mikeboss
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2016–2024
19:49 · 23K views · Dec 10, 2011
A vintage demo video of the BeOS operating system running on mid-90s hardware. It shows media playback and window manipulation staying smooth at the same time.
HN commenters use it to show how responsive BeOS was on very modest hardware compared with Windows and Mac of the era.
3 comments from Hacker News
> Doesn't that apply to everyone's OS of choice though? Do people have love deep in their hearts for Windows or even macOS 11? It's hard to explain these days, but back in the late 90s it was just so far ahead of everything else except maybe NeXT and NeXT was entirely out of reach for 99% of the world. The UI was ridiculously smooth and fast and everything worked together like a well oiled machine. - this video Here they play an mp3 and a video that continue to render while you move the windows around, on a 133mhz machine without it even putting up a sweat. Clearly that's nothing today but that was unheard of at the time. Beyond that it had amazing features you still don't see on operating systems today like the file system being an actual queryable database. Common metadata like ID3 tags from MP3's were entered into this and queryable. The standard email client stored emails as individual files and just queried the file system. I believe the address book did the same for people. The tabs of the individual windows stack together across apps! There were just so many little wonderful fit-and-finish things like that you don't get these days. - [LINK] I feel like most desktop OS's strive for parity with eachother. BeOS was trying to be better.
He beat me to it as I'm mentally working on a similar essay. Backward compatibility and shipping pressure I already covered a lot in my posts on Schneier's blog elaborating on this. See Steve Lipner's Ethics of Perfection essay for a great take on "ship first, fix later" mentality. He had previously done a high-assurance, secure VMM. So, he had been on both sides. [LINK] On backward compatibility, you need to explore lock-in and network effects. These are the strongest drivers of the revenues of the biggest tech firms. Once you get the market with shipping, people will start building on top of and around your solution. They get stuck with it after they do that enough to make it hard to move. Familiarity with language or platform matters here, too. The economics become more monopolistic where you determine just enough additions to keep them from moving. I agree with a commenter there that it needs a OpenVMS tie-in: a great example of Right Thing vs Worse is Better that won in market. While their management was good. ;) It had better security architecture, individual servers went years without reboot, mainframe-like features (eg batch & transactions), cross-language development of apps, clustering in 1980's, more English-like command language, management tech, something like email... the whole kitchen sink all integrated & consistent. Reason was it was a company of engineers making what they themselves would like to use then selling it to others to sustain it. Also mandated qua
That wasn't a hardware limitation. BeOS was outperforming Windows and Mac on the same hardware. If JLG hadn't demanded too much money, Apple would have merged with BeOS (and probably be a distant memory by now but that's a separate issue) this video