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

[@robbirobson7330]

BeOS was a great OS, there was a demonstration where they played 13 mp3 songs simultaneously on a pentium 100 or 133 or so where windows could barely manage to play one without stuttering.

[@bdwilcox]

Or played six videos simultaneously, each on a different side of a 3D spinning cube. all in real time.

[@paco3523]

That's weird, wouldn't it be a CPU limitation?

[@tbuk8350]

@@paco3523 Windows, even now, has a notorious amount of overhead. It's why 96.3% of the top 1,000,000 servers run on Linux. Linux is simply better for handling a crap ton of things at once, as there is significantly less overhead. Even though BeOS wasn't Linux, I'm sure when designing it they were able to cut down on overhead, and given that it was a media-focused OS, I bet they designed everything around doing that. The problem with Windows is that it is not specialized and tries to do everything at once, so it needs tons of compatibility layers, security layers, telemetry, etc. It's what makes Windows both amazing and terrible. It's incredibly easy to use, 99% of the time Windows just works (unlike Linux which often needs tons of manual fixes to get things running), but it also means performance takes a large hit, it's not all magic. Linux on the other hand (and BeOS for that matter) can be, and are highly specialized. Linux can be specialized for basically anything because of how open it is, which is why it's used for server tasks (even Windows Server isn't really that specialized). BeOS was specialized for media use, so they could focus development on getting that to work over other tasks. This means if you wanted a computer that could do everything, BeOS probably wasn't a great choice, while something like MacOS or Windows was incredibly popular because it could do everything. Linux was around at the time, but like now it was mostly for web use, as Linux is exceptionally good at handling large amounts of requests, and is an incredibly scalable OS. There's a reason it's so popular for this. BeOS didn't really have a market, nobody wanted an OS that could play 13 mp3's simultaneously because there was no purpose for it. tl;dr BeOS was purpose-built to be able to handle media. Windows on the other hand, which was designed to do basically everything, has to have a lot of overhead to be able to do a wide range of tasks, therefore you lose some performance. It's similar to how Linux can be faster for specific tasks, and why it's so popular on embedded hardware. Linux is very open and can be either stripped down to nothing but a basic OS, purpose-built to do one thing incredibly well, or generalized like Windows (although it's usually not great at that). When you build an OS to do one thing, you don't have to worry about the overhead of doing other things. It's like how the NES has specific hardware to run games, and it's great at that, but the moment you try to make a word processor it all falls apart.

[@nickryan3417]

@@paco3523 As long as the processors, and the code for them, is good enough to handle the number of streams the stuttering is down to the scheduling layer of the Operating System. While windows lovers at the time shouted "pre-emptive multi-tasking" loudly, because, that was what Microsoft claimed, the reality was somewhat different and applications still had to actively share processing time for any pretence of multi-tasking to really work and the Operating System, with the savagely expensive task swap overhead, really didn't help anything. Add in the growing crud of unmanageable black-box Windows components which chewed through CPU cycles for little observable benefit, graphics drivers that were very primitive compared to modern implementations and it was hard to get anything in Windows to run smoothly when there was just a single application. In the end, brute hardware power was what got Windows to smooth playback, not efficiency or design.

[@davidope]

Yes, I can confirm! I tried it too. While Windows wasn't far from able to do that on my machine that time.

[@Hutch2Much]

i absolutely love the look of BeOS. its shading is so soft, it’s pixel art is great, and the tabs look better than the window system of other operating systems imo

[@GodSpeaksInMath]

This was actually better... inbuilt webserver back then...tech wouldve advanced in a different direction if people had an alternative like this..Billy Gates lost all of his credit in my book...him n Marina A can stay wherever they are... Billy Gates is the Smeagle of Tech...

[@punpcklbw]

Yes, BeOS and Mac OS Classic (8 and 9) have by far the most beautiful looking GUI systems. I love that all icons are drawn in a consistent style, with a pseudo-3D look, subtle shadows and outlines. I also noted how clean are the fonts in BeOS. I wonder if those are bitmap fonts with anti-aliasing or very well rendered vector fonts.

[@uselessDM]

It's sad they never lived into the cloud computing era, introducing their newest product: BeHive

[@lucss21a]

Clever name

[@gp75motorsports]

Oh, BeHave

[@bluephreakr]

Sounds like a P2P download client.

[@CMDRSweeper]

FreeBSD showed up with bhyve though :P So you can get close.

[@Techlevel1534.]

@@gp75motorsportsbehave

[@higgs923]

Thank you! I was one of EarthLink's founder employees and I was tasked with evaluating BeOS for the company's use. It was fun seeing it all again.

[@tristanraine]

Fun fact, BeOS was referenced in Serial Experiments Lain, as the "To Be continued" used the BeOS colours in the word "Be"

[@herocortez]

Thats so cool

[@FuckYouTube00]

Let's all love Lain

[@tbk2010]

Present day. Present time. 😂😂😂

[@ephektz]

So, so many references in that series. I need to give it a rewatch with my kids.

[@tristanraine]

​@@ephektzYeah, like a few references to neXt (close the world, enter the neXt), and the first computer that Lain uses is based on the 20th Anniversary Mac!

[@TheGoatstep]

Fun fact: BeOS is/was actually used in a lot of professional audio/video equipment, like the RADAR 24 24-track audio recorder, Edirol DV-7 video editor made by Roland, and Tascam SX-1 audio recorder - so it did have some success in the A/V professions

[@Scott__C]

RADAR is sadly now Windows based so I suspect it's not quite as ultra-stable as it was with BeOS, but I was on a cruise earlier this year, and the guy running the sound said they used RADAR for playback in the main theatre shows and other venues.

[@CentiZen]

BeOS was used as the server operating system for the LodgeNet media system that was popular (and still is, just not on BeOS anymore) in North American hotel chains. The one with the special Nintendo 64 controllers. It was kept alive well into the late 2000's in some places.

[@styleisaweapon]

and yet after hearing that you still suspect its not stable .. interesting how the facts you know for sure cant defeat the bias you have that never had good founding@@Scott__C

[@trinajohnson1857]

“Fun Fact” is annoying and isn’t necessary Just say the fact and let the other person decide whether it is fun or not. It is a verbal tic that is nearly as annoying as people who feel the need to put ‘literally’ into every sentence.

[@DavidMorley]

I still use my SX-1 and it's proven very reliable.

