The Great Illusion: When We Believed BeOS Would Save the World
44 comments
·June 28, 2025bastawhiz
> Haiku OS, the open source project trying to recreate BeOS, was (and still is) proof that some dreams are too beautiful to die. It will never be the same as the original, but at least it tries. It’s like listening to a Beatles cover band: not the same thing, but it warms your heart.
I'm not an expert on Haiku but I feel like this is needlessly dismissive of a lot of hard work from some smart and passionate people. 25 years later and the hardware is different and more varied, the things people do with their computers is wildly different, and concerns around things like security and compatibility are very different.
Making an analogy that suggests it's a janky BeOS is just wrong. It's not worse, it's different. It might not be the original nostalgic vision the author wants, but that's what two decades does.
bastawhiz
Unrelated to my other comment, who owns the rights to BeOS these days? Palm seems to have sold it off to a company called ACCESS? But they don't seem to have any intention of doing anything with it, and I can't imagine the source is worth much to them. How reasonable is it for a company to push a two decade old project into the public (after taking the basic steps of deleting any licensed code and employee details)?
diskzero
Extracting the licensed 3rd party code and doing the other cleanup needed to do a release would be a chore. I have done this for other code bases and it always ends up being a lot of work that involves lawyers.
The BeOS code wasn’t huge (I remember the tarball being 98mb) but there was licensed code in the codecs, drivers, compilers, dev tools, possibly in NetPositive and more.
It is cool to look at from a historical perspective, which would be the main reason to release it. I wouldn’t advise using the code as a foundation for any future project.
leakycap
I was a Mac fan when it looked like BeOS was going to be the next Mac OS - some Mac magazines even sent bootable BeOS CD-ROMS. I remember booting my Performa to BeOS and being amazed how different the same hardware felt.
After OS X, I worked on a backend team for AT&T. Their entire mobile network at the time - billing, backend, customer service notes... ALL of it was in NeXTStep being streamed from centralized servers out to basic PCs running Citrix.
It was wild to know NeXT had made inroads so many places. I imagine that is why Steve had any sort of relationship with AT&T when he pitched the iPhone and got them to do it. They already saw he could deliver for them on a B&W NeXT-based product used well into the 2000s.
orangecat
I remember booting my Performa to BeOS and being amazed how different the same hardware felt.
No kidding. It took until the M1 to make macOS feel anything close to the responsiveness of BeOS on a 150MHz PowerPC.
WillAdams
The enraging thing is NeXTstep ran acceptably on a 25MHz 68040 (and okay on the 68030 --- the lucky folks had 33MHz "Turbo" '040 boards) --- the performance Rhapsody promised was amazing, but Adobe reneged on a free license of Display PostScript, and Apple spent 10 years recreating that as Quartz (née Display PDF) --- the transparency and drop shadows are nice, but I'd rather have the performance.
ksec
While M1 - M4 are fast. I still think macOS is relatively slow in terms of responsiveness / latency compared to BeOS even with M series. This probably go back to Early Windows or DOS where everything feels instantaneous.
leakycap
I agree & still use a PowerBook running actual OS 9 as my "second brain"
Nothing else is as fast, I don't get slowed down by it
Even cursor movement on modern macOS is slow
loloquwowndueo
Windows, instantaneous? Haha. I never used anything older than 3.0 but unless you mean those older versions indeed, nope - it never felt anything even close to “instantaneous”. (Unless you’re talking about how frequently it crashes).
betamaxthetape
> After OS X, I worked on a backend team for AT&T. Their entire mobile network at the time - billing, backend, customer service notes... ALL of it was in NeXTStep being streamed from centralized servers out to basic PCs running Citrix.
Oh, I would absolutely love to know more details about this. I'm fascinated by the history of telecoms. Would you consider writing a blog post about it? (Or if you prefer, my email is in my profile!)
egypturnash
Is this entire post just an AI summary of a popular HN thread?
paradox460
I hope so, because if an actual human wrote that, yeesh
copperx
Nice image, but what in the world is "muitithreabring"?
nayuki
> https://i0.wp.com/www.desktoponfire.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
And what are the tombstones of TALIGN1, Amigo, and UUS?
wmf
Taligent (a failed Apple/IBM joint OS), Amiga, and I'm not sure what UUS is. It's also funny to give Copland the Linux logo since those are completely unrelated.
fnord77
AI goofing up
leakycap
I love that BeOS/Haiku is still doing its thing, but I don't know what its thing is.
