Pinderkent

Today I read an article reminiscing about the high responsiveness of BeOS. It is unfortunate that people in general are beginning to forget about BeOS. It was a truly remarkable operating system, and as the article I read correctly points out, the responsiveness of the desktop environment it provided over a decade ago still hasn't been matched even by contemporary desktop environments.

It's no wonder that BeOS was able to provide such a responsive desktop experience. We can better understand this by reading the The Media OS whitepaper from Be, Inc.. Their BeOS R4 datasheet is also a useful document to read.

They correctly predicted the rise of multiprocessor systems, although perhaps anticipated their widespread adoption somewhat prematurely. Furthermore, they correctly predicted that such processors would be 64-bit processors. The result was an operating system that was heavily threaded throughout, with powerful 64-bit filesystem, and high-performance graphics and I/O subsystems.

At a higher level, BeOS's various "Kits" provided very well-organized and sensible chunks of functionality. In addition, it offered a very UNIX-like filesystem layout and set of commands. I recall feeling very comfortable and productive with BeOS the first time I used it in the 1990s, because I could reuse so much of my knowledge from my previous experiences with operating systems like Solaris, HP-UX, Linux and BSD/OS.

Even today, over ten years after its release, we can read through the BeOS Release 4 specifications and still not find some of this functionality suitably implemented in today's best desktop and workstation operating systems. And we can't forget that BeOS Release 4 wasn't even the last release of BeOS!

For a variety of reasons, BeOS never succeeded in the marketplace. In many respects, it was likely available far too early to really prove its worth. It's only now that we are just beginning to have widely-available systems, like those built around Intel's Core i7 CPUs, that could really benefit from the pervasive multi-threading and 64-bit support that BeOS offered a decade ago.

Although there have been some attempts, it's unlikely at this point that we'll see much, if anything, further come of the original BeOS codebase. Thankfully, there have been efforts by the open source community to develop operating systems that bring us the benefits of BeOS. The most notable of these projects is likely Haiku. It has been progressing well, with VMware images available for use.

BeOS was a truly amazing desktop and workstation operating system, clearly a decade before its time. Were it to have survived and been continually developed, today it would likely provide a tremendously responsive, productive and powerful desktop environment. This is would be especially true on today's computers with 8 logical 64-bit CPUs, extremely capable graphics hardware, and much faster I/O. Even if open source efforts like Haiku manage to capture a small fraction of the BeOS experience, we'll be very well off.