Increasingly Desperate Attempts to run BeOS on PowerPC

[@nickwallette6201]

This one _still_ hurts, 20 years later. I was heartbroken when Be, Inc. folded. F.

[@tenminutetokyo2643]

I still have my original Be T-shirt from back in the day.

[@GrymWorks-A.I.]

As someone who has several explorer windows open most times I'd love that tabbed browsing in Windows.

[@Cowclops]

I remember having installed BeOS on my PC in the early 2000s and then realizing there's nearly nothing you could do with it because there was no software. And it didn't support whichever NIC I was using at the time so couldn't even go on the internet. So I made the joke, "BeOS: Great multithreading support so you can run all zero of its applications at the same!"

[@alerey4363]

that's true but from an OS point of view Be made your PPC apple hardware really perform! the multimedia, multitasking, protected memory capabilities were light years apart from apple's crappy classic 8 and 9 os (with their dreaded Type 11 errors randomly bombing you everyday). Gasse inflated ego probably was the reason Be got never adopted by a major industry player so without software development it became a practically useless os.

[@denniseldridge2936]

My experience with BeOS was at a radio station of all places. Apparently someone developed a program which was basically a music database for radio stations, supposedly quite popular in the industry. I will say that it really did look like it had some potential, but I guess that French company was just too greedy.

[@Cowclops]

@@denniseldridge2936 Thats pretty interesting, probably the first time i've ever heard of BeOS being used in a "production" environment even if its a simple task. Seems like a thing you could have handled just as well on win3.1 or something, not to mention any later OS. Probably just a pet project for the developer.

[@finkelmana]

I had a similar experience in the late 90s. There was just nothing worth running on it.

[@finkelmana]

@@Cowclops No, this was a thing. Ive heard many radio stations used a commercial app written specifically for BeOS.

[@JoshColletta]

One of the things that has always interested me about BeOS is that it was pushed as a multimedia-focused operating system, and if they had managed to attract developers of high-end media production software, they could have succeeded. In fact, I spent most of my life in radio, and there's a radio automation system called TuneTracker that originally started out exactly that way: it was originally written for BeOS. Unfortunately, that company came along just as Be was taking a nosedive, so they attempted to use BeOS for as long as possible while Haiku matured enough to make it a stable OS usable in a professional broadcasting environment. It's a bit inconvenient to have your automation system running on a different OS than everything else, but much like Rivendell on Linux, it's developed a following... especially since it's a relatively inexpensive alternative to the major players in the automation market.

[@NJRoadfan]

I managed to get BeOS 5 PPC working on a 8600 with a G4-450Mhz card. The secret was to not run MacOS 8.6 or later. Apple broke the BeOS bootloader! Install a stock copy of something like 8.1 and start from there. BeOS runs like greased lightning on a G4. You know what is really annoying? I actually bought a copy of 4.5 and I didn't get those cool stickers!

[@memsom]

I can confirm this!! You can even hack the 8.1 disk utility floppy to make BeOS boot on a Mac with minimal MacOS. I think, 2MB partition.

[@salvadorlimones1811]

If I remember correctly, the Power Mac 8500 and 9500 are on the compatibility list. A few years ago I managed to get ver 5 running on a 9600 with a 300 MHz G3. The only problem was the video card. I ended up running it with 2 monitors hooked up to separate video cards - one with Mac firmware for booting the computer, and a second PC video card that supported higher resolutions and color depth.

[@nickwallette6201]

@@salvadorlimones1811 Can confirm. I have an 8500 running 4.5, and a 9500 running R5. They installed and ran without incident. I also have R5 running on a Pentium II 350MHz, and an Abit dual Celeron. On computers it likes, it’s absolutely flawless and will run for months straight without a reboot. It is a real dream to use. On computers it doesn’t like, it’ll hang randomly at boot, just after boot, or halfway through installing. Don’t bother, just find another PC.

[@egbront1506]

Ding ding! I found this out by trial and error back in the day after getting nowhere fast.

[@VeronicaExplains]

This was so much fun!! I remember a few of these Mac clones rattling around in my middle school. Most of the rooms had regular Power Macs but a few had these. I've wondered what kind of buying situation led to that. Also, the auto-tabbing in BeOS is really neat. I can think of a few modern Linux WMs that could use that!

