Scot Hacker

One of my favorite anecdotes about BeOS was that it had a CPU usage meter[1], and on the CPU meter there were on/off switches for each core. If you had two cores and turned one off, your computer would run at half speed. If you turned both off, your computer would crash. Someone once told me that this was filed as a bug against the OS and the response was "Works As Intended" and that it was the expected behavior. (These are fuzzy memories from ~25 years ago. It would be nice if someone could confirm this story or tell me if it's just my imagination.) [1]: http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/8way/8way-1.jpg

The last article is a bit depressing. But also a good read for millenials and such who have a hard time understanding why some of us older guys really dislike Microsoft. http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

> How is it different from GNU/Linux or BSDs? I am risking the one full-time paid developer of Haiku popping up here and shouting at me, because he's done that a few times before and even written to my editor-in-chief to complain. Sadly for him, my former EIC was a hardcore techie -- it's how I met him, long before either of us worked there -- and he was on my side. https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/11/haiku_beta_4/ Unix is a 1960s design for minicomputers. Minicomputers are text-only standalone multiuser computers. That is why things like handling serial lines (/dev/tty -- short for TeleTYpe) are buried deep in the core of Unix, but networking and graphics aren't. There is an absolute tonne of legacy baggage like this in Unix. All Unixes, including Linux kernel 7.0. We do not use minicomputers any more; nobody even makes them. We don't have multiuser computers any more. In fact, we have multi computers per user. Modern servers are just PCs with lots of connections from other computers not from people. In the early 1980s the Lisa flopped because it was $10K, but the Mac did well because it was $2.5K and had a GUI and no shell. The future, woo, etc. The Mac was black and white, 1 sound channel, no hard disk, no expansion slots, and in cutting down the Lisa, Apple discarded multitasking. Enter the Hi-Toro Lorraine. Intended to be the ultimate games console, with a powerful full-16 bit Motorola 68000 chip (a minicomputer CPU on a sdingle die) amazing colour…

> So, guys, I don’t want to kill your enthusiasm, but this sounds very much like We are just pretending to release a SteamOS version but in fact we advertise the Windows model everywhere instead. Since I am familiar with large companies, I guess the story was like that. As a Linux user since the last millennium, this dance is so incredibly familiar. > In his own column, Gassée has written several times about Microsoft's Windows OEM License and the ways in which it limits the freedoms of PC OEMs. In July 2001, I spoke with Gassée to find out why no dual-boot computers with BeOS or Linux installed alongside Windows can be purchased today https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ > It's impossible to know precisely how much, but if you do the math and assume that it's $30 per computer from those various sources, that would yield $200 million or more than 25% of Dell's profitability. It could be more or less than this number, but any way that you look at it, Dell is dependent on Microsoft for a massive chunk of their profits. http://www.michaelrobertson.com/archive.php?minute_id=131 So, uh, good luck. Sure is an amazing coincidence how many PC vendors suddenly have a competitor to the Steam Deck, that happen to run Windows, and especially push their Windows versions.

The CPU monitor program was called Pulse and early versions allowed you to turn all the processors off and crash the machine. I think it was fixed in 3.something or 4.0. The 8-way PIII Xeon was a Compaq someone tested BeOS on before it went into production. I Remember it being posted on some BeOS news site. There should be another screenshot or two with 25 avi files playing and a crap load of CPU hungry programs running at once. Impressive feat circa 2000. Edit: browse the screenshot directory for the other two. Amazing they survived time, internet, bit rot and my memory: http://birdhouse.org/beos/8way/ The BeOS scheduler prioritized the GUI and media programs so you could load the machine down to 100% and the GUI never stuttered and windows could be smoothly moved, maximized and minimized at 100% CPU. Rather, your programs would stutter. And everything was given a fair chance at CPU time. Very nice design and the OS was built from the ground up for multimedia and threading for SMP. It was a real nice attempt at building a next generation desktop OS. Had no security even though it had basic POSIX compatibility and a bash shell. Security bits meant nothing.

