pre-standard C++ is an even worse programming language than C++ 98, but also the big difference wouldn't have been the technology, it was the people. If Apple buy Be Inc they're getting JLG back whereas if they buy NeXT they get Jobs back.
Jobs is what makes or breaks Apple in that critical period. I didn't like him but that's relevant to the success of the company. JLG did not have whatever it was Jobs gave the company.
And Jobs brought an entire team of people with him. Many of the top people at Apple got replaced by people from NeXT. Avie Tevanian, Craig Federighi, Bertrand Serlet and many lesser known names came from NeXT. The joke at the time was that NeXT bought Apple for -$400M.
Yes, the reverse acquisition. Minor correction though, Craig didn’t show up until much later. He missed out on some very tough years and came on when Apple was fully revitalized and printing money. I might even suggest what I consider the decline of Apple software occurred when Avie and Bertrand left and Craig took over.
I recall the C++ "fragile base class" problem already starting to rear its ugly head by the end. Existing base classes couldn't be reasonably extended without breaking compatibility with existing applications, and the BeOS API was routinely designed in a way that promoted subclassing. e.g. to implement a window, you'd subclass BWindow and fill it with your own subclasses of BView. It's difficult to see how they would have dug themselves out of this hole in the long term. Perhaps eventually they would have needed to ship multiple versions of their system libraries corresponding to each ABI breakage.
I'm not familiar with Be API, but I did a lot of GUI dev in Java Swing back in the day. It's not that hard in principle, you launch whatever background op in whatever threads you like, and any GUI updates have to be done by sending messages back to the GUI event thread (or something like Swing.invokeLater(closure)).
One minor correction: the Haiku developers worked some magic with GCC binary compatibility and modern Haiku builds are done with a modern GCC yet still preserve the ability to run and interoperate with software built using the old release which is important for preserving the use of commercial software built for BeOS without released source code.
It was reported that Apple offered $75M for Be and almost $500M for NeXT and in retrospect those seem like entirely fair valuations. One was a mature OS and the other was a demo of an OS.
JLG countered with a $100 million and I thought Apple offered Steve $400 million at first. There was a moment when Apple was just talking to us (Be) and Steve heard about it. Bummed.
Outside of the GUI, Be is a very thin veneer over Unix. There is, no joke, a class named "BStatable" which, if you know some Unix, is just stat, because of course what their OS kernel implements is just stat.
In the places where there's something entirely different going on, such as networking in earlier BeOS, it's trash and you'd obviously want to throw it away and do what Unix did - Be were doing so. So a hypothetical turn of the century fruit-flavour BeOS is probably much closer to "Unix with a different UI" than you're thinking. NeXT changed nothing there.
A strong BeOS selling point was that it was POSIX compliant. I guess that is what you mean by a thin veneer. But we had to write all that code; it wasn’t like we were running Linux or some SCO or other flavor of Unix. It was a written and rewritten and rewritten multiple times.
I am greatly enjoying the juxtaposition of a comment asserting that obviously BeOS was so far from POSIX that Haiku had to do loads of work to get there and your comment that BeOS was POSIX compliant.
It would have been a disaster, BeOS was significantly different from a NeXT/BSD-like unix type base that made it relatively easy for software to be developed on MacOS in the 10.0 to 10.4 era. Early versions of MacOS X like 10.0 were clearly just an evolved NeXT with a cute MacOS finder like skin on top.
Well, not only former Be but former Finder developer here. The OSX Finder was certainly not a cute Finder-like skin, it was in fact huge amounts of the OS9 Finder source code including a complete copy of a modified Metrowerks PowerPlant C++ framework underneath it all. There was even elements of the old MacApp framework there. It was not a skin; it was a source code behemoth with massive amounts of legacy code.
That is amazing to read. I never knew. I thought it was Workspace Manager, adapted to feel more Mac-like. There is even a clear line of descent:
1. The Rhapsody developer previews, which are NeXTstep with a menu bar at the top and desktop icons, and a Platinum skin.
2. Mac OS X Server 1.x which has cascading finder windows, an icon view by default, and some other things much like that.