[@michelefrau6072]

Stack and tile is a feature that BeOS didn't had in its days, it's been initially developed as a student project of Auckland university, then eventually merged into the official branch of HaikuOS; basically holding "super" key you can stack every windows to have a multi tabbed interface, but you can tile them too similarly to pop-os PS Nice channel, subscribed

[@fc3sbob]

BeOS 4.5, I saved up my pennies from my first job and purchased BeOS in the mid 90's, It was AMAZING. My really slow Sony Laptop could play every video I had at the same time somehow, where in windows it struggled to play ONE of them. Also, I bought a Mac just to run it but it wasn't compatible with the mac I had. I was SO STOKED to see where BeOS was heading I thought it was going to take over but it died shortly after BeOS 5, I couldn't believe it. It was so amazing. I was so sad it fell off the map. It was meant for more :( That being said HAIKU is AWESOME, I had it running on a bunch of old machines. I haven't tried it out in many years though. I will see how the newest release is coming along. They NEED to get this ported over to Raspberry Pi ASAP, People will love it for those.

[@eekee6034]

I love hearing about old OSs that worked well. :) I used Plan 9 From Bell Labs for about 10 years; no video but remarkably simple to network. Can I quote your experience on the OSdev forums?

[@kotyz85]

BeOS was built for multimedia

[@eMorphized]

@@eekee6034 It should be possible to port the Unix/BSD codecs to Plan9, or at least to 9Front

[@alc5440]

I remember running this on my PC when the free BeOS Personal was a thing. There were literally zero programs for it but it installed super easily, was stupid fast, and even had winmodem support (we still had dial up).

[@KittyFae-]

Yeah for sure. I always booted in to BeOS to connect to the web, my winmodem was way faster in Be than I could ever get it in Windows or Linux.

[@lasskinn474]

@@vardekpetrovic9716 yeah for dano too lots of sw and drivers. Not that many games and such but for second pc on trash hw for the time it was okay.

[@adrianmcgrath3107]

BeOS was a great platform for learning to program C++ back in the day. BeOS still looks modern today. Thanks for mentioning HaikuOS, it's a great looking OS and run great on old PC HW - there's loads of software available for it too.

[@AmyGrrl78]

That Star Trek Hello Computer bit was great! I chuckled for a good 2 minutes after.

[@vikingnoise]

Keyboard. How quaint.

[@joshhardin666]

I ran the intel version of beos 5 in 2001 and it was absolutely amazing. the real benefits of beos were the task scheduler (full multithreaded preemptive multitasking during a time where that simply didn't exist outside of expensive "strange"-hardware unix workstations (like sgi's for example), the graphics subsystem (fully accelerated opengl on supported gpus of which there was a fair number), and a file system that was fully journaling (which was kind of a new tech at the time), and was a complete fully-relational metadata database that was searchable (I've been waiting for others to create a file system like this for some time, but the only other one i'm aware of that uses or can use that kind of thing is microsoft's storage spaces which is super jank, though microsoft has it's unreleased winfs which was trying to do the same thing but never came to fruition, and also it's extremely easy to use graphical interface which you touched on with the locking and unlocking tab system, the pluggable beos tracker, and the ABSOLUTE MAGIC of watching these technologies work together to deliver an os experience that felt WICKED FAST at the time, even when running several heavy applications at once... it utilized adaptive pipelining technologies with it's unique, really-well-tuned scheduler to make a box as responsive as it can be... we're just now seeing some of these optimizations come to modern operating systems on the windows and linux, and os x fronts, but many of the implementations of these ideas are again, very janky modules stacked on traditional os pieces whereas the be system was simply... simple and streamlined. it was way ahead of it's time, and if be didn't ask for so much money when apple tried to license them, i'm positive that be would be os x instead of nextstep being os x.

[@kaitlyn__L]

Absolutely, even Grand Central Dispatch isn’t as good as Be’s was. And IME GCD is better at scheduling than Windows, Linux, or freeBSD. It’s a shame it’s still just a small “hobby OS”. The way it supported tons of file systems and network shares is still quite impressive too, but amazing for its time. I could see Be allowing for multimedia production environments, if only it had been adopted. If it became Mac, I’m sure it would’ve.

