An actual demo video for BeOS! I remember reading a lot of magazine articles about it, and I tried their x86 downloadable version in the later era of BeOS when they were flailing around for an alternate market, but this is the first time I’ve seen video promotional material for it.
Some thoughts:
- The intro was weirdly disappointing from a modern perspective. Reading about symmetric multiprocessing in PC Magazine was exciting. Seeing some guys in an office and going oh, it was just another Menlo Park startup is depressing.
- Half the stuff they tout in the video is so mundane I forgot it used to be an actual issue (playing music while doing literally anything else on the computer without it skipping) and half of it is genuinely impressive (streaming a bunch of audio tracks from disk with various spatial filters being adjusted in real time.)
- BeOS let you set a different color depth on each virtual desktop so you could easily preview your work at 256 colors vs 64k colors vs millions of colors. This is completely wild. I had no idea it could do that. I’ve never heard of another OS that supported this.
...most of our residual interest in computers and programming died with it. we are only getting back into things extremely slowly, after a couple decades.
it felt like the last gasp of a certain...I dunno, style of computing where it was expected that your OS would have everything you needed to play with it, including documentation for its own API, all ready to go, with a minimum of muss and fuss. and no, I don't think any Linux experience I've had is even remotely like that.
~Chara
we ran BeOS on our laptop in college for a while and it was really good. there was an IM client wherein your buddy list was just a file browser window pointed at your contacts, and the backend daemon manipulated those files according to their online status, because the filesystem was a true database and this was supported
BeOS could have been the post Classic future of Apple, but they bought NeXT instead...
I think its polish and usability improved with time but my interest in Apple machines withered once Steve Jobs came back and the operating system turned into this "lickable" thing that honestly looked and behaved more someone reskinned Windows than anything I felt was really Mac-like. "hey look the window buttons are red yellow and green like traffic lights! and they're all close together so you can hit the wrong one accidentally!!" "so, what's the advantage of this new arrangement?" "....they're lickable! and they look like traffic lights!"
I guess we're dating ourselves here. we were genuinely fond of 1990s Apple, which at least seemed like they were interested in innovation sometimes instead of slick repackaging.
~Chara
