In 1995, another PC operating system launched its first version around the same time as Windows 95 was released. It was called BeOS, and it tried to become an alternative to Windows and Mac.
Yep. I ran it on my 450MHz Pentium III back in the day - was incredibly fast and felt so ahead of it’s time, especially it’s multimedia and multitasking performance, as well as the fast boot speeds. It was my second favorite OS back then.
As it was explained to me, it could do full-motion video almost 30 years ago, it could switch around analog signals like cable TV and put them on screen in an app, it had ports for hardware hacking that you could control more low-level and directly. It was just better, by quite a lot. And Microsoft and network effects conspired to kill it before it got rooted and so it got thrown out with the trash.
Not only could it do full motion video, but it could, on a 200Mhz Pentium MMX CPU, rotate an OpenGL cube on any axis with a different video running on all six sides, and do so smoothly and without any lag or video stuttering. It was incredible what they were able to do back then. Hell I’m not entirely convinced Windows could pull that off now!
I recall rumors that when it came to version 10 of Mac OS, Apple knew they needed outside help, and the choice came down to BeOS on the one hand, or NeXT (including ol’ Stevie J) on the other.
Yep. I ran it on my 450MHz Pentium III back in the day - was incredibly fast and felt so ahead of it’s time, especially it’s multimedia and multitasking performance, as well as the fast boot speeds. It was my second favorite OS back then.
As it was explained to me, it could do full-motion video almost 30 years ago, it could switch around analog signals like cable TV and put them on screen in an app, it had ports for hardware hacking that you could control more low-level and directly. It was just better, by quite a lot. And Microsoft and network effects conspired to kill it before it got rooted and so it got thrown out with the trash.
Not only could it do full motion video, but it could, on a 200Mhz Pentium MMX CPU, rotate an OpenGL cube on any axis with a different video running on all six sides, and do so smoothly and without any lag or video stuttering. It was incredible what they were able to do back then. Hell I’m not entirely convinced Windows could pull that off now!
I recall rumors that when it came to version 10 of Mac OS, Apple knew they needed outside help, and the choice came down to BeOS on the one hand, or NeXT (including ol’ Stevie J) on the other.
Apple was negotiating to buy Be, but they couldn’t agree on a price. The rumours were that Be was asking too much.
The Apple board also favoured NeXT, and the rest is history.