[@egmccann]

man. I liked BeOS back in the day. Had it installed, played with it a bunch but.... had nothing to run on it, which was its biggest problem. It installed nicely on my PC and just did its thing. Really wish we'd had more stuff ported over or developed for it.

[@eMorphized]

Haiku is FOSS, so it shouldn't be that much of an issue porting over Linux software (probably even easier for BSD software).

[@btsr2553]

Thank you 🙏 very much for this clip and all your efforts. My very esteemed colleague, at 11:35 you made my crappy day. When you spoke into the mouse like Scotty, I was under my desk laughing.😂 It happened to me once quite similarly. I tried to install OS/2 2.0 on a 286 with some f?cking antediluvian pre whatever 386 extension card and 4 MB main memory on a 20MB RLL or MFM (not IDE) controlled double height hard disk. After about 4 hours and 30 minutes and over 20 3.5 inch floppies I was able to restart the system. After another 4 hours I was able to move the mouse pointer for appr. 1 cm. The system was for whatever reason not frozen. The performance of this system was slow motion in slow motion in slow motion. Unfortunately it was not my last OS/2 installation. But the very last one on this system. Thanks again, stay safe please. Best wishes from Bavaria

[@TheRetroRoadshow]

I became *obsessed* with BeOS and the BeBox after seeing them featured in a magazine (maybe WiRED?) in the mid-1990's. It took me another ~10 years, but somewhere around 2006 I lucked out and purchased a mostly-functional Dual 66MHz BeBox on eBay for not too much money. I still have it, and consider it one of the 'Crown Jewels' of my retro collection. Weirdly, the "blinkenlights" on the front of my BeBox bounce up-and-down once at POST, and then never again, even after a full OS reinstall. I need to partner with someone who knows these machines (and/or electronics repair) well enough to diagnose and fix it! If anyone has a suggestion, I'd be grateful... Awesome video, Sean! I hope you return to this experiment - I'd love to see that setup from the pic brought back to life in 202X 🙂

[@alerey4363]

9:01 I remember back in the day when using MacOS 8/9 if you dragged a (properly built) 3rd party extension to the closed System Folder, the system opened a pop-up window asking if you want it inside the Extensions folder; other not so well designed extensions you need to manually drag it inside the Extensions folder, by navigating your way inside the System folder.Just my 2 cents for "extension installing" on classic macos; otherwise by misplacing the extension you can get the dreaded 💣 on restart

[@SpikeGrobstein]

I used to run beOS off a jaz drive on my old 7600/132 back in the late 90s. I loved it so much and it was my first introduction to posix and unixy commandline shells. I fell in love with it after seeing gasee demo it at Macworld east 1997 where they handed out the pr2 disk. Im surprised you had so much trouble since it was so easy for 16 year old me who wasn't terribly technical yet.

[@paulyearley1084]

In 1999-2000, I had a friend in college who was a BEOS *evangelist* even though by then BeBoxes were hard to come by. I dual-booted it for a little bit on my regular PC to fool around with, and it was nice to use tbh, lackluster software support aside.

[@BuddhaPhi]

I still kick myself for not bidding on a cheap pallet of BeBoxes when eBay was very new. I think there were 7 or 8 of them from a university and the final auction price was a few hundred dollars.

[@baconfister]

I’ve been there before with the endless hours of frustration, and experimenting with every possible hardware configuration tested. Thanks for putting in the effort, much appreciate your videos.

[@MisutaaAsriel]

11:35 Nice Star Trek reference :)

[@vividimagination2044]

That tabbed thing is actually a very good idea. This would make for an excellent window manager feature!

[@Shaggy0f138]

The tabbed window manager was really nice. The virtual desktops that allowed independent resolutions and color depth was also handy.

[@eMorphized]

It is a very nice wm feature. It's standard on some i3 builds, and suckless' "tabs" app can add them to most other wms.

[@DerekLippold]

Haiku does it and it is nice especially if you’re like me and open a million things at once 😂

[@badstate]

Be os was astonishing for it's time. I used to live a couple miles from their office and was able to go in for a demo. Dragging six video files to the sides of a rotatable cube and have them all playing at the same time blew my mind.

