The BeBox was so cool. I'm surprised no gaming-oriented PC builder has replicated the CPU activity LEDs. The GeekPort was also fun- in my dorm someone on my floor had a BeBox and used the GeekPort to control a robot arm. At least that came back in the form of the Raspberry Pi GPIO connector.
> It was shockingly performant, especially with anything graphical.
I had the same experience.
Only few things came close since: QNX, my M1 MBP when it was new and a fresh MXLinux installation (no idea how they do it, maybe some low latency scheduler?)
Those felt similarly instant GUI-wise as BeOS did, while unfortunately current MacOS and Win11 feel glacial compared to it.
There were a few apps, a word processor, a 3D modeling and rendering application, some media players, a basic DAW and so on .. but the web browser situation kind of wasn’t so great, and there were still holes in the OS where future features had been promised, a bit too long imho ..
(Disclaimer: you can pry my still-functioning BeBox from my cold dead hands.. okay, I admit, I only use it a couple times a year just to be sure it still boots..)
I've been told that, circa 1996 or so, there were a lot of holes in the OS. It demoed well, but…
Related: I've been enjoying, the Designed in California podcast [1]. Link below is "Part 3" wherein Apple is circling the drain in the mid 1990's (when I started at Apple, BTW) and is desperately looking outside Apple for the operating system they hope will save the company. Be (and Jean-Louis Gassée) look like they will win:
Well, how fortunate we are now, being able to do simplified coding through LLMs. AROS and Haiku and MenuetOS (etc.) could get a boost in software availability soon.
It was ridiculously fast on my family’s Dimension 4100 tower, which had a 750Mhz PIII in it. The 98SE install that machine shipped with was glacial in comparison, and though Win2K shrunken the gap dramatically it still wasn’t as fast as BeOS.
I was able to find a decent number of apps on BeBits but a lot of stuff was missing.
Was blazing fast even on my 450MHz PIII. But QNX was equally fast too on the same machine, if not faster. I think I enjoyed using QNX more at the time overall. Oh, and DOS too, late 90s/early 00s DOS was surprisingly decent with tons of cool thirdparty apps. There was even a quirky graphical web browser called Arachne that I thoroughly enjoyed using.
I've moved back to Haiku as my daily driver for a lot of stuff. Unfortunately it doesn't really have a good video editor yet, so I'm stuck with Linux for that at least.
If only for the UI. Back then, all bring white and beige and Windows blue screenofdesthblye. Be OS was pure joy, if only to play around with. Many third-party developers (remember sharewsre) took s liking to the Be aesthetic and ran away with it.
What the hell happened to BeBox and QNX?! They were the pinnacle of blitz. I’ve got a beefy machine to run large LLM models, but recently installing a new Debian, Gnome struggles after booting because of their packaging manager running 100% for a few minutes, following by random lag. Like wtf we had speed 26 years ago :(
I was just telling my 10 year old about QNX last night, and how it was an amazing feat to have a whole graphical desktop with apps all fit on a 1.44mb floppy disc. Since he's missing so much of the context of "the ancient times", he didn't exactly share my enthusiasm, but at least he humored me a bit for my trip down memory lane.
Check out https://v-os.dev/ - it's been adopted to create a new Linux distro that's a hybrid of Linux and Haiku. Pretty light on resource and the Be / Haiku GUI feels so good.