3. Mac OS X 10.0, which I used, or tried to use, as a daily driver, with a broadly Mac-like experience with an Apple menu, but with app names next to it containing global "about" and "quit" options, and so on.
It never did acquire any of the nice stuff that came in with System 7 (e.g. drag-and-drop customisable Apple menu stored in folders in the System Folder) or MacOS 8 (e.g. folder drawers that shrink to tabs).
I didn't mean that the 10.0 finder was a reskinned NeXT GUI file management application (as you point out, it clearly wasn't and was a huge thing that had a bunch of heritage code), but that the entire 10.0 GUI was a kinda-MacOS-9-like GUI on top of the NeXT bsd-heritage unix-like base. If you were to take a 10.0 system and put it side by side for comparison with the CLI environment perspective, file tree, system libraries with the last NeXTSTEP releases or rhapsody.
I loved my BeBox, but what would be the modern equivalent of the GeekPort? I've been using esp32/nRF52/etc boards for uart/spi/i2c/i2s/pwm-type work... it feels like hardware hacking on a desktop is a lost art.
Your BeBox case was lovingly spray painted in a conference room with inadequate ventilation by us at Be at corporate HQ in Menlo Park. Each one was lovingly assembled by the actual people who designed the hardware and wrote the code.
The old school way to do I/O on desktop was via the parallel port, which I imagine would still work if you get a PCIe parallel port card. For a more modern way, the FT232H chip supports UART, SPI, I2C, JTAG and raw GPIO over USB, and there are break-out boards available.
I was going to say this as well the GeekPort was a parallel port. I always thought it was marketed that way is that Macs didn’t have a parallel port. Having a parallel port would make the spec sheet seem regressive. I believe serial ports were always faster than parallel ports.
I bought a BeBox at the time.
The original Nike store in NYC purchased one to do their signage media playback. It didn’t go well.
I seem to recall that you could hold down Alt key and drag the tab horizontally. So a tab could stick up anywhere along the top of the window frame. The SPARCStations had three-button mice, and this might have been mapped to middle or right mouse button.
The tabbed interface features the ability to gather windows into tab groups. So when you are moving a window by dragging its tab, if you drag the tab next to another window's tab, the dragged window will snap to that other window's frame, the dragged window will be the selected tab and its contents displayed in the frame. Then dragging any of the tabs drags the whole set of tabs that are snapped to that frame. Click on a tab to make it the active tab displayed in the frame.
It's effectively like tabs now, but sort of inside out: tabs are managed by the windows manager and not the app. Tab groups of multiple, different apps. The app does not have to be "tab-aware" to be in a tab group, although I suppose there are events that can signal the manager to make a window the selected tab. It's just raising a window, making it frontmost. Modal dialogs can get tangled up, but it's no worse than the mess commonly accepted today.
To me it's not nostalgia, the system felt truly great to use. Haven't met anything as good since then.
And while I agree that Steve Jobs and Next were the right business (and people) choice, I still mourn the loss of a much better UI (never been a fan of the Mac UI, and it's my daily at-work system).
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.
[1]: https://www.haiku-os.org/
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?
> At this point, they could likely decompile MacOS classic and rework it to give it modern memory protection, virtual memory, preemptive multitasking, and networking.
You'd lose compatibility with the applications, though, so you'd have to decompile and rework those as well. And even if you did, you couldn't legally distribute any of it.
An alternative approach is high-level emulation. Running a separate instance per application gives you process isolation (via the host OS) for free.
> I assume booting an OS with a mere few megabytes of RAM footprint would only take milliseconds?
I haven't measured it as such, but yes.
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.
Please share anything you have, if possible. I'd love to know how you're doing it. If you don't want to do it publicly, my email is in my profile.
I've a wild whim to try this with Windows 95. What's an x11 or wayland? we're going EXPLORER.EXE!
Which model are you using? If Anthropic/OpenAI aren't you tripping any "cyber" blockage?
I am willing to check this out. I have 512Ke and Mac Plus hardware and am always looking for ways to maximize the hardware capabilities.
Woah I never even considered the possibly of rebooting old OS with new features. Very cool. Would love to experience that era of music tech
How did you implement that? Is it like a modified emulator with your enhancements added? How does the System 6 cooperatively multitasking stuff interoperate with the posix stuff?