[@lemagreengreen]

My only experience with BeOS was late 90s with the R5 version, like a lot of geeks of the time I suppose. I remember it being something neat that we all installed and played about with, it was an era where we liked to experiment with desktop operating systems and BeOS was curiously polished from memory, I remember it just working very well on x86. I had no idea of its history though and I'd say it's a shame they missed out on it being the Mac OS . QNX was another curiosity from the same time, it was absurdly small and feature packed.

[@bakkus82]

I remember doing my absolute best to run BeOS 5 PE (which I got from a CD with a computer magazine - remember those? :P ) as my daily driver back in the early 2000s. It made my Cyrix 266MHz absolutely fly! And for a while it actually looked like a good contender on the OS market. You could even get an official build of the Opera browser for it. Totally planning on trying out BeOS 4.5 PPC on my 4400 once it arrives from Japan.

[@memsom]

Just run R5 PPC, it is basically the same as R5 on intel.

[@bakkus82]

@@memsom I momentarily forgot they actually did release a PPC build of R5. You're right of course, R5 was a much more useful OS.

[@gentuxable]

Yeah I remember computer magazine CDs. My library close to school even lent out the former issues of PC-Welt including the CD. I was always there to get it and copy over all the nice software from those CDs. Sometimes I bought an issue with my pocket money but that was rather expensive comparatively so I took them when we went to shopping with my parents.

[@DavidRavenMoon]

My PowerComputing PowerCenter 132 came with a BeOS install disk. I remember being shocked with how quickly it booted! And you started it right inside Mac OS. Now I run Haiku in VMWare.

[@RichsRandomRetroReviews]

I LOVE THIS VIDEO! I love BeOS and everything about BeOS. Awesome video!

[@stephenbridges2791]

Got my first computer when I was 50. My sister gave me a G3 iMac with OS9 on it. Had a cathode ray display and a whopping 8Gb hard drive. I remember thinking how cool I thought it was. Kept it for a long time. Even after I upgraded to MacBook Pro's. Anything related to Apple from the late 90's and early 00's is a stroll down memory lane. Cool video.

[@dionelr]

I feel like Action Retro is one ancient Mac away from turning into an super villain.

[@ManChicken]

I had an original BeBox (the blue/grey one, not the blue/red one.) Cool machine, great new OS, very fun to program for. Such a shame it didn't grab on 😕

[@otopico]

I always wanted to play with the huge connector, it was called the Nerd Port or something. The og BeBox with the leds running up the front made my young nerd URGE to maybe get to use one. I never did. :{ Never forget the teAPOT!

[@memsom]

@@otopico geek port.

[@otopico]

@@memsom thank you. I know I could have googled it, but I appreciate the answer. It was a very different time in personal computers and what manufacturers intended the purpose of the machines to be. I miss those days.

[@lactobacillusprime]

I found it easier to install it on PC hardware back in the day - despite it only supporting a subset of PC hardware. I was quite a fan of BeOS and have used it quite extensively on a secundary machine back in the day. And you did find Haiku - An open source offshoot of this OS is actually still in active development.

[@kotyz85]

Haiku has a ton of opensource software ported to it - vlc, libre office, telegram, some games. mostly qt/kde apps. but where is lacking, is web browsers - no firefox or chromium, just webpositive. compatibility with modern javascript-heavy websites is not great.

[@lasskinn474]

I ran beos dano for couple of years on a second computer to play mp3's and irc and stuff. it was pretty rock solid. well, sometimes the audio subsystem crashed but you could restart it without restarting the whole pc, so I had uptimes of like half a year plus straight on it(that's half a year no rebooting with daily usage).

[@eMorphized]

Microkernels are the best

[@TheAtariSan]

Been following Haiku since 2011, it's a work of love and dedication that spawn across 2 decades. It can possibly have a good future has a niche OS, unlike OpenIndiana.

[@memsom]

I would just try installing it on a regular Mac (7300, 8500 or 9500) as this will work a lot better. I have it running on multiple Macs (9500 180/mp and Umax C500) and it is pretty easy to install if you have a good CD. Problem is, a lot of the CDs are bad now and the file system BeOS used is very unforgiving if the CD is corrupted. I sent you a message via Facebook, message me back if you want help.

[@EricsEdgeVideos]

I remember trying the "free" version of BeOS when it became available. I've thought about trying Haiku if I ever get around to it.