[@retrozmachine1189]

I played around with BeOS back then. Compared to Windows 9x it was remarkably fluid and responsive. The high amount of threading and non-blocking in the design really did make the hardware sing.

[@tomLaverick-jj1qs]

i like win 11 and beos

[@RichardHoule]

Haha. I actually wrote device drivers for BeOS! It had some interesting features and design. But it had flaws. For example, the multithreaded UI was something that a lof of developer ended having problems to work with. If I remember correctly, instead of having the concept of a "main thread", they had one thread per window. Which is something that no other operating system was doing. It was easy to create race condition if your underlying model was aware of that. (Hint: Still today, most application are poorly threaded!)

[@FeelingShred]

it's 2023 and I noticed that both Windows and Linux systems put their interfaces (Start Menu, taskbar, etc) into disk caching (pagefile, swap) Something is not right... this is unacceptable

[@FeelingShred]

worse than that is when you run into situations of low memory and notice that both Windows and Linux put the entire Sound subsystem on disk caching... "what could possibly go wrong"... and then it starts stuttering, noise, artifacts, latency delay... WTF... it's unimaginable how low we allowed for things to go down recently...

[@FeelingShred]

another thing that I just learned last week... I was so pissed off that my new laptop was running into the same low free memory situations, requiring to overcommit into pagefile, etc... then I try to use Chrome with Hardware Acceleration turned Off... RAM problems gone... it's much more manageable now...

[@FeelingShred]

so I ask myself, what is the freaking point of my GPU having VRAM when the internet browser will also require System RAM to operate as well

[@nalinux]

Thanks for the former work ! :) Drivers were a pain.

[@GianmarioScotti]

BeOS will never be forgotten. Even BeOS 4 could do things, no current OS can do. The responsiveness to the user is unparalleled to this day, because all other OSes make compromises towards the resource distribution. Not BeOS, where the user inputs/commands were sacrosanct and to be immediately responded to.

[@tkenben]

This responsiveness may have directly contributed to frequent crashing for people; I'm guessing due to resource scheduling. It may also be due to how easy it was to write programs that could break the main operating system.

[@aprofondir]

What does it do that today's systems can't?

[@timothyp8947]

From memory, I would say features like desktop replicants, which I’m not sure how to explain, but we’re kind of clones of apps that sat on the desktop rather than being full windowed apps, a bit like some modern desktop widgets; the file type system where files are automatically added a MIME type (or types) used to determine which app would be used rather than a filename's extension (I think Acorn RiscOS has something similar but not using MIME types), the Be file system had database-like features which could be indexed, for example a file could have many attributes beyond its name and data - the mail app used this extensively with each mail item being a file with separate attributes for to/from etc.. The OS was largely C++ and everything was highly threaded at a time when threading was still quite new. Unusual features at the time, still pretty rare.

[@sbrazenor2]

What about Haiku? That might have all of the features you are talking about and then some. Linux also does multithreading pretty well these days, so it would probably blow the shit out of BeOS in an apples to apples comparison.

[@bryans8895]

I recommend you try the several variants of the Linux kernel just for giggles. Low latency, preempt, realtime, etc. it can make a world of difference depending on use case, assuming you’re not using windows exclusive applications.

[@jeffmccloud905]

I owned BeOS. wrote a little C++ on it too. it was ahead of its time. it touted "multi processor computing" way before dual CPUs was even a thing, let alone multi-cores and hyperthreading. it was designed from the ground up for multitasking/threading. and also, cool Amiga-like icons.

[@marcdraco2189]

Looked nicer than AmigaOS 3 even then though.

[@eriksiers]

I bought BeOS 5 for the PC. It was a great OS but had little support from the industry.

[@megatronskneecap]

I believe it got beaten by the BSD family not long after it's release.

[@athstreamsandmore]

I made an ESS audio drive driver for it. Lack of support sucked. Also the reason for the lack of CD audio, it wasn't playing it digitally it was the audio cable from the CD drive to the sound card. That's the difference.

[@MarionStevensJr]

I bought it as well. Picked it up from Best Buy, of all places, in 2000 or 2001. I was amazed at how well it worked. The only issue I had was that it wouldn't recognize my NIC. Can't remember what brand I had in my machine, but it was a card and not an adapter on the board. After doing some research, I ordered an IBM card that had BeOS drivers written for it, and it worked fine. I seem to remember that there were only a few cards that worked.

[@randomperson6548775]

@@megatronskneecap huh? The BSD family is a (primarily) command line driven system used on servers. I am unaware of it ever being popular for multimedia work. Further, what does "beaten" mean? I doubt BSD ever went above 0.1% desktop market share. BeOS got beaten by Windows in the PC space, and NeXTSTEP for the Mac's new operating system (admittedly NextStep is based on BSD, as is modern macOS, but macOS is not even remotely similar as a desktop system to other BSD systems).

[@megatronskneecap]

@@randomperson6548775 NeXTSTEP was based on BSD and contributed to the market-share uprise in *BSD. Please research stuff before you comment thinking you're smug.

[@NormanF62]

Thanks for the trip down memory lane! BeOS lives on in its modern spiritual descendant, Haiku OS. Basically the same with porting from BSD to make it compatible with modern hardware and its now 64 bit. What a long strange journey its been and despite the fact it went nowhere, we’re fortunate its still with us today!

[@FloatingDogs]

BeOS was my daily driver in the early 2000. I loved that it was so lightweight, fast, and did everything I needed. For browsing the Internet and to watch DVDs or MPK/MP4, I only used it!

[@animatewithdermot]

I loved playing with Be. I remember running something like 15 or 20 instances of the Phantom Menace trailer, with some of them mapped onto a spinning 3D cube, no frame loss, all audio playing fine in an overlapping madness. Showed it to my friend, a very good C++ programmer who worked for Disney Interactive, he just cracked up. "OK, I get the point!" It was so sad that there was never a killer app with video editing or a PS equivalent. And also, screw M$.

[@FeelingShred]

HAHA you have to record video of that, even a simple video recorded from phone

[@cgistiffy3642]

checkout haiku-os its based on BeOs

[@TheRandomChannel_idk]

Fun Fact: The Fake Windows Whistler (what would become Windows XP) Shutdown Sound actually came from BeOS 5. The actual startup and shutdown are all from Windows 2000.

