BeOS - The Forgotten ‘90s Operating System (Retrospective & Demo)

Ho conosciuto BeOs quando fu presentato al popolo di Amiga, a Milano nel '95/96. Il BeBox dotato di 2 cpu PowerPc a 133Mhz e una Matrox Millennium 4Mb, era una bestia da traino, tutto quello che riusciva a fare lasciando la comunità Amiga con un sogno che avrebbe voluto diventasse realta per chi amava quella splendida macchina incompresa....Ti chiedo come se la versione 5 di BeOs potrebbe funzionare su un PowerMac MDD G4 doppia cpu a 867Mhz senza problemi e a sfruttarne le modalità grafiche a 32bit colore; nel tuo video mi sembra che usassi solo una modalità video a 8bit colore e una risoluzione bassa.....

OS 9 >>>> Windows 98 and below

Jean-Louis Gassée came from Apple, where he headed the Macintosh program. If we would believe his marketeering claims of guilt by association for MS-DOS & Windows 95 and VMS & Windows NT, then by the very same logic, BeOS must be the same 16-bit cooperative multitasking OS as the Mac had at the time.

I’ve used Debian in the 90s as windows 95 was pretty bad

God i hate Microsoft. Like where tf were the feds to ensure an actually free market? Capitalism can't work when you let companies unfairly squash competitive innovation

BIG DEAL!

No love for Bob.

I worked for IBM in the mid 90s. We used win 95 running in OS2.

What I totally was blown away with was BeOS's abilty to play many videos seperately,,but all at once(10,20,30 and even more),,,Awesome memory management unlike any other OS even anything out there today

I was running Redhat and Mandrake back then.

I did not forgot. It was amazing.

Yes,I love computers and I want to learn all history!

I remember seeing it in action at a local computer store and was blown away by the boot speed and performance, too bad it never went anywhere

Yeaaaah, it is reaaaaaaaly amazing, that it was able to change background and also font to some unreadable stuff ... Unbelievable.

BeOS in 1995
B OS in 1996 - 2023

Another victim of Microsoft's anti competitive behavior along with OS/2 and many others in the 90s

I love thise graphs because osxs marketshare wan irrelevant to anyone not using a macsince apple din not lucence their os to thirf parties and the favr rhat apple at the time ran on powerpc which meant it wouldn't run on a standard pc even if they did lisence it, conversly apoart grom windows nt/200 ( which i belive had a powerpc port at some point) to 2 never really competed, come to think of it nt was ported to lots of platforms including things like mips, but thosecare allso not that relevant to the genelar market

I was still a child when BeOS was a thing, I remember using a system extension on our Mac to make the Mac OS UI look like BeOS - intriguing. Also, Macworld and other magazines talked a lot about this system back in the days. Fascinated by it, until today. Interesting what the world could've become ... :)

i never got around to trying BeOS. i got stuck dicking around with linux Mandrake on the side while learning NT and never realized Be was meant for consumers, thought it was more of a Unix type OS/

I can just imagine this video speeding up by .01 everytime he says "Be" or "BeOS"

Nobody forgot about BeOS; it's been legendary since the day it appeared.

I used Opera on BeOS. Still use Opera today as a result.

for the peeple that play progressbar 95 on steam or moble there is beos on the baros tab if you get it beos is b os

But my copy of Softram doesn't work with BeOS! I can't lose half my system memory!

I think in terms of computing devices, desktop computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc, the market has only ever allowed for it to be a three horse race, and by that I mean a two horse race with a third race that barely manages to keep up.
For computers and laptops, it's MacOS and Windows constantly fighting for the top spot with Linux chilling in the back at all times, there have Not been very many other successes in that department, maybe Chrome OS counts as a fourth.
For smartphones, it's even simpler because there's just iOS and Android, if there is a legitimate third horse in that race, please let me know.
I don't think there's really a demand for any more, or at least one hasn't come up that has given us a reason to move away from one of those already established OSs.
Most who have tried to compete with one the OSs I have already mentioned, like Windows Phones, PalmOS, or BeOS, failed at one point or another mostly because they couldn't compete.

Thank you. Always wanted to see a BE OS demo ! Awesome

Man. I kinda want BeOS

It's absolutely ridiculous that Microsoft threw a fit over having BeOS installed as a dual boot with Windows. They weren't even the manufacturer of that computer system. They were an OS maker.

Mez09z😅

Hey.




















You forgot Linux

hope this bas a bios joke

Nothing beats Plan9

The damage microsoft did is irreversible

I like how in BeoS you could move apps over the taskbar,
while Windows and Linux behave as if taskbar is the most important thing on your computer

L I N U X !

i used BeOS in college circa 1998.

wHaT aBoUT lInUX thO?

I was using windows 95 until windows 7 came out as beta 😂

laughable...........anybody that is somebody is on )BSD.................

Hey Michael, I want to thank you for this video. I found it really exciting. The reason why I found it exciting is because I have a passion for unconventional operating systems. And the reason for that passion is because I harbor the belief that the really good operating system of our time hasn't yet been invented. I can see how all the popular OSes have maneuvered themselves into all kinds of dead ends, which results in this absolutely massive waste of CPU and memory resources that is widely accepted as normal nowadays. And the behemoths of organizations that must stand behind those OSes, just so that this enormous amount of complexity of those OSes can be managed and the OSes can always be updated and adapted to modern requirements.