The only "killer app/feature" I know of for Be/Haiku is https://www.tunetrackersystems.com/status.html a radio station automation program, and it's in a weird state where they can't provide hardware that works reliably.
desktopninja
I fondly remember running beos5 PE on a computer with a amd k6 processor and ati tv wonder card. I think it was 400Mhz, maybe 600 and 192MB ram. Watched in awe as it purrr'd editing DVs from firewire and the turner. It was a glorious multimedia OS. BeDepot was awesome too! The ports for winamp (BeAmp), zsnes and genecyst/dgens were top notch. the hw support was great too. never had an issue with MS Sidewinder gamepad (gameport and usb versions).
phlakaton
There are many features of BeOS I loved, but for some funny reason the one that just thoroughly won me over from day one was the three-second boot time on my crusty Mac. Might've been a bit of a cheat. You'd never know it. It was just glorious performance for the impatient.
Of course, that version of the OS didn't do a whole lot. By the time R5 rolled around, the boot time had grown quite a bit. It was still damn fast though.
acdha
The one which got me was the time I had music playing, a large C++ build going, and transferring video from a FireWire card with a tiny buffer simultaneously … and everything not only worked but the UI responsiveness didn’t change at all.
For reference, on that same PC I installed Win98 to play Baldur’s Gate. It bluescreened when I plugged in a Microsoft USB mouse. This was a representative experience.
cosmic_cheese
Some seem to remember 95/98(SE) fondly but what I remember is them being unstable messes even on good hardware, an effect which was multiplied on the crappy bargain bin machines sold at Staples and the like.
Mac OS of the same vintage wasn’t a paragon of stability exactly, but its stability seemed have more rhyme/reason - there were programs and activities that had a tendency to make your system more crashy while others had little to no impact. You could kinda plan around it, and rebooting after doing the instability-causing thing would clear things up. 95/98(SE)’s instability felt a lot more random which for me made it more day-ruining.
Windows didn’t feel appreciably more stable than the competition until they finally ditched that crappy 9x kernel with Windows 2000, but that release wasn’t intended for general users, which is a shame because it was just as stable as the post-SP1 XP was, maybe more. Consumers got cheated with Windows ME.
acdha
Yeah, macOS 7-9 had known weaknesses (e.g. burning CD coasters or skipping audio if you held down the mouse button, keeping it in an interrupt handler) but they were more deterministic and people could avoid them.
The DOS-based Windows versions were just plain bad, and only Microsoft’s illegal product tying kept competitors off of the market. Windows NT 3 was at least stable, but they made it worse moving drivers into the kernel for performance in 4, and it took decades to repair the security damage that caused.
bombcar
Back then booting and rebooting was something you did so many times (or at least when you “wanted to use the computer”) - my first experience with Linux was colored by “how fast did it boot”?
II2II
I solved that problem by compiling my own kernel. The speedup was dramatic. Of course, that was back in the days when an interested hobbiest could compile a lean kernel without fear of breaking dozens of things.
bombcar
That was Gentoo for me - it took forever to build but then the realization that all this autoprobes and other self-configuring things were taking an awful long time.
I remember years of avoiding DHCP because if the client daemon didn’t get a response boot would hang waiting for it to time out …
ndiddy
This is an obvious AI SEO spam site. Kinda interesting how AI has "innovated" here by making it viable to make SEO spam sites about extremely niche topics because generating the slop articles/pictures costs pennies.
jkestner
If they’re just targeting HN, they can save those pennies too. You can’t make me RTFA!
zem
for the windows and mac users the lack of preinstalls and lack of apps might have been what killed beos, but for the linux users who might have been tempted to experiment (i was one!) it was the lack of drivers that delivered the death blow. i was perfectly happy to install the os myself and use it for whatever i could, but it did not support my network card and that was that.
JohnDeHope
I think it has the prettiest UI of the era, including Apple’s.
Former Be employee here who ended up at Apple eventually. BeOS was way, way behind NeXTStep in so many ways. We also had fragile base class problems and had a lot of kernel issues. BeFS was cool but Dominic ended up at Apple (and is still there) so I feel Apple got generations of BeFS evolution. Jean Louis wanted an unrealistic price and Apple spent the smartest 400 million dollars that I can think of by buying NeXT. Apple got Steve, Avie, Bertrand and so many others. Many Be people ended up on board after journeys with Eazel and others. Some never made it to Apple due to their Danger/Android/Google paths. This saddens me even to this day.