Target system 7.5.3, it will run far more stuff.
I was going to say, why System 6 and not 7?
Possibly because System 6 runs better on SE-era machines?
I tried it, about 20Y ago.
It does but not all that much.
I had a Classic II, so a very limited machine.
Not a "road apple" but a "compromised Mac":
https://lowendmac.com/1991/mac-classic-ii/
68030 on a 16-bit bus, max 10MB RAM, no expansion slots so nothing except SCSI.
So, I put 10MB in it, a bigger SCSI HDD, a SCSI Ethernet adaptor on the back, and built both OSes up from scratch.
MacOS 6.0.8 with all the extras: a menu bar clock, hierarchical Apple menu with modular Control Panel, MacTCP, etc.
And MacOS 7.6.1, which doesn't officially support the Classic II as it wants 12MB RAM minimum -- but I had RAMdoubler. OpenTalk, Netscape Navigator 3, Communicator 4, some early Internet Explorer, etc.
Honestly, there was little difference. It was usably quick on 7.6.1 and more stable. So many things that are extras on 6.0.8 are built in to 7.x that it doesn't need that much more disk or memory.
7.x did more, made it easier, and ran well.
But, as an example, on roughly 1MBs ADSL, it took about half an hour to render the top-left quarter of https://slashdot.org/.
Perfectly usable machine, could do email, FTP, Gopher, but forget it on the WWW on of the noughties (2000-2009).
> 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.
You are getting your versions muddled up.
You are describing attributes of the NeXT-based OS X but calling it MacOS 9.
MacOS 9 was the final version of Classic. No preemption, weak virtual memory, weak cooperative multitasking, no virtual machines for anything.
MacOS 9 is the OS that ran inside the Blue Box on Mac OS X for backwards compatibility.
> You are describing attributes of the NeXT-based OS X but calling it MacOS 9.
You're mistaken.
> MacOS 9 [had] no preemption
Classic Mac OS has had vertical retrace (VBL) interrupts since System 1.0 (which are a form of preemption). But suppose we disregard that.
>> MacOS 9 had a preemptively scheduled kernel.
The GP is correct. Applications run cooperatively within the Blue task, but the Blue task itself runs preemptively with other MP tasks (which an application can create).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_nanokernel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprocessing_Services
I know about the nanokernel, yes. Without following the links, Gary Davidian (is that spelled right?) did amazing work.
Very very little used it. About the only classic app I ever heard of that could even use pre-emption and background execution were some demanding Photoshop filters. Enough that Daystar Digital built multiprocessor Mac clones just for that alone:
https://lowendmac.com/1995/daystar-genesis-mp/
Within the MacOS kernel it is as coop as ever, and there were no different OSes inside virtual machines. No, Tenon MachTen does not count.
> Mmm. Or improve the OSes themselves.
Haiku specifically does not accept AI-generated code.
I expect if you use AI to explain how to write it and then write it yourself that would be okay.
You need to be able to explain your work without just pasting in what Special Needs Wintermute says.
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.
> The distinctive tabbed window titles look neat, but they have a reduced draggable area, so I’d have to think harder every time I wanted to move a window.
Now imagine macOS progressing to the point where title bars have been replaced with toolbars, and buttons no longer have borders, so you have to guess what part of the window will drag it.
:-|
The feature those provide isn't immediately obvious in a static screenshot, the tabs are "magnetic" and you can take your "word" application and "stick" it's tab next to your email tab, and now you have a "tabbed application" with the email app tab on the left, and the word app tab on the right. You might have one "window" that is your front end dev workflow (firefox, vscode, 2-3 term windows) with 5 tabs, and then a second window that is your backend workflow of vscode + 4 terminal tabs, and a database workflow that is pgadmin + 2 terminal tabs. For example. I haven't seen anything like it, and I'm not sure how it handles windows with a smaller fixed window size, like winamp.