[@robert1975031]

Me too, a great os even if the program library was limited. and what could have been quite the contender. had it dual booting with windows , but like most, eventually I was booting into windows more than BEOS. I also have a haiku iso around, I need to try it as well..

[@memsom]

Haiku is a whole other beast. It has a lot more software.

[@kotyz85]

Haiku works great in VM, installing on real HW can be problematic because of lack of device drivers.

[@kotyz85]

@@memsom it's mostly ported from linux, multiplatform opensource software which is also available on windows and os x. like vlc, libre office. and you will have newer versions than in most linux distributions. but it's still a single-user os, like win 9x. and there is no firefox or chromium for haiku.

[@guillaumegaudin694]

1:40 oh my god, those were dreamy specs back in 95 !

[@pedrohqb]

I absolutely loved BeOS. Still do. For me, if Haiku has a chance to thrive is on ARM and RISC V CPUs. Clean, functional, beautiful without many whistles, lightweight OS.

[@kotyz85]

Haiku ARM port is no longer maintained, but RISC-V port is in working state. PPC port seems completely abandoned.

[@WooShell]

I remember BeOS fondly.. ran R4 and R5 on one of my PCs for quite a long time. There was a sizable community porting all kinds of linux games over to it, and it performed great on a 233 MHz Pentium MMX, especially with media stuff. Significantly better than Win98 at that time.

[@broimnotyourbro]

FWIW, this is accurate retro content. It perfectly matches my recollection of getting BeOS up and running on an old Mac clone in the 90s. "And it froze."

[@perpetualcollapse]

Understandable, have a nice day.

[@amirpourghoureiyan1637]

Definitely got the authentic 90s install experience in this vid 😉

[@memsom]

Not for BeOS on PowerPC. It really did just install and work.

[@photoniccannon2117]

I can’t imagine a 1995 computer with 1GB of RAM, a 1GHZ CPU, and a SATA SSD. That would have been looked at with quite some suspicion I imagine. 😂

[@bakkus82]

"A processor at one THOUSAND megahertz? Hah! Fantasies! Maybe in the year 2000"

[@chumbusthings]

Always a good day when Action Uploads!

[@Chriva]

It looks like that supermac chassis is built on the same frame as early dell p2-era xps machines. Exact same mold mark on the side and the inner metal frame is identical. So weird to see :D Edit the next day: I unearthed the old behemoth and compared against your video and pictures on the net. It's 100% based on the same chassis that xps D266 and the likes used.

[@quayzar1]

I have a 1 GHz PIII in that same chassis. I believe it was the last Dell to use it.

[@otopico]

I loved the BeOS while we had it. With the right hardware you could make a homebrew BeBox sing. I hate the ear icon thing. BeOS was a good name.

[@ArniesTech]

I absolutely LOVE Retro machines and retro software. 😊🙏

[@residentauditofficer2166]

I really liked BeOS , using Haiku OS for nostalgia

[@Sir_Uncle_Ned]

This is the aspect of computing that I don't miss. No need to meddle with jumpers, switches, configuration files, command line prompts, and all that stuff. You can just slap together some hardware and as long as it complies with the standards, it works.

[@cwaldrip]

I remember drooling over BeOS demos back in the day. But had nothing I could spare to test it on. Man, I wonder what BeOS would be like today with the competition from MacOS X.

[@tenminutetokyo2643]

Haiku OS Project.

[@rhysholdaway]

Now you've got to check out OS/2 Warp PowerPC Edition! 😁

[@DamianMontero]

I’d buy that for a dollar!!!

[@bakkus82]

Compatible with exactly 4 computers. Still - yes!

[@rhysholdaway]

@@bakkus82 There was also Windows NT for PPC. Think same thing. Limited hardware. Imagine the alternative future.

[@brashmandicoot]

I built a dual Celeron PC based on the hardware compatibility list for BeOS R4 and it was a great experience. I really miss this OS, the R4.5 days were really the best.

[@gentuxable]

BeOS 5 Personal for PCs came free on some german IT magazine CDs sometimes in the 2000s. I had no issues running it on a Pentium 150 back then and was pleased how well it handled things like a WinTV card. It's like the opposite of iTunes, on Windows it was just running an installer, if I remember correctly and it would create an image and then it would either reboot changing autoexec or just shutdown windows and run it from DOS. But it worked like a charm.