[@pawer_themaw]

Fun Fact 2: Even the official RC release for XP uses 2000 sounds as its default sounds

[@megatronskneecap]

Fun Fact 3: Bill Gates stole DOS from a collage dorm buddy/friend and blamed it on one of his professors

[@Peti4391]

@@pawer_themawbecause XP made from Windows 2000. The first betas are showing Windows 2000 in winver

[@Vixiental]

I was gonna comment this...

[@deadair32101]

@@Peti4391 Thats how most if not all of them after 4 were made. No reason to throw the bathwater out, just add some bubbles instead. Early XP showed 2000, early 7 showed Vista, early 11 showed 10

[@Ganiscol]

I preordered BeOS back in the day and was hyped when I got my package! After installing it and a lot of "Wow! This looks awesome!" and "Finally harnessing the power of my PC in a way Windows never could!" the sobering reality set in that there wasnt much I could do with it at the time and the out of the box functionality was very, very limited. But I was in on it from the beginning to its not too distant demise. 😅

[@GazzaBoo]

Yep, that was always the problem, it was cool, looked good but doing anything useful with it was a challenge.

[@nickwallette6201]

@@GazzaBoo Back then, it wasn't too bad for general PC use. NetPositive was a pretty decent browser, it had a WinAmp clone, there were IRC clients, Gobe Productive was a decent enough office package, and you could use it for coding or anything else geeky that benefited from a BASH shell. It wasn't much of a gaming platform, and if you had any special hardware, you weren't going to use it to its potential (if at all.) But, other than that, it could do a good 50-75% of the usual "computer stuff" you wanted to do. At least by R4 or R4.5 or R5 -- whichever you had and would boot on your hardware.

[@VideoAmericanStyle]

That probably sums up 90% of user experiences with BeOS. Neat, but useless.

[@RafaelRomoMulas1]

@@VideoAmericanStyle On the contrary: it was perfect for useful things. What it LACKED were the useless ones that everyone wants: videogames. Apart from that, there was nothing you couldn't do with it. It was killed by human nature wanting useless stuff.

[@Omega-mr1jg]

​@@RafaelRomoMulas1mandatory linux mention

[@koduflower2000]

Yay! BeOS! I used HaikuOS, an upgraded alternative to BeOS. It was awesome! I'm glad you made a video about BeOS. I love this video. Great job, Michael! ❤

[@D3M3NT3Dstrang3r]

I always loved BeOS. The problems arose around pc gaming just like they did for Linux. BeOS was so polished it was hard to go back to Windows until you realized that there was virtually no software for it other than what it came with.

[@PRH123]

aye, there's the rub, as Shakespeare wrote... no software... so no matter how cool the OS was, what can you actually do with it... I installed it, way back when, looked at it for an hour or two, and uninstalled it....

[@paul1979uk2000]

Software compatibility is always the number one issue with rival OS's. Fortunately, it looks like they are working around that with compatibility layers through Linux, so you can run Windows software through Linux, that once it gets close to 100% for software and games could become a game changer, because then it won't matter which OS you use, the software just works. As for Windows, it's not a great OS, but it's not a bad one, the software compatibility is the number one reason that keeps us on it, I know because I've heard it countless times over the last decade of people that tried Linux but had to go back to windows because of 1 software or game they wanted to use. Valve themselves have realised that, they've been banging their heads against a brick wall trying to push Linux mainstream but always failing, they realised that you need the same software ecosystem, after all, most consumers won't care if any software or game is designed for Windows, just as long as it works well on Linux, the Steam Deck is a perfect example of that.

[@PRH123]

@@paul1979uk2000 "compatibility layers through Linux," does that mean a windows emulator of some kind within Linux...? Back in the day of MacOS9, I recall installing a windows emulator... it worked, but it was slow... and if I recall correctly it couldn't do things like utilize video cards or USB ports...

[@vadiquemyself]

today, the browser is enough for everyone

[@Raderade1-pt3om]

That's how windows phone died against android ios

[@leandrocosta3709]

The funny thing is that youtube suggested this video to me and I'm watching it wearing my old Be Inc. t-shirt. I've used BeOS RC's 4.5 and 5 and now I'm actively looking for parts to build an era appropriate BeOS machine.

[@exidy-yt]

I LOVED the cocept of BeOS as it reminded me very much of my beloved Commodore Amiga systems and AmigaDOS, even while I was a filthy traitor and Win95 salesman at the time, but even then I knew it had no chance to take market share from M$ despite all the cheerleading from the sidelines I could do. Great retrospective of a fallen dream.

[@fourthhorseman4531]

I'm a Linux guy, but for a couple of years I ran BeOS as the main OS on my work computer. All I really needed for work was terminal windows to SSH into servers and a web browser, so BeOS was fine in that role. BeOS was light, small and fast. And I liked the GUI. It may have been a foregone conclusion that it wasn't going to make it, but I always hoped it would find success.

[@Fancy2209Real]

Haiku has been going strong for 12 years

[@brianhsu8333]

I’m actually surprised that how much the Haiku project progressed in these years. Consider that BeOS is not very well known OS and the small user base. Basically Haiku is now a full and could be use as a daily use operation system, it’s really impressive.

[@nalinux]

I'm also a Linux guy, since 1998. Still my daily computer with boot on Win10 for games. I used FreeBSD, NetBSD, BeOS and Win2k. BeOS was impressive in 2000. Haiku is a nice try, but ... still lack native applications. And drivers.

[@nalinux]

@@brianhsu8333 Not sure. Haiku is nice. No drivers for most of webcam, wifi, no modern browser. It's not usable as a daily.

[@fourthhorseman4531]

@@tipple31337 It absolutely did. Lots of Linux tools were ported over.

[@PineappleForFun]

Be was the first 'alternative' OS I ever installed, opened up a whole new world for me as a teenager.

[@kingvinoda3896]

I really wish that history had worked differently and that Microsoft had not destroyed the competition like it did and we could have had a multiple selection of different os to select from that would have been cool.

[@Play-On7]

I would love a new OS that is just Windows XP 2.0.

[@dmnsonic]

I totally agree. Even today, with many different devices, Windows is still one of the most used OS on desktop systems. Imagine if Linux, Mac OS and even BSD have more share on the market...

[@amogoose2971]

bill gates suck he is sooooooooo agressive back then

[@JacksonDevices]

@dmnsonic Yes!

