Never used it myself - only ever read about it. Proprietary operating system with a nice GUI and some degree of unix compatibility. Don't know how far that compatibility went but it was enough for it to use GNU Bash as its shell and GCC as the compiler. Filesystem (BeFS) was pretty flash and made extensive use of extended attributes. Supposedly it was very good at multitasking and multimedia work - I assume this was mostly compared to Windows 9x and classic MacOS rather than Windows NT.

I've played around with Haiku from time to time and if you're curious about BeOS it might be worth a look. I think its pretty much aiming to be a reimplementation of BeOS R5 with upgrades. Very similar if not the same architecture, same filesystem, same GUI shell (tracker was open-sourced at some point), same user-mode APIs, etc. The 64bit version is source compatible with BeOS R5 and the 32bit version is binary compatible as well (can run unmodified BeOS R5 software and, IIRC, some drivers too). On top of that it has various upgrades like more modern hardware support, better unix compatibility (so it can run a lot of software from linux), package manager, modern browser, UI updates, and probably a load of other things.

Great info davidrg, that is a very good summary IMHO.

I remember running BeOS 5 Personal Edition (came free on PC magazine CD) on my Pentium 133 around the early 2000s for some fun.

It was cool as it could be installed on Windows 9x with a single file and it could shutdown Windows and boot from the file. You didn't need to partition the hard drive or anything. Very neat.

I believe GUI resources were high priority so the OS always felt nice and fast. It ran pretty well and I had lots of fun playing with it. It even had SMP support I believe.

Pity it didn't really go anywhere.

Apple looked to purchase BeOS over Next but they wanted too much money. Would have been interesting to see what Apple would have done with the OS.

I ended up with a copy of Zeta (purchased "legally") which was a crappy "upgrade" of BeOS 5 done by an unsanctioned 3rd party. They basically patched various parts of BeOS with newer packages and modules. It wasn't done very well.

Oh well, man of wealth and taste that you are, you'll have to start with the appropriate hardware:

Cuttoon wrote on 2022-03-31, 21:07:

Oh well, man of wealth and taste that you are, you'll have to start with the appropriate hardware:

Cuttoon, do you any any chance own this? What version of Mac OS and ROM did you use to get SheepShaver going? I've a dual 133 BeBox running BeOS R5.03 and can't find the correct version of Mac OS to run without crashing at startup.

Byrd wrote on 2022-03-31, 22:39:

Cuttoon wrote on 2022-03-31, 21:07:

Oh well, man of wealth and taste that you are, you'll have to start with the appropriate hardware:

Cuttoon, do you any any chance own this? What version of Mac OS and ROM did you use to get SheepShaver going? I've a dual 133 BeBox running BeOS R5.03 and can't find the correct version of Mac OS to run without crashing at startup.

Dude, you clicked "quote and reply" so you saw in the code where those pictures came from. Wikipedia, entry for the BeBox.
So, I sure wish I did.
Just meant to point out that BeOS started out as the software to some hardware.

I actually saw the announcements back in 1995 and was torn between "amazing how anyone would challenge the PC overlord" and "well, that thing isn't going anywhere"...

Cuttoon wrote on 2022-03-31, 22:48:

Dude, you clicked "quote and reply" so you saw in the code where those pictures came from. Wikipedia, entry for the BeBox.
So, I sure wish I did.
Just meant to point out that BeOS started out as the software to some hardware.

Yes, I did - but had to ask thought "maybe, just maybe" that was your own hardware ... not exactly a stock image

Byrd wrote on 2022-04-01, 02:50:

Cuttoon wrote on 2022-03-31, 22:48:

Dude, you clicked "quote and reply" so you saw in the code where those pictures came from. Wikipedia, entry for the BeBox.
So, I sure wish I did.
Just meant to point out that BeOS started out as the software to some hardware.

Yes, I did - but had to ask thought "maybe, just maybe" that was your own hardware ... not exactly a stock image

Sure, I could have uploaded them and they and their content look crummy enough to feel authentic.
But, I don't engage in Wikipedia apart from the rare, anonymous OCD typo correction 😉

Even if it gives you trouble - congratulations on owning such a unicorn!

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2022-03-31, 19:14:

I have not heard much about this OS? What are your views?

It started in the early 90s, changed architectures 3 times (from the original running on AT&T DSP chips to Motorola PowerPC 603/604 and finally started supporting the Intel Pentium with the release of R3).

Compared to what was available at the time on the consumer market, MacOS 7.5 I believe and Windows 95 when R3 was released, it was quite a difference in handling multimedia streams and supporting multi processors.
A handful of companies used it on professional systems for video editing and digital audio recorders.