[@slembcke]

I had a friend with BeOS on his PPC Mac in the 90's. It seemed pretty neat, but I never really got to dig into it. I've spent a few weekends playing with Haiku, compiling a bunch of my software for it, etc. It seems really neat!

[@schmutz1g]

Awww man, this brought back some serious mid/late 90s vibes.. spent many many hours trying to trouble shoot software and hardware to make things work lol.. many blue screens, freezes, crashes, and frustrating hours.. Good times

[@brianarmstrong234]

I can echo much of the love of trying BeOS in the late 90s. I use to think that Apple had missed out by picking NeXTSTEP but after I got a chance to try a build from late 1996, I realized that the BeOS in the state that it was in late 1996 could not really compare to what NeXTSTEP was offering to Apple at the time. All it had that was truly breath taking was its multi-CPU support and its journaled BFS filesystem with extensible metadata support. But in late 1996 BeOS still could not produce a printed page which for Apple was not a good thing given their market share in Desktop Publishing areas. NeXTSTEP was the pragmatic choice since it was a complete solution and was not an OS that was still had core needed features under development.

[@aegisofhonor]

I still have all my Mac User, Mac World, and Mac Addict magazines from that time that talked about the Mac clones and even Be OS, Next OS, Copeland and everything in between. It was very interesting reading back in the day. From what I remember, Be OS was created by a former Apple President and CEO and mostly existed in a niche business market in Europe and never took off in the US to any major level. Complete original "Be" systems are very rare in the United States (though significantly more common in Europe as that was the market they originally launched had by far the most success as complete systems) and are considered rare collectables due to their history and obscurity.

[@thisisreallyme3130]

Fond memories running BeOS on a Mac "clone" circa 1997. For a time pre-OS X, it was really nice to have an advanced UNIX-like OS where the OS just worked, multitasking, and OpenGL.

[@DerekWitt]

11:35 - "Hello, computer?" "Just use the keyboard." "Ah, the keyboard. How quaint!" *frantic typing* Transparent aluminum!

[@klonkk]

I grabbed a Roland / Edirol DV-7 video editor from a Japanese junk store a couple of years ago for pennies. Turns out it worked, just required a bit of fiddling. And lo and behold...it runs on BeOS!

[@timothyp8947]

I never knew BeOS ran on Macs - thought BeBox was the only PPC machine it ran on. I still have my boxed copies of BeOS for Intel machines. It was quite fun in its own way, and very zippy. It was the only OS I’ve ever used where it booted in around 10s (well, after the BIOS initialisation did it’s stuff, which was probably longer). Seem to remember that was a Pentium 75MHz but my memory is a bit blurry on that now. May well have had that machine multi-booting Windows, BeOS, NeXT/Openstep and Linux - a collector of obscure OSs in the days before virtual machines on Intel boxes made that easier. When it came to using Be on PC, it had some pretty novel features and was mostly stable, although would deadlock. Of course, multi-processor Intel boxes at home were unheard of then so Be's 'pervasive multi-threading' couldn’t show that off till much later. It had the POSIX APIs so was relatively easy to port Unix stuff, at least for text-only apps. Replicants was an odd feature and the file system had usability features streets ahead of what we have even now.

[@andre-le-bone-aparte]

Question: Can we donate to this video? We want to ease the suffering that you endured during this painful install. You have saved all of us countles DAYS of attempting to do this.

[@scottgfx]

I can feel my experience with the Power Macs of that era in this video. I called it "SCSI VooDoo". I built a chain of SCSI devices on a PowerMac 8100-80 that was so fragile. It took me months to get it so all of the devices were stable. SCSI relies on proper termination of the signals. That's a lot of resistor packs! Lots of points of failure! But yeah, I had BeOS on both my PowerWave 604|120 and PCs for a little while. Apple tried to get BeOS cheaper than they were offering, but ended up buying NeXT for a lot more money than the BeOS price.

[@michaelmarks1391]

All right, "Groan" on the whiteboard got me. Subscribed.

[@livefreeprintguns]

Just when I couldn't love your content enough (and for being a homie who shouts out OpenBSD), you go ahead and make a video on literally the holy grail of operating systems for me. I tried Haiku once but I want the real thing.