Haiku made them magnetic. In classic BeOS you had to manually position the windows on top of each other, then hold shift and manually drag the tab over from the left. And they wouldn't be tethered together: moving one window wouldn't move the other. It was annoying enough that I never bothered. By the end of BeOS's life I was mostly using the Mac OS 8 titlebar style (accessed by holding down all the modifier keys and pressing the Be menu).
> I haven't seen anything like it
I remember using the fluxbox wm like this back on the university Sun machines
Yep, reeeally nice feature, used it on Linux. After that I wondered why apps bothered to implement their own tabbing when you could just stack Windows as tabs (assuming more WMs would adopt that feature).
Also Windows was going to have this, but never left the preview builds, there was a BUILD or Ignite session were it was demoed.
Granted it was already Windows 10, so nothing that original.
It would just stack the windows of different sizes, so if you hit the Winamp tab the smaller Winamp tab would be at the top of the stack. Pretty simple and intuitive.
I loved the tabs on BeOS.
I really like the linux solution here. My windows have no titlebar/borders at all. To move a window hold the window key and drag the window from anywhere, to resize hold the window key and right-click drag.
And yes I know it's not really a linux specific thing, but that gets the point across. It is very common on linux. I could twirl my os/desktop hipster mustache and say "my obsd/spectrwm desktop handles no window chrome really well" but then I feel really pretentious instead of only slightly.
I wrote something to do this 13 years ago, someone picked it up after 6 years of inactivity (since I don't own a Mac anymore): https://github.com/justjake/metamove
Yeah I do this too, though on macOS (through Rectangle, the window manager). Control+Option drags the window under my cursor. I picked that up from the Super key drag on Linux
How funny, this is exactly the control scheme I ended up with for a window-manager-esque system I was working on recently. I love finding out I've rediscovered something proven to work well :)
For Windows there is AltDrag or the AltSnap fork.
https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap
https://github.com/stefansundin/altdrag
Also built-in to PowerToys.
> I really like the linux solution here. My windows have no titlebar/borders at all. To move a window hold the window key and drag the window from anywhere, to resize hold the window key and right-click drag.
Speaking of which. It is not a Linux solution but stock X11 twm window manager features dating back into 1988, i.e.:
– replicates the described behaviour with the pin-point precision[0].[0] m4 stands for the Mod4 modifier, now commonly assigned to the Super/Windows key. The equivalent 1988 configuration would have used m (Meta), since the original binding syntax supported Shift, Control and Meta only.
To me BeOS was and is still the best looking desktop OS ever, and it was so fast, it felt so good. I think in 2000ish (when it was released freely) I used it on my PC pretty much exclusively for a few months.
I fervently agree.
I wish that there was some edict from KDE Project management telling everyone working on the Plasma desktop to spend a week in Haiku or something.
The amount of indirect "open a dialog box, click 6 tabs down, then enter a value" stuff in KDE that is a single drag in Haiku drives me mad.
The counterpoint is RISC OS for GNOME.
GNOME 3 was trying to built a clean modern minimalist desktop without all the clutter inherited from the design of Windows... But all they know is, very visibly, Windows and KDE.
RISC OS is that clean legacy free desktop. It's unlike anything else, built from scratch by a team not interested in what the rest of the world was doing.
And it's still alive and still updated and works well on modern hardware. Several separate efforts are building 64-bit replacements today.
RISC OS? That's still going! What can I run it on?/run on it?
The FOSS version is here:
https://www.riscosopen.org/content/
It runs on all Raspberry Pi models up to the 4, and runs really well. As of version 5.30 it supports the Wifi chip in the Pi so it can connect to WLANs.
The owners of the IP are RISC OS Developments Ltd (ROD) and they have an enhanced version -- free on the Pi -- called RISC OS Direct, with an IPv6 stack and a modern WebKit browser:
https://www.riscosdev.com/direct/
They also sell more capable hardware for it.
There is another fork of the OS that is still proprietary. That's owned by 3QD. They used to sell upgrades for real Acorn-compatible kit but there's none of that that isn't vintage now, so it focuses on a software emulation that runs on modern x86 machines:
http://www.virtualacorn.co.uk/index2.htm
I have written about it multiple times, trying to spread awareness.
https://www.theregister.com/software/2022/06/21/risc-os-is-3...