Somehow, I don't believe that's necessary. Some reasonable amount of that complexity is necessary, but not to that absurd amount that we see today. I am rather certain that if we started from scratch and created a simple, modern OS that makes much better use of today's computers which would have beaten every supercomputer from a few decades back, we could come up with an OS that would blow all of today's popular OSes out of the park. And not require a multi-million company behind it. (And yes, even the continued development of the various Linuxes is largely dependent on a constant stream of millions, probably billions of dollars every year.)

Most of the fringe operating systems are interesting, but just too whacky, wonky and buggy to fit into my vision. BeOS however seemed like a good candidate. It wasn't whacky or wonky, and it doesn't seem like it had all that many bugs in it. It actually was a fully-featured operating system, ready for good everyday use.

And I've seen other candidates. Plan 9 was such a great concept, and it worked for a while. Unfortunately it never really took off. Still, I believe that a new modern operating system could learn some lessons from Plan 9.

Another one was NeXTStep, built on the Mach kernel. A ridiculously great operating system; I was absolutely blown away by it when we got those NeXT Cubes at our university in the early 2000s. And lo and behold, NeXTStep had a future! The Mac that I'm typing this comment on right this moment has its OS roots in NeXTStep. It revolutionized Apple's operating system. For a while, MacOS X has been really, really good. Now in the last couple of years, I see it deteriorate in real time.

AmigaOS was great too. All the Amiga games that came on bootable floppies had a very basic operating system on the floppy -- in the boot sector! And it booted in a snap, modulo the floppy disk read time. If you start an Amiga game on a modern emulator, it starts up in the blink of an eye, as long as you allow for maximum hardware CPU and I/O speed. So even back then in the Amiga days, we proved that you can have a simple, basic OS that doesn't take many system resources and boots up fast.

Of course, AmigaOS wouldn't satisfy modern requirements. We need some amount of abstraction and process isolation on modern computers, for a variety of reasons. I don't see how AmigaOS in its old form could have evolved into a modern OS. This line of evolution is much more clear when we look at BeOS, NeXTStep or Plan 9.

Which leaves me with my last question: Do all "good" new operating systems eventually become some variation of Linux? I don't mean that in the literal sense, but more like: Is it inevitable that a good modern OS eventually attracts the complexity of a Linux? Is my hypothetical vision maybe impossible? Is Linux already the end of the line, right at the attractor point that all good OSes will eventually gravitate towards?

I kinda want to end my already very long comment on that question. I don't have a full answer to it, and we're only speaking hypothetically anyways. But I do believe that in order to find a good answer, we need to consider more than just the bare software implementation of the OS. We have to consider graphics cards for example, and the abstraction layers that are already built into the hardware itself -- or rather, the suitability for such abstractions. We have to consider web standards -- the modern web browser has the complexity of a modest OS, just on its own. I can see how HTML, CSS, JavaScript, now WebAssembly and all the sandboxes and browser-internal virtualization have evolved to today's point, where browsers have become extremely resource hungry and hard-to-tame monoliths. But I'm also convinced that if we started from scratch, created a reasonable, contemporary foundation for a "new web" without the historic baggage that current browsers have to carry on their backs, if we somehow managed to undo all the artificial complexity that accumulated in graphics hardware -- then we could create a modern computer and OS that would react fast, use only a fraction of the resources that current computers use and would serve as a foundation for the next few decades. And as a side track, if you think about economy and environmentally friendly computing, that would also be of great use for us all. Why waste all that CPU and network load for Adobe Photoshop to phone home while you're waiting for it to start when we could open a sophisticated image editor within the snap of a finger?

That's my final point that I end this on. And that's why I'm so fascinated with unusual, new operating systems. Thanks for reading my little TED talk.

Brings back memories. I purchased a copy and played around with it. I had one of those black t-shirts too.

I haven't played around with 3D Mix, but knowing about audio mixing theory I would guess that if you load each of those tracks up with an audio file and move the boxes around in 3D it would change the pan and volume of each track to virtually move it around in the 3D space. That would have been a really advanced piece of audio software in the mid 90s.

I actually had forgotten about BeOS and even OS/2

I’m loving that wall lol. 😂

As beos investor, actually got few dollars from Microsoft was a shock. Was hope apple select beos than next. Be was more compatible with Mac than next and superior IMHO.

Ah, the ‘90s, my golden years when it came to hacking and computing stuff in general. I used to run Sun server at home, later on used FreeBSD, of course I was also using Windows, Linux and I tried BeOS… it was fun. I even tried another OS, but I can’t remember the name, I think it was a RTOS for music… my memory is getting old, I can’t remember the name. But yeah, back then it was just fun to learn new OS, running server daemon to have my own IRC server, my own FTP and such, back then it was a huge deal (it was well before P2P, but it was after Amiga and Atari Mega ST for Soundtrackers… the old days of 8 bits music song for cracked installers, etc…). Of course, that’s the old days, now I just use a Mac and everything is bought and legit, no more “Warez” stuff… I’m not even sure they still exist since now we can get pretty much everything with a subscription anyway. But still, it was a good time to test stuff, try new OS

BeOS was astounding.

That Dell monitor, do you mind sharing the model please?