Byrd wrote on 2022-03-31, 22:39:

Cuttoon wrote on 2022-03-31, 21:07:

Oh well, man of wealth and taste that you are, you'll have to start with the appropriate hardware:

Cuttoon, do you any any chance own this? What version of Mac OS and ROM did you use to get SheepShaver going? I've a dual 133 BeBox running BeOS R5.03 and can't find the correct version of Mac OS to run without crashing at startup.

I think it needs something like 7.5.2 upto 8.0 or 8.1 and a 4MB rom, which would be oldworld powermac.
I currently run BeOS dr8, too old for SheepShaver.

lolo799 wrote on 2022-04-01, 11:14:

I think it needs something like 7.5.2 upto 8.0 or 8.1 and a 4MB rom, which would be oldworld powermac.
I currently run BeOS dr8, too old for SheepShaver.

Thanks, the readme suggested anything above 8.5, so I'll try 8.1 and below next.

I also used BeOS (on a PC) a lot during the 2000-2001s , I got tired of 9x crashes and my only license of WinNT was the Win2k Beta something that was a freebie from some computer magazine (which I also had installed as a dualboot, but did not use much).
I remember I even bought GobeProductive at some point (not physical)

What sold me on BeOS was the very usual demo where they would play a couple movies in windows simultaneously and not one of them would drop a frame, while the rest of the UI was as responsive as if you had nothing open. I remember I could not reproduce that on the same hardware on either Windows or Linux. And could not even on more modern hardware for at least another 5 years, more or less by the time compiz was a thing on Linux.

The interface felt really snappy and quick while still being "modern looking".
Something I remember really liking was the mail integration -- your mail was just visible as files inside your $HOME directory (like a UNIX Maildir), but unlike a Maildir, the GUI file browser could still do nice things like sort by subject, from, etc. In fact, the file browser was the primary GUI to browse email.
The "mail daemon" would just connect to POP3 and download new files into your mail directory.

I also remember the printer setup dialogs. The fact I remember then means it must have been complicated for some reason 😀

I also wrote at least one driver for Be (for the USB<->Serial adapter from my Palm m130, so that I could run pilot-link). I enjoyed the APIs a lot, both kernel side and application side. Actually it was my first shot at writing a kernel-mode driver and it was quite fun. Compared to either Windows or Linux, it was a very clean, well designed (mostly) C++ API. At the time I was quite sure this was the future of OSes. I actually put the BeBook on my Palm and read it as if it was a fiction book. 😀

By the time I got my next hardware Be was already dead 🙁, and I moved to XP.

javispedro1 wrote on 2022-04-01, 12:11:

Something I remember really liking was the mail integration -- your mail was just visible as files inside your $HOME directory (like a UNIX Maildir), but unlike a Maildir, the GUI file browser could still do nice things like sort by subject, from, etc. In fact, the file browser was the primary GUI to browse email.
The "mail daemon" would just connect to POP3 and download new files into your mail directory.

Yeah, I found this quite impressive when I discovered it in Haiku - really shows off what BeFS can do with extended attributes. Here is a screenshot from the Haiku Users Guide:

The "New E-Mail" window showing how the inbox is just a folder full of email files.

I was going through old GTA3 readme.txt and got reference to BeOS, saying the game isn't supported there. Was BeOS compatible with Windows in some ways or vice versa?

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2022-04-01, 19:03:

I was going through old GTA3 readme.txt and got reference to BeOS, saying the game isn't supported there. Was BeOS compatible with Windows in some ways or vice versa?

No compatibility at all. Only reason I can think of it being mentioned in the GTA3 readme is if GTA1 or 2 was ported to BeOS.

I've been trying to get round to dedicating a system to Haiku exploration, I've got this feeling that it's really going to take off soon, has a lot falling into place whereas linux desktop is falling apart again, and windows 11 is windows 11.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-04-01, 20:21:

I've been trying to get round to dedicating a system to Haiku exploration, I've got this feeling that it's really going to take off soon, has a lot falling into place whereas linux desktop is falling apart again, and windows 11 is windows 11.

Yeah, I'd say its got a much bigger chance at taking on the windows desktop than Linux does. There is semi-active work going on to port it to RISC-V and ARM - I expect once done it could become a popular option on the Raspberry Pi. Biggest missing piece really is a chrome or firefox port. The included browser, NetPositive, is based on chrome and does work but it still had a way to go last time I used it.

