http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/WindowManager?...
What technically enabled this on such limited hardware? Was there lack of security/containerization/sandboxing that made os call much faster and context switches better?
Be had well written multi threading and preemptive multitasking implemented on a clean slate - no compatibility hacks required. That meant it worked well and was quick/responsive. There were still limits, and the OS didn't have many security protections that would get written in today.
The BeBox itself was vastly different hardware than a standard PC as well, so it could break a lot of rules as far as smooth concurrency and multitasking... kinda like the Amiga did.
Edit:
Pretty sure this is the monitor: https://www.necdisplay.com/documents/ColorBrochures/RDF225WG...
IIRC there were solutions like this for the Amiga too.
That depended _very_ heavily on your graphics card at the time. In 2001, I could get X to crash on my work computer if I shook my mouse too fast. At home on my matrox card, yes, it was rock stable.
EDIT: Also, Slackware was rock solid and it crashed far less than SuSE/Mandrake.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_accelera...
The point is that modern GPUs have hardware decoding for common codecs, and will use far less power than CPU decoding. But the major browsers on Linux (Firefox and Chrome) disable hardware decoding on Linux, because $PROBLEMS.
So, you end up with battery draining CPU-based 1080p decoding. And even more battery draining or choppy 4k decoding.
And it still happens occasionally, while my Windows 10 userspace drivers just reinitialize instead of locking the OS.
No swap, some swap, huge swap, swappiness=0, zram - nothing helped me.
No comment in regards to the 9x line. ;)
But did video formats back then use delta frames?
Of course that might have changed if they added more system services, but from POST screen to a usable desktop was easily under 15 seconds.
That sounds just as good? Compared to quad-booting Win98/Win2000/BeOS5/Slackware, today you could quad-boot Win10/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Ubuntu. Actually, depending on what you count as different systems and what exact hardware you have, you could have 2 laptops sitting on your desk: a pinebook running your choice of netbsd, openbsd, freebsd, or some linux (https://forum.pine64.org/forumdisplay.php?fid=107), and an x86 laptop multibooting Windows 10, Android, Ubuntu GNU/Linux, Alpine Busybox/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Redox (https://www.redox-os.org/screens/). That's 2 processor families in 2 machines running what I would count as 4 and 8 operating systems each.
I think we're doing fine.
By the time the Pentium came around, the future looked like a completely monotonous stretch of Windows NT on x86 for ever and ever, amen. No serious hardware competition, other than Intel being smart enough to not kill AMD outright for fear of antitrust litigation, and no software competition on the desktop, with OSS OSes being barely usable then (due to an infinite backlog of shitty hardware like Winmodems and consumer-grade printers) and Apple in a permanent funk.
We were perpetually a bit afraid that Microsoft/Intel would pull something like Palladium/Trustworthy Computing [1] and lock down PC hardware but good, finally killing the Rebel Alliance of Linux/BSD, but somehow the hammer never quite fell. It did in the cell phone world, though, albeit in an inconsistent fashion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi...
Microsoft and Intel really seemed permanent back then. I wonder if that's how people felt about IBM back in the 1950s.
https://www.osnews.com/story/681/be-inc-files-suit-against-m...
MS worked with SGI on a project known as Fahrenheit - to unify Direct3D and OpenGL:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_(graphics_API)
...well, we all know what happened - but I've often thought that Microsoft hastened their demise.
Somewhere in there, of course, was also the whole SGI moving away from IRIX (SGI's unix variant) to Windows NT (IIRC, this was on the Octane platform) - there being some upset over it by the SGI community. Maybe that was part of the "last gasp"? I'm sure some here have better info about those times; I merely watched from the sidelines, because I certainly didn't have any access to SGI hardware, nor any means to purchase some myself - waaaaay out of my price range then and now.
Of course - had SGI not gone belly up, I'm not sure we'd have NVidia today...? So maybe there's a silver lining there at least?
Desktops are now a niche product, where buying cards has to be done mostly online, with most malls having only laptops and 2-1 on display.
Servers are away in some cloud, running virtualized OSes on top of a level-1 hypervisor.
I agree that phones are more locked down than desktops/laptops nowadays, but it's worth pointing out that neither Microsoft or Intel are really winners in this area. They both still are doing fairly well in the desktop/laptop in terms of market share though.
True. I've always regarded "Wintel" as more descriptive than accusatory. It's just a handy shorthand to refer to one specific monoculture.
> Between Palladium not working out and Microsoft actually making Windows NT for some RISC ISA's, there wasn't actually an Intel/Microsoft conspiracy to dominate the industry together.
Right. They both happened to rise and converge, and it's humanity's need to see patterns which turns that into a conspiracy to take over the world. They both owe IBM a huge debt, and IBM did what it did with no intention of being knocked down by the companies it did business with.
A few years earlier things were a little more bleak.
> A few years earlier things were a little more bleak.
I admit I was unclear on the time I was talking about, and probably inadvertently mangled a few things.
As for Linux in the XP era, I was using it, yes, but I wouldn't recommend it to others back then because it still had pretty hard sticking points with regards to what hardware it could use. As I said, Winmodems (cheap sound cards with a phone jack instead of a speaker/microphone jack, which shove all of the modem functionality onto the CPU) were one issue, and then there was WiFi on laptops, and NTFS support wasn't there yet, either. I remember USB and the move away from dial-up as being big helps in hardware compatibility.
ndiswrapper. It's almost a shibboleth among people who were using Linux on laptops Way Back When.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDISwrapper
> NDISwrapper is a free software driver wrapper that enables the use of Windows XP network device drivers (for devices such as PCI cards, USB modems, and routers) on Linux operating systems. NDISwrapper works by implementing the Windows kernel and NDIS APIs and dynamically linking Windows network drivers to this implementation. As a result, it only works on systems based on the instruction set architectures supported by Windows, namely IA-32 and x86-64.
[snip]
> When a Linux application calls a device which is registered on Linux as an NDISwrapper device, the NDISwrapper determines which Windows driver is targeted. It then converts the Linux query into Windows parlance, it calls the Windows driver, waits for the result and translates it into Linux parlance then sends the result back to the Linux application. It's possible from a Linux driver (NDISwrapper is a Linux driver) to call a Windows driver because they both execute in the same address space (the same as the Linux kernel). If the Windows driver is composed of layered drivers (for example one for Ethernet above one for USB) it's the upper layer driver which is called, and this upper layer will create new calls (IRP in Windows parlance) by calling the "mini ntoskrnl". So the "mini ntoskrnl" must know there are other drivers, it must have registered them in its internal database a priori by reading the Windows ".inf" files.
It's kind of amazing it worked as well as it did. It wasn't exactly fun setting it up, but I never had any actual problems with it as I recall.
I wish we had more options today. On modern x86 hardware, you pretty much just have Windows, Linux and maybe FreeBSD/OpenBSD if you replace your Wi-Fi card with an older one (or MacOS if you're feeling Hackintoshy .. or just buy Apple hardware). I guess three is kinda the limit you're going to hit when it comes to broad support.