[@SkepticalCaveman]

BeOS, the best OS ever made by far. Haiku is nearing a stable release, so I can finally go back to using it daily again. Hopefully the ARM and RISC-V ports also will be stable so the OS will have a bright future.

[@ohareport]

such a good video title. make it an essay!

[@jaumesinglavalls5486]

I would love to see haiku growing popularity, and I would love to see them runing in a rpi 4.

[@krzbrew]

Nice video as always

[@draggonhedd]

PSU in the powercomputing unit is just ATX pretty sure. I replaced the psu in my powercenter pro with a standard modern ATX unit.

[@SergioEduP]

I personally believe that white board guy would have been able to succeed in installing BeOS, even though he doesn't speak he says so much, and I believe that his technical knowledge is far superior that of us mere mortals.

[@Texasfrank512]

That was a pretty good Kirk impression @11:10... Khaaaaaaannnnnn!

[@pum6454]

I'd love to see the fully upgraded mac clone running haiku os, it's such a unique os to learn about and it'd be fun to see what you can do with it

[@johncate9541]

And now you know why BeOS did not become Mac OS X. It was well known that it still needed a lot of development before it could have been rolled out as a new Mac OS, which is why Apple wasn't going to let Jean-Louis Gassee hold them hostage. NeXT was already an established product that had been commercially sold for several years. They would have gladly paid Gassee well, but he made ridiculous demands for an unfinished OS that didn't even always work when it was supposed to. Haiku was able to happen because Be open-sourced the Tracker right before they went under. The team behind Haiku ran with that and then just used the documentation for the APIs to reverse-engineer the rest, over a period of about 20 years.

[@memsom]

I think it would have been fine because MacOS X took years to be viable. The think you need to realise is, half the Be Engineering team ended up on the Android team, and others did just as interesting things. Dominic Giampaolo did BFS but also APFS for example.

[@livefreeprintguns]

Any window manager I used under *NIX I always first tried to hunt down a BeOS theme. That was my main theme for years on WindowMaker when I first started on Slackware back in the mid-90's.

[@dsteiersteier2026]

Did you check the installation CD to see if there were scratchs on it?

[@sjk5845]

I really need to see the BeOS logo with angry eyes as a recurring villain in your videos

[@karolisr]

It just wasn’t meant to BE.

[@sarreqteryx]

side-note: WebOS is partially based on BeOS, by way of PalmOS. edit: BeOS could not dock its tabs, that's a recent-ish addition to Haiku. you'd think it's an obvious feature, but Be hadn't thought it up.

[@yueibm]

I installed the free version of BeOS onto my IBM Aptiva with an AMD K6-II at 350MHz in the late 90s / early 2000s, and I was amazed at how fast and easy it was to set up. Of course my winmodem at the time wasn't supported but it was incredible to see how a Windows alternative could be so good and easy (not to rub it in for the PPC side).

[@jrdavis1992]

I'm not sure if this has been tested... Have you tried using QEMU?

[@boneske]

I can only imagine the hair pulling you were going through to try to get it up and running, it reminds me of trying to get ReactOS running on real hardware. The only time I've had an issue with BeOS R5 personal edition was when I installed it in VMware, I can't find a good video driver to get color resolution. BeOS R5 PE runs great on my old Pentium III computers I currently have them installed on. I've been following Haiku since 2001(back when it was called OpenBeOS). My current Haiku rig is a hyper threading Pentium 4 Dell desktop. It runs ok, but the CPU gets taxed pretty hard when trying to run LibreOffice or other more modern applications. Still fun to play with it on that machine though.

[@donatj]

I tried ReactOS maybe 4 years ago on real hardware and it worked fine first try. It was a little unstable but I was delighted. About a month ago I tried a newer release on the same hardware and could not get the dang thing to boot at all.

[@memsom]

The PowerPC version really wasn’t any issue to install. The hardware was limited and what it supported it supported. This seems like a bad CD or bad hardware. My R4.5 CD still works fine, but my R5 one is toast. The CDs of that era are terrible for bitrot.