Search the Reg for "riscos" and you'll find interview with the original core team, looks at the last couple of FOSS releases, the Moonshot effort to go 64-bit and more.
> I wish that there was some edict from KDE Project management telling everyone working on the Plasma desktop to spend a week in Haiku or something.
The other thing is that it says right at the start of the BeOS Book - and this is carried across to Haiku - is that you shouldn't have a spinner or hourglass. It should do *something*, it shouldn't make you wait.
I would be very interested in a writeup that talked about the likely trajectory of Apple's OS if they had bought BeOS instead.
Some former Be employees have commented here in the past saying that Apple made the right decision to buy Next and not Be from a technical perspective, as BeOS had poor code quality and was far behind NEXTSTEP in important areas like networking and printing. They also implemented the OS API directly in C++, which tied them to a specific C++ compiler (some mid-90s version of GCC) due to the ABI getting broken in newer versions. The 32-bit version of Haiku (modern BeOS reimplementation) supports BeOS software, and as a result still needs to be compiled with that mid-90s GCC release.
Beyond that, I'm not sure if buying Be would have fixed the managerial problems at Apple. Would they have been able to add the required features to BeOS to turn it into a production OS without the project turning into another Copland? Would the existing Apple management have slimmed down the massive Apple product line that had dozens of nearly identical models? Would it have gotten rid of dead-end projects like Newton and Pippin? Etc.
Best example of how far BeOs fell short was that for a very long while it lacked printer drivers of any kind --- by contrast, not only did NeXTstep essentially get printing "for free" since it used Display PostScript, the implementation of that was such that Adobe demanded a modification to the user agreement limiting the output resolution so that print shops would not be able to purchase NeXT computers and use them as RIPs for imagesetters.
Ah, Adobe, how I want you to burn in an enormous, abyssal hellfire.
Former Be person here. Excellent summary. To further elucidate the management issue, some of the Be management went to Palm and they weren’t super effective there either. A fun alternative universe would be Apple buying Be, Apple going bankrupt or eaten by the clones, NeXT powering the internet with WebObjects, Microsoft crushed by antitrust and we are all running Linux using Eazel/GNOME.
Yeah it's interesting how similar what happened with Palm OS 6 was to Copland. They had a working, but outdated OS that had been hacked onto a new platform as a stopgap, then they couldn't get the rewrite meant to take full advantage of the new hardware out the door. Palm OS 6 was at least finished, but it never got used on a shipping device. There's an interesting Reddit post going over how the OS design was fundamentally flawed when combined with the ARM processors that were available at the time: https://www.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/1422bqy/palm_os6/jn5o...
Palm at one point was talking to Symbian about licensing the Symbian kernel for the Arm PalmOS.
I wish that had happened... it might have saved both companies.
Pre-standard C++ is an even worse programming language than C++ 98, but also the big difference wouldn't have been the technology, it was the people. If Apple buy Be Inc they're getting JLG back whereas if they buy NeXT they get Jobs back.
Jobs is what makes or breaks Apple in that critical period. I didn't like him but that's relevant to the success of the company. JLG did not have whatever it was Jobs gave the company.
And Jobs brought an entire team of people with him. Many of the top people at Apple got replaced by people from NeXT. Avie Tevanian, Craig Federighi, Bertrand Serlet and many lesser known names came from NeXT. The joke at the time was that NeXT bought Apple for -$400M.
Yes, the reverse acquisition. Minor correction though, Craig didn’t show up until much later. He missed out on some very tough years and came on when Apple was fully revitalized and printing money. I might even suggest what I consider the decline of Apple software occurred when Avie and Bertrand left and Craig took over.
I recall the C++ "fragile base class" problem already starting to rear its ugly head by the end. Existing base classes couldn't be reasonably extended without breaking compatibility with existing applications, and the BeOS API was routinely designed in a way that promoted subclassing. e.g. to implement a window, you'd subclass BWindow and fill it with your own subclasses of BView. It's difficult to see how they would have dug themselves out of this hole in the long term. Perhaps eventually they would have needed to ship multiple versions of their system libraries corresponding to each ABI breakage.