[@Lneti_VT]

To this day, still miss, OS/2 Warp 3. Though, I do wonder, how would the hardware vs software go about things if we has a bigger selection of OS on the mainstream.

[@Pwtz]

This was a real blast to watch again. I used BeOS as my primary OS for a bit of time just to see if it could be done and it was the closest I ever felt to thinking it had a chance. I hosted a live blog on it for about a year or so to the internet.

[@TheShattenjager]

Did you use Diner as the web hosting software? That’s what I used. I loved it.

[@Pwtz]

@@TheShattenjager I don’t think I used Diner I tried it out but I think I ended up using something a bit more hefty like Apache - but maybe not Apache. I seem to recall there were some serious issues with TCP threading that made it hard to compile server software… but I don’t think I hosted with Diner.

[@Raveheart]

I remember using BeOS in the late 90s or early 2000s for a few days. It came as a free CD with a PC magazine here in Germany. I remember I kinda liked it, but it wasn't enough to make me switch from Windows. After all, i was ~15 years old and my games was everything I was interested in at the time.

[@elrabiator5104]

dito, ich hab das 300MB file mit nem internen isa usr56k Modem gesaugt und neben der win2000 beta installiert. Win2000 beta/nt5 war mein System und hat sich fünf Jahre lang kein einziges Mal aufgehängt. Nur zum Zoggen war noch win98 auf ner Spielepartition. BeOS war nur auf English und die Demo ziemlich rudimentär. win2000, vista und alles ab win10 hab ich genutzt und nie einen Grund zur Neuinstallation gehabt, weil es sich selbst reparieren konnte. Darum nutze ich auch seit Jahren die 1TB Cloud und MS365, GREAT!!!

[@Bort_86]

Yeah, could it have been PC WELT? I also remember when the „successor“ Zeta was sold on RTL-Shop :D

[@Raveheart]

@@Bort_86 Not 100% sure but it must have been PC Welt or c't. I don't have the magazines anymore but I kept lots of the CDs, maybe it's still on one of my old spindles in the basement. :P

[@Raveheart]

@@elrabiator5104 Eine einzige MP3 mit 56k zu saugen hat schon eine halbe Stunde gedauert. Kann mir vorstellen, 300 MB müssen SCHMERZEN gewesen sein 😂

[@elrabiator5104]

@@Raveheart Musste, der damaligen Freundin sei Dank, nur T-Com Gebühren 8min/23Pfennige zahlen, da sie einen Unizugang hatte. Die Liebe Mandy...

[@bujin5455]

29:16. Back in the 90s, most optical drives had an audio out jack, and this was so the optical drive could be placed in audio mode, where the drive would decode an audio CD and send the analog audio directly to the sound card. When you play the audio CD using the CD app you're putting the optical drive into audio CD mode, and it's deciding the CD, and sending the audio out it's analog audio port (which you probably don't have hooked up). When you open the file directly, it's being read like a data file across your digital IDE connection, and your CPU is decoding the audio and sending it your audio card. This is why you're hearing the audio one direction and not the other.

[@amigaworkbench720]

I used to stick to Amiga 1200 and PSX at that time (intel outside). I was so happy when I got BeOS demo. It was somewhere between AmigaOS and MacOS 9. What is amazing about the OS is that is written C++ and developer documentation (Be Book) is really interesting. It would be interesting to see what would happen to Mac OSX if they chose to base OSX on BeOS and not on BSD. Anyway, another cool piece of tech destroyed by our beloved biggest tech company in the world.

[@RetroRobotRadio]

I was an A1200 user at the time, and I recall reading about BeOS in magazines, but never used it.

[@electricshmoo]

The most wonderful program was Cortex - it's a live audio stream piping program that you could reroute all application audio and streams through a mixing board system with lots of plugins. It was complete control of your audio with drag-and-drop connection lines. So nice.

[@SurgemanX]

BeOS had potential to be a great OS!I downloaded it a few times,and installed it on few spare boxes I had laying around back in the day!

[@billfusionenterprise]

44 megs compared to 500 meg linux, plus it worked

[@billfusionenterprise]

@@andrewsawesome not fully sure but the "Haiku Project" is based on it

[@JoePlett]

This really takes me back. I bought the BeOS Bible (book) which came with a CD-ROM containing both 8086 & Power PC versions of the OS. It was a very promising OS, supporting multiple processors back when windows was struggling to multitask at all. It could have been disruptive. It just never found critical mass. Like so many brilliant ideas by would be Davids intent on smiting Goliath. sigh.... what might've been.... Thanks for the nostalgia.

[@vinnytube1001]

My guess regarding your CD audio issue is that the CD player app was sending CD control commands, but wasn't streaming the audio off the disc. There's a lot of "it depends" type scenarios but there was an era when CD drives could be operated in redbook audio mode, but then they had a built in DAC and converted the audio to an analog signal all inside the drive. These drives sometimes even had 3.5mm headphone jacks and volume pots right on the front under the CD drawer. In order to hear the audio through your soundcard, you generally had to hook a special header from the CD drive to an audio header either on your motherboard or to your soundcard. By contrast, when you mount the drive, BeOS is now "aware" of the audio content vs doing essentially a hardware bypass the other way around, since when mounted it's treating the CD content as data vs redbook. PS hope you get into the BeFS live query stuff in your Haiku video. That was also a killer app for BeOS, besides being able to handle audio and video a million times better than Windows. I also swear I remember being able to pin tabs to windows in the BeOS OG - but now your video has me questioning my memory.

[@memsom]

Yeah, you need the audio connection internally to play CDs. When he played the mounted disc he didn’t realise he was playing AIFF files that are generated on the fly by BeOS from the data on the disc. You can drag them off the CD to rip the audio. If you have Lame installed you can go to MP3 with a simple script that loops over the mounted Cd and converts AIFF to MP3

[@agranero6]

For people that at that moment didn't have the chance to experience BeOS like me, this was a nice review of it. Thanks.

[@dungeonseeker3087]

Obligatory comment about Linux: Nobody outside of academia other than the most hardcore PC enthusiast was using Linux in the mid 90s, it was an absolute mess for home use. X was in its infancy, sound was literally a wing and prayer and you were basically compiling most of the software from source. NCommander has an amazing video on Debian 2.0 from IIRC 98 or 99, remember this is a guy who worked at Canonical as a full time Linux programmer and even he had a world of pain simply getting through the installer to a desktop.

