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The BeOS, decades ahead of its time.
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Dec 1999
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BeOS Demo video
Geeze. I was a huge fan of the BeOS when it was running around in the mid 90s. We installed it on some old LCs and IBM Aptivas. The difference in speed between Mac OS, Winodws95, and BeOS was staggering. We had an alpha build of Photoshop 3 for BeOS running on what we thought were really slow Aptivas. Photoshop ran on a 166MHz Aptiva with BeOS seemingly faster than my 300MHz 8600 running OS 8.5
Just crazy.
The above video is a demo of the BeOS. It's amazing how good it was at multitasking. Hadn't seen stuff like that since the Amiga.
Check out the multiple desktops. Look familiar? 
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"…I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than
you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods,
you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen F. Roberts
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Apr 2005
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[old lady]Oh look at that technology, it even has a word processor![/old lady]
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: planning a comeback !
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Woulda-coulda-shoulda...
-t
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: Salamanca, España
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BeOS is nice, but NeXT was nice too. Mac OS X is today, especially with 10.5 everything and more the BeOS ever could have been. No regrets.
It is still amazing how advanced the BeOS was back in the late 90s.
V
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I could take Sean Connery in a fight... I could definitely take him.
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Dec 1999
Status:
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Originally Posted by voodoo 
BeOS is nice, but NeXT was nice too. Mac OS X is today, especially with 10.5 everything and more the BeOS ever could have been. No regrets.
It is still amazing how advanced the BeOS was back in the late 90s.
V
OS X just seems really slow compared to BeOS, given the available hardware we have. I look at BeOS and how fast it was on those older computers, then I look at OS X and how "fast" it is on a Dual Dual-Core system.
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"…I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than
you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods,
you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen F. Roberts
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: Salamanca, España
Status:
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Originally Posted by olePigeon
OS X just seems really slow compared to BeOS, given the available hardware we have. I look at BeOS and how fast it was on those older computers, then I look at OS X and how "fast" it is on a Dual Dual-Core system.
Yes it is fast.. It would be nice if OS X was as responsive (especially regarding window re-sizing) as BeOS was 15 years ago.
V
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I could take Sean Connery in a fight... I could definitely take him.
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Baninated
Join Date: Jul 2007
Status:
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Can you load BeOS on older macs? I have a g3 iMac sitting around.
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Baninated
Join Date: Jul 2007
Status:
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FYI: be.com is totally empty. Weird.
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Jun 2007
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They were in the running to be sold to Apple, that thought they were the only game in town and tried to take apple to the cleaners. Apple went with Next, got Steve Job in the deal who killed off the clone market which spelled the doom of BeOS.
While BeOS certainly had advanced features, they were a solution looking for a problem that had not appeared.
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: BFE
Status:
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They were so ahead of their time, they went under faster than the rest.
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I'm a bird. I am the 1% (of pets).
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Moderator  Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: Up In The Air
Status:
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After they realized they weren't going to go to Apple, they redesigned themselves as BeIA, or Be for internet appliances, and they went with Sony to make the eVilla.
Of course, they forgot that Sony is about as fickle as anything on the planet. Sony regularly makes a product and then pretends it never existed.
The shining hope was when 3Com bought the Be property. This was just as they were beginning to move from the dragonball processor to the ARM processor, from 33mhz to 300mhz.
My hope was that they would use Be as the OS on Palm, and run old Palm applications in an emulator like "Classic" on OS X.
Instead, Palm made wrong turns at every opportunity, licensing the Palm OS, but never doing anything useful with the Be property. Then they sold off the OS to Access, and now have to license it from them for their own devices.
Instead of Access doing anything useful with Be, they prevent anyone else from working with it, and are going to push Palm into using Linux. Hooray for Linux - Be was faster, and more appropriate for the handheld.
I'm convinced that Be could have added multi-user in the 7 years from when I last used it to now, had someone actually managed to put developers to work on it.
There was a lot to like about Be, and a lot of potential. I've run it on pIII 733 mhz, and it's faster than Windows on 3ghz, and faster than Mac OS X on G5 dual 2ghz. (of course faster is relative - I'm saying ripping mp3 with lame, as opposed to showing opengl teapots. I also know that I'm comparing this with different optical drives, so not all things are equal.)
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Baninated
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: Cambridge, Chicago, Jerusalem (school/home/heart)
Status:
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I love the line in the theme song "you can't find love down a t1 line".
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