There were other issues too, no? They went all in on multi-threading of the GUI which is super hard to do well, so apps were often crash prone.
I'm not familiar with Be API, but I did a lot of GUI dev in Java Swing back in the day. It's not that hard in principle, you launch whatever background op in whatever threads you like, and any GUI updates have to be done by sending messages back to the GUI event thread (or something like Swing.invokeLater(closure)).
For release 4, we added private impls with many many virtual declaration placeholders. I still remember the comment in every file: Mmmmmmm, stuffing!
One minor correction: the Haiku developers worked some magic with GCC binary compatibility and modern Haiku builds are done with a modern GCC yet still preserve the ability to run and interoperate with software built using the old release which is important for preserving the use of commercial software built for BeOS without released source code.
This is not quite correct as I understand it.
32-bit Haiku can run old Be apps, but must be built with ancient GCC.
64-bit Haiku is built with modern GCC but it is not binary compatible with old BeOS.
Correct, yes. You can run BeOS apps on 32-bit gcc2 builds.
This is a surprising amount of effort to not break compatibility ;-)
Gee, maybe Linux devs could learn something from them...
It was reported that Apple offered $75M for Be and almost $500M for NeXT and in retrospect those seem like entirely fair valuations. One was a mature OS and the other was a demo of an OS.
JLG countered with a $100 million and I thought Apple offered Steve $400 million at first. There was a moment when Apple was just talking to us (Be) and Steve heard about it. Bummed.
> They also implemented the OS API directly in C++, which tied them to a specific C++ compiler
We paid Cygnus(?) millions for that. The multiple virtual inheritance needed for MediaKit was a real joy to get working.
I'll note that Mac OS X used a C++ ABI in the _kernel_....
Designed in California has been a very entertaining (video podcast) watch that covers this era:
https://www.youtube.com/@designedinca
(Specifically they talk about Be beginning: https://youtu.be/5IFxwnXASyQ)
They probably would fail to recover and be another historical company by now.
If not, desktop computing would be taken over by C++ as main systems programming language, and UNIX like computing relegated to servers.
Outside of the GUI, Be is a very thin veneer over Unix. There is, no joke, a class named "BStatable" which, if you know some Unix, is just stat, because of course what their OS kernel implements is just stat.
In the places where there's something entirely different going on, such as networking in earlier BeOS, it's trash and you'd obviously want to throw it away and do what Unix did - Be were doing so. So a hypothetical turn of the century fruit-flavour BeOS is probably much closer to "Unix with a different UI" than you're thinking. NeXT changed nothing there.
It certainly wasn't on the BeOS R5 CD that was available back in the day, or the whole Kits available for BeOs programming in C++.
The amount of work done by Haiku to provide a proper POSIX userspace support proves the point.
A strong BeOS selling point was that it was POSIX compliant. I guess that is what you mean by a thin veneer. But we had to write all that code; it wasn’t like we were running Linux or some SCO or other flavor of Unix. It was a written and rewritten and rewritten multiple times.
I am greatly enjoying the juxtaposition of a comment asserting that obviously BeOS was so far from POSIX that Haiku had to do loads of work to get there and your comment that BeOS was POSIX compliant.
It would have been a disaster, BeOS was significantly different from a NeXT/BSD-like unix type base that made it relatively easy for software to be developed on MacOS in the 10.0 to 10.4 era. Early versions of MacOS X like 10.0 were clearly just an evolved NeXT with a cute MacOS finder like skin on top.
Well, not only former Be but former Finder developer here. The OSX Finder was certainly not a cute Finder-like skin, it was in fact huge amounts of the OS9 Finder source code including a complete copy of a modified Metrowerks PowerPlant C++ framework underneath it all. There was even elements of the old MacApp framework there. It was not a skin; it was a source code behemoth with massive amounts of legacy code.
That is amazing to read. I never knew. I thought it was Workspace Manager, adapted to feel more Mac-like. There is even a clear line of descent:
1. The Rhapsody developer previews, which are NeXTstep with a menu bar at the top and desktop icons, and a Platinum skin.
2. Mac OS X Server 1.x which has cascading finder windows, an icon view by default, and some other things much like that.