[@rosiefay7283]

And how about other Unix clones? and how about in industry?

[@vinnytube1001]

@@rosiefay7283 I used BeOS in the 90s and also dabbled with Linux. At that time, Linux was a total mess. FreeBSD, by comparison, was far more capable, polished, and advanced. When BeOS died I used FreeBSD for quite a while, but then in the mid-ish 2000s Linux finished catching up for the most part.

[@jamesperih9658]

Slackware '96

[@GoonyMclinux]

I used linux in the 90's and im a normie. 😂

[@GoonyMclinux]

​@@jamesperih9658I started on Slackware when it first came out, downloaded the ISO on dial up. 👀

[@jurviz]

I've seen Haiku many times on different KZbin channels but, watching this, I realized I've probably never seen any actual BeOS coverage before. Thanks.

[@UnixAnt]

In the mid 90s I was still using Amiga Workbench as my primary OS and also Solaris on a couple of Sparcstation 10's. I did play with BeOS the first time round and found it interesting, but can't claim to have ever been a BeOS user - I never had a use case for it. The way BeOS handled multimedia reminded me of IRIX.

[@RockTo11]

Amiga OS is, by far, the most elegant OS design ever. I've not come across anything as well designed in all the time since.

[@walkero]

Yeap, back then I was using AmigaOS and still do. I only used Windows for my work from 2000-2005 when I switched to Linux and never looked back.

[@nickwallette6201]

@@RockTo11 That's funny -- I only used an Amiga once back in the day, when I had a 486 with much more interesting software to run on it. So I didn't get it at all. But, when I hear people talk about how great it was, it reminds me of what it felt like to run BeOS. It was so beautifully designed on the inside and out, and Windows just couldn't hold a candle to it on the same hardware.

[@MAKER_GURU]

I was a system designer for a small computer company back when this hit the market. I was tasked with evaluating this software, the original idea being to offer machines with this as a reduced-cost option to avoid the Windows license fee. The OS worked well being snappier and more stable than Windows, the only real issues being with certain hardware lacking support. Unfortunately, some of these parts were the cheapest options which sort of killed the whole 'cheaper option' feature. But that wasn't really the big issue. The big issue was the software support. Budget and business clients both wanted approximately the same software, which wasn't available. Gamers wanted games, which were not available. The hardware for a good multimedia experience was expensive and came with Windows software that was better than what BeOS came with; the cheap knock-offs that came a bit later didn't work with BeOS anyway. We still offered it along with a slew of other OS options. We even offered it as a part of a multi-boot configuration; a service we didn't charge for. We never sold a single computer with it. People bought DOS-only machines after Windows 98 came out, people bought Linux-only machines when X was basically useless and getting software was a chore involving magazine CDs or pay-per-hour dialup internet...but they never even gave this a chance as a second boot option.

[@kjetilv]

I played around with BeOS some times, but never used it for anything significant. Fun to see it again

[@andykras]

Thanks for the great demo! I remember the first time I installed BeOS and realized it was way more advanced compared to Win95/98. Gosh, it had virtual desktops, could play 10 mp3 files simultaneously, and had beautiful demos like Chart, allowing you to enjoy a beautiful starfield

[@killmeh2]

BeOS was so advanced it didn't support printing, nor having multiple users, nor internationalization. Yea, why did this advanced OS lost to Win95 or why Apple went with Next instead of BeOS will forever be a mystery.

[@diodebridge]

As an audio engineer, that mixing utility looks super neat! I wish there was some sort of emulation of this. If anyone knows of one, let me know! And yes, I know about the multitude of 3d visualizers, but none integrated with a mixer that you can drag around like that in the 3d space.

[@SPNKR76]

Winworldpc has roms for BeOs. I think VMware can emulate it.

[@wclifton968gameplaystutorials]

You can use Haiku 32-bit to run all BeOS applications I believe but not the 64-bit version of BeOS which I believe cannot yet emulate 32-bit BeOS applications (unlike windows which uses applications in the "SYSWOW64" folder)

[@GoonyMclinux]

I have a haiku computer for the audio stuff, its not perfect but its amazing what you can do with it. When I was all into it the huge amount of simultaneous sampling I could do was like 20x more than I could do in winblows.

[@theviralusername]

I used to run a soundboard for churches and events, and I also dabbed in audio recording on PC as well when I was 13, and I too had never seen anything like that 3Dmix app. I have used Sony Acid, Cubase, Audacity, Ableton, FL Studio, and not one of those programs has anything like that. I messed with a LOT of plugins too on those programs (and I had a LOT of plugins that were pirated), back then internet was hard to come by and boredom was widespread.

[@Scott__C]

And if you didn't know as mentioned elsewhere in the comments, the RADAR hard disk recorder systems ran on BeOS until not terribly long ago. They're now sadly Windows based but still around.

[@larsafpetersens1488]

Thanks for the nostalgia, I actually signed up as a dev and had some dev cd releases sent to me! Used to test them out on my power mac 8500/120, good times!

[@sbrazenor2]

I was actually using BeOS back in the late 1990's / early 2000's. The threading performance was amazing, even on relatively unremarkable hardware.

[@core36]

first time i heard if BeOS was on some website, i think around 2003, that had some free games and game demos. it had symbols that indicated what OS the game was compatible with. of course there were many windows and mac symbols and some linux but then there was a symbol that i didn't recognize. hovering over it revealed the name BeOS, so i did some searching and found out about the OS and the Company. long story short, that's what got me interested into the Haiku project.

[@nabamitadutta4517]

It's great to see someone shed some light on this OS! Honestly so many OSes used to exist back then..

[@eriksiers]

There are a LOT of OS's now. There are at least a dozen I use at least once a month, and I don't just mean the big 3 (Windows, Linux, Mac).

[@MikroLGS]

@@eriksiers TempleOS for an example

[@eriksiers]

@@MikroLGS lol well, I don't use that one, but at least I know about it. I was thinking more along the lines of DOS, OS/2, AROS, QNX, etc.

[@MikroLGS]

@@eriksiers yeah those work as well. There's also Plan9 which is continuation of UNIX

[@eriksiers]

@@MikroLGS ...and Inferno, and Illumos, and and and... Yep.

[@MrFluteboy1980]

For the cd player issue, at that time, there used to be a little connector cable that linked the cd rom directly to the soundcard. It could beOS is relying on that method to pay the cd audio.