Be made inroads in radio and sound production; though I don't think they knew it.[0] There was a market starved for a stable, high quality and responsive operating system that would run on the x86 hardware that was abundant everywhere. Windows wasn't it, yet; recall this is years before XP, and Windows 98 was an unstable mess while NT was slow. 0: https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/27-tune_tracker/

Wasn't this the one that was sabotaged by Microsoft so that BeOS was installed but you couldn't boot it? https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

BeOS stored mail as individual files with extended attributes holding the subject, date, sender, etc. The email app (BeMail) was used to view/compose/send email but inbox management was handled by Tracker (BeOS version of Macintosh Finder or Windows Explorer). But the Tracker window was configured to display the extended attributes instead of the file names. The actual filename wasn't even displayed. Nobody went crazy. Example: https://birdhouse.org/beos/refugee/bemail.jpg via https://birdhouse.org/beos/refugee/ (which has some other images of Tracker organization with extended attributes)

> Be example https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ msft forced PC makers to ship bootloaders that would lockup on sight of Be's boot chain

Relevant: “Antique BeOS Content by Scot Hacker (1996–2001)” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32708579 https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/

This interview with Scott Holdaway from 1999 has more on the OpenDoc/Gobe transition: https://birdhouse.org/beos/bible/bos/int_holdaway.html

The project description ("Install Linux over or alongside an existing Windows install, straight from Windows, without requiring to boot from external media like a flash drive or making BIOS configuration changes") reminded me of the old BeOS 5 Personal Edition installer which "installs from within Windows without partitioning" and "kicks Windows out of memory and boots BeOS in its place."[1] In the same review, Scot went on to say: "I tested the Windows installer on several machines, and was amazed. Not only did everything work as advertised -- it worked better than I dreamed possible. BeOS has always been the easiest OS on the planet to install, bar none, but this is ridiculous. BeOS is up and running in five minutes or less, and everything is totally painless. Linux distributors should be taking notes." Sounds like someone did! ;-) [1] https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/13-beos_5/

It wasn't Microsoft's meddling with the browser that was it's major anticompetitive sin; it was it's control over the bootloader. https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ Yet here we are, and windows is not at all the dominant consumer os, and is not the dominant general purpose os any longer.

If you wanted to learn bash scripting, there is some fun stuff in here: http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/24-scripting_the_bfs/ $ ThisCity=$(catattr META:city "$This Person" | cut -f3 -d:) The value of $ThisCity is now "Munster Hamlet" whenever the script is passing over the file "Walter Mitty."

Interesting mention on the BeOS-based IPAD prototype in 1999: > Be has quietly been planning their own version of the perfect low-cost, easy-to-use, dedicated media device. Be's IPAD (Internet Personal Access Device)* > [...] > * According to hints dropped in a recent newsletter, Be may be casting about for a catchier moniker than "IPAD." http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/07-IPAD/

I see https://birdhouse.org/beos/refugee/trackerbase.gif for 2 seconds and I feel happy. So cute, clear, useful.

If you can do queries AND have a GUI option that seems logical to me. Looking back at my history this topic hits me right in the feels... http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/25-formula_queries/

I think the clever bit is when a user sees their email in the file browser[1] they can mentally connect with that and start using their file system as the database that it is, building their own dynamic todo list[2] that isn't managed by any application! Almost every filesystem "supports metadata", and while I agree that application support could be better, I think the real key is getting users to use that space themselves. [1]: https://birdhouse.org/beos/refugee/bemail.jpg [2]: https://birdhouse.org/beos/refugee/trackerbase.gif

You'd be interested in the Be File System (from BeOS / Haiku) for inspiration: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/06/the-beos-filesys… It has support for database-like extended file attributes, which can be custom attributes! For example, a `person` file would have all of the normal fields you'd expect from an address book as file attributes: http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/24-scripting_the_bfs/ https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/attributes.html Technical: http://www.letterp.com/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf Though you seem to be against specific file systems due to non-portability and that is understandable.

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking for (obviously I have no new evidence of ancient history), but I'm generally referring to this type of thing: http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

Ever wonder why it was so hard to find a Dell/OEM with Linux, OS/2, or BeOS, instead of Windows? http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

I assume they're just random numbers encoded in "base 62" or similar. http://birdhouse.org/blog/2010/10/24/base62-urls-django/

I had to google for that: http://www.birdhouse.org/etc/kibosig.txt

I wonder what the author would think of Kibo and his sig: http://www.birdhouse.org/etc/kibosig.txt

Agreed. "svn up" and your site is updated - no FTP details need to be given away. And you can this to automatically install via SVN http://birdhouse.org/software/2008/04/wp-create/ (and there's a similar script for updating all the sites at once)