[@musicalimarc]

I purchased a power tower pro just weeks before Steve announced the end of cloning at Macworld Boston in 1998. I’d actually wanted a power Mac 9600 but was way out of my price range. Ultimately, it did a good job for a few years. I ran it with a media100 editing card.

[@bfrancis9898]

ADB mice are great when they work. I had nightmares with BeOS too. I used a PowerMac 4400 with an L2 G3 upgrade and it would randomly freeze, sometimes after working well for hours. Eventually I tried other mice and the problem went away. Rock solid. I don’t have that Mac anymore but do have BeOS on a 7300 and a BeBox. When you find the combination of supported hardware it’s a great experience.

[@saturdaysequalsyouth]

Those first 2 computers are increadibly clean for being almost 30 years old.

[@pjf7044]

I was 13 when I first ran beos. At the time I was into midi sequencing and beos was seen as a superior platform for running multimedia or audio production software

[@derekw6811]

I used to run PR2 and R3 on my PowerMac 6500. It was easy.

[@iSamYTBackup]

was it worth it? Perhaps

[@ArmyK9]

That is insane. You can play minecraft on it? Wow! hahahaha, that is so kickass! I got a copy of BeOS from a computer magazine that came with a CD, back in the 90s. I did install BeOS for awhile but due to lack of software stopped using it after 2 months. I still remember BeOS, brings back so many childhood memories for me.

[@Mantikal]

I tried installing this - following some YT videos - but it would freeze at boot up - just the logo but nothing more. I tried it on 3 different PCs that I have but it would freeze at boot on all of them. I installed it on another drive and tried it again on all three PCs again - but it would also freeze at boot up.

[@ulissesdecastro]

I already installed BeOS in my PC, but it didn't work with dial-up model.

[@CDE.Hacker]

I ran BE on my Power macintosh 9500 before Jobs came back. It did have a nice feel and was very Mac like. But as mentioned before, no software. The next stuff never ported so it was pretty much useless. It was supposed to have compartmentalize memory so it wouldn't crash the system. But it was not stable as you can tell by just the install. Although I didn't have problems installing it it was just buggy as hell. Thanks for the video it brought back a lot of memories.

[@memsom]

BeOS was running with full memory protection and multiprocessor support. I also ran it on a 9500 with dual 604e’s and it used both processors at the same time - unlike MacOS that struggled to ever use the second processor. It was stable. The issues were mostly that there was no software.

[@elhombre2711]

I've got Power PC iMac sitting in a cupboard. I wonder of I could get BeOS running on that?

[@retr0bits545]

Action Retro. I remember making a comment about a PowerBook 520, I finally got around to it and the HDD cannot be detected except with the Mac OS 8.1 CD. Unfortunately, it seems that whatever data is on the drive might be corrupted to the point of reinitializing the drive. Do you have any recommendations on a HDD alternative for the Apple 2.5 inch hard drives?

[@ArmyK9]

Omg, how did you even find the old CRT monitor? I've thrown mine out like 15 years ago!

[@Nossieuk]

upgrade it to Haiku if it has a PPC port?

[@AndreDeLimburger]

How much RAM is in the machine? I recall that BeOS R5 Personal Edition on the PC has problems booting if there is too much RAM in there.

[@TheducksOrg]

I remember getting one of the preview releases running on my PowerMac 5500 back in the day. I liked it, but it wasn't stable enough for long term use, and I had to wipe the PRAM after every boot as it stopped the internal display from showing all the resolutions.

[@cypresstwist]

I was a BeOS user for about 2 years. Used it exclusively. Knew the OS by heart - every nook and cranny.

[@teekay_1]

I think I have BeOS x86 around here somewhere, which was a bit fussy to install, but as Cowclops points out, there was no software to run, and it didn't recognize many network cards. I think I have NeXT x86 around here.....

[@laialbert]

Back in the day, I had a PowerTower Pro 225 and installed BeOS to play with it, but couldn’t find any practical reason to have it. It was very cool and blazing fast though. I also had a broken BeBox that I was never able to fix.

[@squeeeb]

A valiant effort. Those BeBox machines seem pretty neat, they had dual LED strips on the case that would correspond with the CPU usage (or so I've read).

[@NeverlandSystemZor]

Having run BeOS on an Intel PC years ago (I did actually buy a copy to play with)... I am glad they went with BSD as the backbone of OSX instead of Be.