[@klauskillski3881]

Final Scratch, the first vinyl emulation software for Djs, was originally developed for BeOS. it was ported then to linux and mac os and from v1.5 it run also on windows xp

[@Studio1XN]

I was a daily BeOS user for a couple of years, I bought 4.0 in a shop, I still have the box :) and when I got my first mac around 2002-3, the BeOS machine became my file server. It was really great at the time. I even got mailed the 4.5 update for free which I couldn't believe, they were even mailing registered users! I got the BeOS bible book, which I still have and it was a great read, full of interviews. I was sad to see it not make it. I really wanted to keep using it and to start programming for it but I moved to MacOS and Linux.

[@Choralone422]

Nice vid! I remember playing around with BeOS in the fall of 99 shortly after I got my first cable modem. It was neat to use and I really hoped it would gain some traction. It seemed very stable compared to Win98 and had a lot going for it at the time.

[@TonyCastley]

I loved using BeOS, I still have the BeOS Bible book and remember working on VLC back on the day. Thanks for the memories.

[@vomytdaug]

I used to install and run beos from a jazz drive . The machine that ran it was ancient so you never really noticed the slowness since the entire machine was slow to run anything but the os itself was great.

[@Mario583a]

Wait a minute.... BeOS Jazz Drive you all like jazz?

[@j.d.8843]

Really miss the BeOS days. Started with version 4, 4.5 and eventually 5.0. Remember building an Abit BP6 system with two Intel celeron CPU’s. Damn, that machine flies with BeOS back in the day. Spending hours and hours on BeGroovy site and BeBits to find new software. Best community ever. Too bad BeOS did not make it.

[@vpun215]

Yo Michael, been watching your vids since late 2019, a huge fan of this channel. Keep the quality vids comin'!

[@antivanti]

There was a demo application that displayed a rotating 3D cube and you could drag&drop pictures and video files to the different sides of the cube which was absolutely mind blowing at the time. It was actually a hardware accelerated graphical interface unlike Windows and Mac at the time (this was before WinXP and Mac OS X)

[@stephantual]

Technically it was a rotating teapot 🫖 but yes it was amazing

[@antivanti]

@@stephantual That was a different demo

[@stephantual]

@@antivanti oh i see! i'd love to see the cube one, man this brings me back!

[@nikodll]

IIRC, when you maximize multiple windows, BeOS automatically aligns their title bars into a "tabbed" task panel. Was a very nice and unique feature, saving some vertical desktop space.

[@nicotw2000]

Made a video effect software on BeOS 22 years ago for my university graduation project. Lots of fun.

[@marklechman2225]

I still have the original PPC demo CD. I tried it out on my beloved PowerBase 240 and it was way ahead of its time. Very snappy and light but powerful.

[@danieldeelite]

I made a radio station automation in BeOS in the early 2000s. It ran for a surprising number of years.

[@electricshmoo]

I could play 8 video files at the same time on Be, while Windows 98 on the same machine couldn't pull off 2. Audio CD's show up as wav files you just drag and drop in a converter. It was so beautiful, it makes me sad thinking about how much I miss those days. You could toggle your CPU's on and off at will, jiggle your audio card and not crash, recover Fat32 when Windows couldn't... it was amazing.

[@benverdel3073]

Great intro to BeOs and HaikuOs. Can't wait for the follow-up. Thanks in advance.

[@davinp]

Microsoft, being a huge company, bulled OEMs to pre-installed Windows 95 on their PCs. Unfortunately, the big tech companies Apple, Google & Microsoft have put smaller tech companies out of business.

[@Scott__C]

The problem is always costs. Unless a lot of people adopt independent software from smaller companies, they really don't have a chance. Giving stuff away for free is kind of a bad business move, because then people don't place any value on your product, even if they use it every day to make money for themselves.

[@jcsmith725]

I've not thought of Be OS in a long time.. Thanks for this.

[@travis1240]

As for why the CD player app doesn't work - Probably you don't have an analog audio cable running from the CDROM drive to the sound card. This is the old school way to play CDs, using the DAC inside the CDROM drive. Modern PCS and operating systems read the data from the CD, decode the audio and send it to the sound card in digital form so they don't need a DAC in the CDROM or the analog cable. You could do this on late 90s PCs as well but it wasn't necessarily the default.

[@libertyernie]

That was my thought too - I recently tried to get it working (playing some DOS games with CD audio) on a 2004 PC I've got that has the right 4-pin port on the motherboard, but I couldn't figure out how to make the audio come through.

[@cian87]

You could do it on BeOS R5 also (not earlier, without additional software) as there was a filesystem add-on that presented a CD as a folder of WAV files.

[@Behnam_Moghaddam]

awesome! thank you! now looking forward to the Haiku Video :)

[@tkenben]

I don't know if someone said this already, but Neal Stephenson mentions BeOS in his essay, "In the Beginning, There Was the Command Line" or something like that. He likens operating systems to vehicles at one point, where linux is a full featured tank, and BeOS the Batmobile. I installed and played with BeOS on my work computer. It was so fast, it was creepy. It did crash frequently, though, usually after installing and trying software outside the base system, and its crash was always a complete freeze. One of the unique features about BeOS was how applications could talk to each other and form symbiotic relationships by passing BMessages around. There was a demo folder in BeOS R5 with an app demonstrating this I think. Also, BeOS had a CLI and some unix like tools, but it was limited and single user IIRC.

[@darak2]

Strange, my experience was the opposite, BeOS was extremely stable for me and I essentially never had a freeze or an OS crash. BeOS had protected memory between processes (something you take for granted nowadays, but those were Win95/98 days) and applications crashing shouldn't bring down the OS. That being said, it had a number of bugs and faulty device drivers (including one nasty issue when you had more then 64MB of RAM), so it was not as stable as something like Windows NT, especially early versions.

[@tkenben]

@@darak2 It is possible these were processor freezes. One thing I remember noticing is that BeOS was using 100% of the processor for the simplest of tasks. In any case, impossible to debug, because it wasn't like some kind of fault. It was always just a plain frozen screen with no response to interrupts. And it would happen when just moving the mouse or pressing a key.

[@tkenben]

I should add that it happened on more than one system.