3. Mac OS X 10.0, which I used, or tried to use, as a daily driver, with a broadly Mac-like experience with an Apple menu, but with app names next to it containing global "about" and "quit" options, and so on.
It never did acquire any of the nice stuff that came in with System 7 (e.g. drag-and-drop customisable Apple menu stored in folders in the System Folder) or MacOS 8 (e.g. folder drawers that shrink to tabs).
I didn't mean that the 10.0 finder was a reskinned NeXT GUI file management application (as you point out, it clearly wasn't and was a huge thing that had a bunch of heritage code), but that the entire 10.0 GUI was a kinda-MacOS-9-like GUI on top of the NeXT bsd-heritage unix-like base. If you were to take a 10.0 system and put it side by side for comparison with the CLI environment perspective, file tree, system libraries with the last NeXTSTEP releases or rhapsody.
I loved my BeBox, but what would be the modern equivalent of the GeekPort? I've been using esp32/nRF52/etc boards for uart/spi/i2c/i2s/pwm-type work... it feels like hardware hacking on a desktop is a lost art.
Your BeBox case was lovingly spray painted in a conference room with inadequate ventilation by us at Be at corporate HQ in Menlo Park. Each one was lovingly assembled by the actual people who designed the hardware and wrote the code.
Still got my BeBox, boot it up every year just to make sure its still okay. I have wondered about that paint job over the years ..
The closest modern thing to it is probably the Raspberry Pi GPIO header.
The old school way to do I/O on desktop was via the parallel port, which I imagine would still work if you get a PCIe parallel port card. For a more modern way, the FT232H chip supports UART, SPI, I2C, JTAG and raw GPIO over USB, and there are break-out boards available.
I was going to say this as well the GeekPort was a parallel port. I always thought it was marketed that way is that Macs didn’t have a parallel port. Having a parallel port would make the spec sheet seem regressive. I believe serial ports were always faster than parallel ports. I bought a BeBox at the time.
The original Nike store in NYC purchased one to do their signage media playback. It didn’t go well.
This is still an on-going thing for the LinuxCNC project (which mostly follows Mach3 in using a Parallel port interface to drive a CNC controller).
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I used a BeOS inspired GNOME extension or hack for tabbed windows, signature yellow color, about 20 years ago. Loved it.
I was installing GNOME pieces compiling from source, on top of Sun Solaris. So it was a weird configuration. But FWIW I relied on the tabs a lot.
Were the tabs movable like on BeOS? That’s something I cannot recall seeing in any theme.
I think so; it's been a while.
I seem to recall that you could hold down Alt key and drag the tab horizontally. So a tab could stick up anywhere along the top of the window frame. The SPARCStations had three-button mice, and this might have been mapped to middle or right mouse button.
The tabbed interface features the ability to gather windows into tab groups. So when you are moving a window by dragging its tab, if you drag the tab next to another window's tab, the dragged window will snap to that other window's frame, the dragged window will be the selected tab and its contents displayed in the frame. Then dragging any of the tabs drags the whole set of tabs that are snapped to that frame. Click on a tab to make it the active tab displayed in the frame.
It's effectively like tabs now, but sort of inside out: tabs are managed by the windows manager and not the app. Tab groups of multiple, different apps. The app does not have to be "tab-aware" to be in a tab group, although I suppose there are events that can signal the manager to make a window the selected tab. It's just raising a window, making it frontmost. Modal dialogs can get tangled up, but it's no worse than the mess commonly accepted today.
As mentioned in another thread above: you can get similar(?) tabs in Fluxbox on Linux.
I ran BeOS for a bit, and it was the best OS upgrade experience I've had, besides the Windows 95 to NT 4.0 upgrade.
One of the few upgrade experiences that was a discernable improvement and completely revised experience.
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Why do people want to look at old os's like this and Amiga what is the fascination? Just curious.
To me it's not nostalgia, the system felt truly great to use. Haven't met anything as good since then.
And while I agree that Steve Jobs and Next were the right business (and people) choice, I still mourn the loss of a much better UI (never been a fan of the Mac UI, and it's my daily at-work system).
Nostalgia is an addictive drug.