Two major differences. One, Spotlight is just a search tool. They run a daemon in the background that monitors reads to the FS and updates an index [1]. In Haiku, indexing and querying is a feature built into the filesystem. Secondly, Spotlight does full-text search and indexing whereas Haiku only indexes the attributes you attach to files. Metadata plays a very important role in the Haiku world. You cannot fathom the extent of their power unless you use the OS. This is not a "feature" that was tacked onto the OS as an afterthought, the entire OS was built around this feature. [1] I'm actually working on a tool like Spotlight for Haiku (http://code.google.com/p/haiku-beacon/), though development has been stalled since my PC went kaput. EDIT: Read articles 24 and 25 for a sneak peek into BFS's more powerful features: http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/

> LibreOffice team is frustrated that the for-profit model is beating the OSS model Let's take a look at this "for-profit model" - is it just higher price outweighed by better product? lol: Microsoft, after getting beat up in the press for making propietary extensions to the Kerberos protocol, has released the specifications on the web -- but in order to get it, you have to run a Windows .exe file which forces you agree to a click-through license agreement where you agree to treat it as a trade secret, before it will give you the .pdf file. Who would have thought that you could publish a trade secret on the web? - https://slashdot.org/story/00/05/02/158204/kerberos-pacs-and-microsoft… Back in 2001, Be, Inc. managed to get BeOS pre-installed on one computer model from Hitachi. Just one. On the entire PC market. Microsoft forced Hitachi to drop the bootloader entry to hide BeOS from customers buying it. They enforced their monopoly over the only possible niche BeOS could find on the PC market, crushing Be, Inc. in the process. - https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2021-10-04_ok_lenovo_we_need_to_… So why aren't there any dual-boot computers for sale? The answer lies in the nature of the relationship Microsoft maintains with hardware vendors. More specifically, in the "Windows License" agreed to by hardware vendors who want to include Windows on the computers they sell. This is not the license you pretend to read and click "I Accept" to when installing…

Reading the BeOS Bible talking about that is quite a throwback: > As described elsewhere in this book, BeOS uses multiple processors with incredible efficiency. If you'll be running BeOS most of the time, you'll get more bang for your buck by getting two (or more) older processors than by installing one superfast CPU. Last year's 266 MHz CPUs will always be dirt cheap compared to today's 450 MHz CPU. Thus, when running BeOS, you could have 532 MHz for less than the cost of a single 450 MHz processor. The catch is that if you'll be dual-booting into operating systems that won't recognize a second CPU (such as Windows 95/98), you'll end up with half of your processor speed being wasted until you reboot into BeOS. Chance are that once you start using BeOS regularly, you won't want to use anything else, and you won't regret buying a multiprocessor machine. https://birdhouse.org/beos/bible/bos/ch_hardware1.html

Ok, I've read it. I agree it is serious. But I think it's also wrong. Monopolies can be abused in ways that make it almost impossible to compete against them. Let's use Windows as an example. Some companies that sell Windows boxes also sell Linux boxes. (Dell for example.) Of course, the Linux boxes are less popular. But why not sell a computer that can dual boot? People would be a lot more willing to experiment with Linux if they didn't have to install it themselves. Indeed, around 1999 a young company was trying to popularize its new operating system: BeOS. I am quoting from this site: http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ "[...] Be was engaged in enthusiastic discussions with Dell, Compaq, Micron, and Hitachi. Taken together, pre-installation arrangements with vendors of this magnitude could have had a major impact on the future of Be and BeOS. But of the four, only Hitachi actually shipped a machine with BeOS pre-installed. The rest apparently backed off after a closer reading of the fine print in their Microsoft Windows License agreements. Hitachi did ship a line of machines (the Flora Prius) with BeOS pre-installed, but made changes to the bootloader -- rendering BeOS invisible to the consumer -- before shipping. Apparently, Hitachi received a little visit from Microsoft just before shipping the Flora Prius, and were reminded of the terms of the license."

> don't be stupid. holy cow. No personal attacks, please. Personally, I wouldn't put it in certain terms like the GP has, but it is not out of the question for me. > compatibility is not an EEE tactic. embracing alone is not anything other than embracing. > where is the extending and extinguishing of Linux? name ONE thing that is possible in WSL that is not possible without it. just one. > where is the extending and extinguishing of .net? of Yammer? of Teams? where are these extensions to Linux or Android? what's been extinguished? You are aware that EEE is in /phases/, right? Embracing is just the first one. > You people really drank the kool-aid didn't you? Think for yourselves for once. Or maybe we just haven't forgotten history? In case you want to learn or refresh the memory: - http://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp. - https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/us-v-microsoft-corporation-browser-an… - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT (the patent wasn't released to the OIN until 2019)