[@ericarall]

One of BeOS's "Media OS" features was a very fine-grained thread priority system. IIRC, threads could have priority 1-120, with each priority bracket getting twice a much CPU resources. For example if you had two priority 30 threads both trying to run continuously at the same time on a single-processor machine, each will run half the time. Increase one the threads to pri31, and it will run 2/3 of the time. Increase it to 32, and it will run 4/5 of the time. At 33, it will run 8/9 of the time. And above a certain level (100, I think), threads are considered "real time" so they'd always preempt non-realtime threads and could never be preempted themselves except by other realtime threads. This has a lot of advantages in terms of doing as much as possible in the background while still allowing the UI to remain responsive (the main UI thread of each window defaulted to a pretty high priority, in the 80s, I think, while worker threads defaulted to something like 35) and for processing of running media to run at top priority in order to maintain smooth operation. But the big disadvantage was that a poorly-behaved high-priority thread could easily hog all the CPU resources, starving all the UI threads and rendering the whole system unresponsive. This would look like the freezes @tkenben reports seeing. There was also a "real-time audio" system setting that would make the system's audio processing threads run at real-time priorities instead of their defaults (slightly lower than UI threads, IIRC). This helped sound playback run more smoothly on slow systems, but ran the risk of starving the UI threads if audio threads somehow got too busy. Source: I was a QA intern at Be in 1999.

[@tkenben]

@@ericarall Wow, thanks. That is pretty detailed and makes a lot of sense.

[@rdoursenaud]

Oh the fond memories. I remember the marketing and trying the personal edition on my parents' computer! BeOS also appeared in a few specialized media-production machines. I've had the privilege to tinker with a TASCAM SX-1 multitrack audio production machine that was powered by BeOS.

[@AshtonSnapp]

Now you need to look at Haiku, the open source successor to BeOS that runs on modern computers. Edit: IGNORE THIS. I didn’t realize you already planned on covering Haiku.

[@NormanF62]

I’d like to see Michael demonstrate it on modern hardware! The Software Valet was BeOS’ attempt at a package manager but in Haiku OS, its been superseded by the Haiku Depot.

[@bryanirvine6455]

Around 2002/2003 I installed BeOS PE on a coworkers computer and put the start icon in his windows startup folder so it would go into bios whenever he rebooted. He was soooo confused!

[@Viky2594]

you know its a good day when Micheal uploads

[@Margen67]

Penguins need HUGS

[@nogginozzy6710]

Absolutely LOVE your "wallpaper" on your wall behind your monitor!!! What an awesome way to re purpose floppies!!!

[@andykras]

Fun fact: The superuser in BeOS was called "baron"

[@vingevigur9202]

A quick Haiku introduction video seems like a nice addition to this video

[@epremeaux]

There's not many videos on R5 or earlier BEOS, so its great that you made this detailed demo. I might try to go through roughly the same demo with BeBox hardware for a hardware comparison. Not sure how the dual 603e stacks up against a single pentium, bu the real difference may come down to ram.

[@nathanbyrd873]

Thanks for this video! BeOS is something that I didn't use back in the day, but would love to explore more. I can't wait for your Haiku video, as I was think about giving that a whirl as well. Great video, keep them coming!

[@samshort365]

I used BeOS 5 Pro as my primary OS for a short while and used it as the foundation of my media center. I tried Zeta OS, but that just lacked stability. Eventually, I moved to Linux and then FreeBSD, but recently, I installed Haiku Beta 4 on metal and I'm very happy and surprised with its progress.

[@FeelingShred]

please send some resumes offering to work for the TV manufacturing industry... I'm so tired of every Unix-based "smart" TV freezing when watching youtube... this should not happen in 2023... not freeze like that anyway, having to wait 20 sseconds until inputs are registered... WTF... we need alternatives to that garbage

[@FeelingShred]

but then the trick is: how do you advertise your work without giving away to them any of your secrets? that's the trick

[@FeelingShred]

unless you find a way to Hack TV's installing some variant of BeOS or Haiku into them... and then sending them video as proof, so they don't get any code without paying, or without knowing what exact system is running...

[@samshort365]

@@FeelingShred The best kept secret, which is what I alluded to above, is to use a real PC. Most Smart TVs are low spec hacks that waste most of their potential and bandwidth on data harvesting ("A new study from Princeton University shows internet-connected TVs ... are loaded with data-hungry trackers", The Verge 2019)

[@Straximus]

I worked in a professional theatre space that used BeOS to run mixing/control software for a pair of LCS LD-88s in the mid-2000s. I *loved* BeOS. So much so that I installed in on a laptop and used it as my primary OS for a few months.

[@TheREALJosephTurner]

When BeOS was around, what we now call the "pro-sumer" market embraced them. You could open any musician catalog back then and find audio interfaces, DAWs, editing programs, MIDI control, etc- that came with BeOS compatibility. Windows was still kinda flaky for home-pro audio, so those who were serious about home studios usually chose between Mac and BeOS. BeOS just worked for that situation. Then the company flaked and just walked away from the OS market. The reverberations are still felt today, as manufacturers STILL don't want to touch OS's that aren't Mac or Windows. Modern Linux would arguably be a better choice for a music production environment, but nobody's willing to bother out of fear of "getting stung by the Be again."

[@musicalneptunian]

I run pro audio as a power user on Ubuntu Studio. My interface is a Focusrite that works on Linux with a small change to a config file. The thought of the Windows ASIO audio driver makes me grab a sick bucket.

[@TheREALJosephTurner]

@@musicalneptunian I didn't say that you couldn't run Linux. I'm saying that, still to this day, Linux doesn't have a fraction of the manufacturer support that even BeOS did in it's heyday. Back then my MOTU interface had BeOS drivers included right out of the box. Even today- IF a manufacturer has Linux drivers (that aren't beta or experimental), they still aren't touting Linux compatibility as a major feature like they did with BeOS. But to be clear, I did say "Modern Linux would arguably be a better choice for a music production environment," which I believe would be true if we could get the manufacturers on board.

[@NotSoCrazyNinja]

Oh man, I am feeling my age now. I've used Windows 3.11, 95, 98, XP, ME, Vista, 2K, 10. Used BeOS, ReactOS, and probably close to a hundred Linux Distros. I remember the early releases of Ubuntu because I thought they sucked hard. I remember the free Ubuntu install disks they sent out if you asked. I've even used DOS quite a bit. Man, the early days of the internet were wild.