I've currently got an HP nc6400 laptop (1.8GHz Core 2 duo, SSD, few GB RAM) setup to dual boot Haiku and Ubuntu. Haiku takes about 15 seconds to get from the boot menu to the desktop and is very fast once its up and running. All hardware works except wifi (keeps connecting and disconnecting) and perhaps the battery gauge (which seems to be just showing random numbers). I've set the software updater running as its been several months so perhaps some of these issues have been fixed now.

I ran that "Personal Edition" version 5 of BeOS on my K6-3 back around 2000 or so. I was very impressed with it, but it's usefulness was of course limited by the fact that we were living in a Windows world.
Up to that point I had not used the WinNT series yet so BeOS' stability felt like a revolution compared to Win9x.
It was a very lean and mean OS. Unix style, but did not support multiple users.
The boot speed was by far the fastest I ever saw for anything besides MS-DOS on comparable hardware, and maybe the fastest I've seen period. Starting from the time the BIOS hands off to the OS, I recall the boot to a working desktop took about 4-5 seconds.
It had a decent amount of driver support for common hardware. I know I had my Sound Blaster AWE32 working and some kind of mp3 player installed. I think my printer also worked but not totally sure. Either my modem or my NIC (whichever I was using at that point) also worked. I used whatever web browser it came with as an exotic test-case for a web site I was working on back then.
Around this time I thought about buying a Gravis Ultrasound on eBay just so I could try my hand at writing a BeOS driver (not sure if it already had one, but I was looking for a project). If only I had done that, I'd have a Gravis Ultrasound now...

I tried to use BeOS whenever I could, but before long I'd want to run something that required me to reboot back to Win98.
As BeOS faded away, the promises of Linux started to get louder and I began my first struggle with a RedHat 6.2 desktop which really didn't work at all. Somewhere in there I also tried FreeBSD as a server (no GUI). But Win2k was the next big OS that I'd actually use long term.

^Which version?

I can’t seem to get it to run. Anyone else running it on socket 7? What iso did you use?

Byrd wrote on 2022-03-31, 22:39:

Cuttoon wrote on 2022-03-31, 21:07:

Oh well, man of wealth and taste that you are, you'll have to start with the appropriate hardware:

Cuttoon, do you any any chance own this? What version of Mac OS and ROM did you use to get SheepShaver going? I've a dual 133 BeBox running BeOS R5.03 and can't find the correct version of Mac OS to run without crashing at startup.

dual 133? Pentium? What mobo? I have a dual tyan I’d love to try haiku or beos out on. But it won’t boot it

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-04-03, 21:24:

^Which version? […]
Show full quote

^Which version?

I can’t seem to get it to run. Anyone else running it on socket 7? What iso did you use?

Byrd wrote on 2022-03-31, 22:39:

Cuttoon wrote on 2022-03-31, 21:07:

Oh well, man of wealth and taste that you are, you'll have to start with the appropriate hardware:

Cuttoon, do you any any chance own this? What version of Mac OS and ROM did you use to get SheepShaver going? I've a dual 133 BeBox running BeOS R5.03 and can't find the correct version of Mac OS to run without crashing at startup.

dual 133? Pentium? What mobo? I have a dual tyan I’d love to try haiku or beos out on. But it won’t boot it

The BeBox had dual PowerPC CPUs - either a 603 at 66MHz or a 603e at 133MHz. BeOS wasn't available on x86 until R3 in 1998.

For Haiku the minimum requirement is a Pentium II with 384MB of RAM. I assume its mostly so high because the installer is a live CD (IIRC once the GUI starts you get asked if you want to install Haiku or continue to the desktop). Probably once installed it would run with less.

davidrg wrote on 2022-04-03, 23:40:

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-04-03, 21:24:

^Which version? […]
Show full quote

^Which version?

I can’t seem to get it to run. Anyone else running it on socket 7? What iso did you use?

Byrd wrote on 2022-03-31, 22:39:

Cuttoon, do you any any chance own this? What version of Mac OS and ROM did you use to get SheepShaver going? I've a dual 133 BeBox running BeOS R5.03 and can't find the correct version of Mac OS to run without crashing at startup.

dual 133? Pentium? What mobo? I have a dual tyan I’d love to try haiku or beos out on. But it won’t boot it

The BeBox had dual PowerPC CPUs - either a 603 at 66MHz or a 603e at 133MHz. BeOS wasn't available on x86 until R3 in 1998.

For Haiku the minimum requirement is a Pentium II with 384MB of RAM. I assume its mostly so high because the installer is a live CD (IIRC once the GUI starts you get asked if you want to install Haiku or continue to the desktop). Probably once installed it would run with less.

I wonder if a 400gp would do the trick? 🤔