Pinderkent

Earlier this year Google announced Google Chrome OS. Subsequently, some early indications of what it may offer came to light. And now there will apparently be an event held soon, where further details pertaining to Chrome OS may be made available.

I am interested in seeing what Chrome OS may offer us. Based on the original announcement, it sounded like it would bring some fresh ideas to the table. This is something we really haven't seen for well over a decade now. Modern mainstream desktop operating systems like Mac OS X and Windows 7 aren't overly different from their equivalent releases of 10 to 15 years ago. Mac OS X is still remarkably similar to NeXTSTEP and Mac OS 9 and earlier, while Windows 7 still follows the concepts introduced with Windows 95.

Looking back, the last truly innovative desktop operating system is likely BeOS. I covered many of the excellent design decisions behind BeOS in an article earlier this year. In short, it was far too many years ahead of its time. It's only today that we're getting the hardware that it would excel on. And although the original BeOS implementation can best be considered dead, the Haiku project has been making good strides creating an operating system inspired by it.

If Chrome OS can bring even just a fraction of the innovation that BeOS brought, I think we should be able to consider it a success. Unlike BeOS, Chrome OS has a powerful backer, which may very well be what it needs to become a mainstream competitor to the existing consumer-grade operating systems that are widely used today. So I'm looking forward to the upcoming announcements regarding it, and hopefully we'll be able to start using it out quite soon.

At the beginning of this month, I wrote about BeOS, and how far ahead of its time it was. It turns out that a former colleague of mine from many years back had read that article. He contacted me this week and mentioned that the company he works for in Germany still uses BeOS on a small number of systems!

While I'm sure it still has casual hobbyist users, I can't say that I had really expected BeOS to still be used commercially. He said that they had gotten some custom animation software developed for them nearly a decade ago, and the developers recommended BeOS since it was the most suitable OS at the time for such work.

I tried to find out more about the version of BeOS they were using, as well as what hardware they were running it on, but my former colleague wasn't sure. He didn't work directly with the systems, but said he'd try to talk to one of the users to see if they had any idea. I haven't heard back from him yet, however.

As for why they still use such old systems, he said that they work fine, the custom application still allows them to get their work done, and they don't feel any need to upgrade. That is fair enough. It's a pretty common response from small businesses who are still using older hardware and software.

I'm pleased to see that BeOS is still of use to some people, years after it was effectively discontinued. Perhaps as Haiku matures, it will eventually provide my former colleague's company (and any other BeOS users) a way to upgrade their hardware, while still being able to make full use of their custom applications, as well as the BeOS software platform.

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.