[@DogwafflDan]

We were still using Amiga professionally through 95 until the Dec Alphas came out and we had to use bare Windows NT with no software that ran on it. We continued to use Amiga for Directory Opus and maybe Deluxe Paint for a while longer.

[@PrimalNaCl]

The coolest thing I experienced about BeOS was the fact that in the CPU monitor/tool (I forget the name) allows you to turn off cpu(s). Now when presented with an option to disable the cpu on a single proc/single thread system I thought that they would surely not allow one to disable the only cpu in the system. The moment I disabled the cpu, the system stopped responding. As in frozen screen. I found this to be awesome. Still a fun memory/experience.

[@-Jakob-]

As an Amiga user in the 90's i was very interested in BeOS, the important problem was - there was no software.

[@BrianBoniMakes]

When BeOS came out I was running a graphics company that had a room filled with SGI, Sun, Dec, IBM and Macs. We were given a Motorola clone running BeOS and on it was a beta application that processed graphic files. You attached it to the server and it would watch a folder, process the file and copy it to the completed folder. I remember it was faster than the way we had been doing it before but it wasn't doing anything exciting and sat in the server room. When the project was over they just left the computer and I still have it. Another thing, it was a single user computer and had no log in. BeOS was fast because of what it lacked so for a machine intended to do a single task it was a good choice.

[@PAKTC]

To BeOS or not to be that is the question

[@Opaquit]

Thanks so much for this video! I absolutely remember messing with this particular version of BeOS back in spring 2000 - it was a lot of fun. Downloading a 45MB file over dial-up was not a very pleasant experience so I ended up getting a Czech magazine (I think it was called literally Computer) that came with a CD which had this EXE installer.

[@readybear64]

I like the floppy disk wall

[@richardgreaney]

My lasting memory of BeOS was how it responded to clicking the shutdown button. Shutdown; confirm yes; BAM, the computer was off. No waiting for half a million services to close. The computer just shut down gracefully on command, like you asked. Who would have thought.

[@BrendonProle]

I loved BeOS, ran mulit boot system. One demo I was hoping you would do was to show how it mounted an audio CD as WAV files then you could just drop the mounted WAV file onto an MP3 converter. This was so far ahead of it's time because previously, and currently in Windows, you had to rip the CD to WAV then convert to MP3 in 2 separate steps.

[@teqnotic]

Fun Fact: Steinberg began development of a BeOS version of their D.A.W. - Cubase. I believe there was an internal beta version.

[@gaeshows1938]

Micheal = 8 bit guy?

[@KittyFae-]

Ahh BeOS. Used it for a long while after finding my PC would web browse way better in BeOS, even with my winmodem. Probably the only reason I still use the Opera Browser, even had to pay for it back then. There was an ad-supported version with huuuge banner ads.

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

BeOS was actually much better than Microsoft Windows.

[@winstonslone2797]

Most operating systems are

[@korneliusfrik9545]

wonder what happens when someone developed that further

[@BillyBobDingledorf]

In the mid-90's I was using OS/2 on both my workstation and my server. Thank you for mentioning it. I did appreciate BeOS. I kinda remember trying it out. My brain is old. Watching this video, it was pretty cool, way ahead of it's time. None of this mattered, as Microsoft was extremely good at contractually disallowing competition.

[@anon_y_mousse]

Definitely a thumbs up for mentioning Haiku, and I definitely want to see you do a video on that. I've been playing with it a bit in a VM.

[@khashmeshab]

The reason that the audio CD didn't play is that the three wire cable from your CD drive to your sound card is not connected. When you play an audio CD the normal way, the audio is played by the CD drive through this wire to your sound card and then to your speakers. But when you mount it, the player software reads the audio CD like a data CD, processes the data and generates the sound like other normal sounds. That's why it works when you mount it.

[@Daphoid]

I dual booted with BeOS for a summer, it felt awesome to use something different. I remember the days of having time to do things like that; or just explore Linus back in the late 90's. Good times indeed.

[@cyrollan]

i remember downloading BeOS from a "warez" BBS from the old days, via 14.4 kbps modem. i used it for a few months, and enjoyed it. man.....those early PC days were like the wild west........

[@NZLion]

The CD audio wasn't playing because it's expecting your optical drive to have a separate digital connection to your sound card, it doesn't try to play cd audio over data connection. Go go 1990s computing. Also when an audio CD is mounted, you can just copy the tracks off as wav files. That's why they played in the media player

[@JamieJamez]

I remember that there was a demo that showed that separate windows could interact with each other. I think it was just called BeBall? You opened a window and a ball would bounce around inside the window. If you opened a second window the ball would continue bouncing around in the 1st screen, but if the 2nd window was inline to where the ball was traveling, the ball could warp into the other window and continue bouncing around in the 2nd window. You could move the windows around in real time, and the ball could bounce into the other window depending on where the windows were located, on the screen, at the time. It was also demonstrated on an episode of the Screen Savers, where Leo LaPorte interviewed the founder.

[@Transmissions]

I had a BeBox for a while. Loved the lights on the front that showed cpu usage. BeOS was dope. Its multitasking capabilities were awesome. I could open a bunch of video files and play them all without any stuttering or delays.

[@neobscura]

I remember running this circa 2003 and be like "dude, this is so fast and cool" but there was no support for it obviously so I went back to windows. Now I'm using linux only and when I checked HAIKU my first reaction was "DUDE THIS IS SO FAST"... They really were onto something with this OS. So yeah, Haiku video for me.

[@MorningNapalm]

I was not using Windows 95, I was using OS/2 2.x/3.x, but I did see a demo of BeOS and I wanted a BeBox so badly, but couldn't afford it until it was too late. I remember the demo being very funny. There were two CPUs, and an on/off switch for each. The demonstrator started a multi-threaded task, and the front-mounted CPU meters were both pegged. Then he turned the one CPU off, and the corresponding meter dropped to zero. Then he turned it back on, and then turned the other one off, and the other meter dropped to zero. So the O/S had no CPU affinity, it was very cool. Then he turned both CPUs off... We all sat there processing this slowly in our brains, and then he said "and now we reboot" :D Didn't the BeBox have some funky multimedia port where you could plug in things and communicate with them?

[@NeverlandSystemZor]

I used BeOS even... I used Linux for most work and browsing, Windows 98 for gaming... but in 1999 I bought Be just to explore it and play with it. Neat stuff, actually.