BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X

Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by pjmlp on Thursday January 09, 2020 @12:44PM (#22003488)

Bluebottle OS (written in Active Oberon, a GC enabled systems programming language) was also capable of it.

http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/WindowManager?...

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by AtlasBarfed on Thursday January 09, 2020 @01:24PM (#22003894)

Ok, so this is the big BeOS thing I've heard.

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?

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by acdha on Thursday January 09, 2020 @04:29PM (#22006013)

Other people mentioned the real preemptive scheduling — and the general overall better worst-case latency — but another factor was the clean design. The other operating systems tended to be okay in the absence of I/O content but once you hit the capacity of your hard drive you would find out that e.g. clicking a menu in your X11 app did a bunch of small file I/O in the background which would normally be cached but had been pushed out, etc. A common mitigation factor in that era was having separate drives for the operating system, home directory, and data so you could at least avoid contention for the few hundred IOPs a drive could sustain.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by thdrdt on Thursday January 09, 2020 @07:49PM (#22007502)

Yes. This always amazed me with BeOS. It would play 6 movie simultaneously making my PC very slow but still responsive. As if the framerate just went down.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by Accujack on Thursday January 09, 2020 @01:37PM (#22004037)

Bear in mind that resolutions back then were much lower than now, and not all computers had 24 bit color frame buffers. Video cards ran one monitor for the most part, with no others attached.

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.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by navjack27 on Thursday January 09, 2020 @04:23PM (#22005936)

I mean maybe. I was running 1600x1200 on my monitor back then.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by Accujack on Friday January 10, 2020 @10:55AM (#22011821)

Some people were, but it wasn't too common. Workstations had far higher resolutions long before this, but home PCs running non 3d accelerated hardware were still mostly 1024x768-ish.

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.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by joshspankit on Friday January 10, 2020 @07:15AM (#22010424)

Also we had actual 32bit colour, not this 24 + 8 alpha. You could actually look at a rainbow gradient without banding.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by bitL on Thursday January 09, 2020 @05:27PM (#22006568)

2048x1536 was already a thing as well.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by jsjohnst on Thursday January 09, 2020 @07:28PM (#22007366)

Yup, had a 22” Mitsubishi monitor that could do that resolution in ~2002. Everyone would pick on me about the text being so small, but I’d let them sit at my desk squinting and I’d stand ten feet back and read the screen with ease as they struggled. The monitor was a beast though, around 70lbs if memory serves.

Edit:

Pretty sure this is the monitor: https://www.necdisplay.com/documents/ColorBrochures/RDF225WG...

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by anthk on Thursday January 09, 2020 @07:28PM (#22007367)

1280x1024, not so far from 1920x1080.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by Accujack on Friday January 10, 2020 @10:51AM (#22011783)

That was more the exception than the rule. Besides, 1080P is about 45% more pixels per frame than 1280, and likely at a higher frame rate. Big difference in hardware load.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by drewfish on Thursday January 09, 2020 @02:51PM (#22004899)

I think it was their thread/process scheduler. It had a section of priorities which got hard realtime scheduling, then lower priority stuff got more "traditional" scheduling. (Alas, I don't know too much about thread/process scheduling so the details elude me.) That way the playback threads (and also other UI threads such as the window system) got the timeslices they needed.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by rasz on Thursday January 09, 2020 @04:14PM (#22005837)

Isnt giving near real time priority scheduling to audio/video how Windows handles things those days? I think I read that somewhere last week under Linux kernel scheduler behaviour response discussion.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by amatecha on Thursday January 09, 2020 @01:32PM (#22003975)

Real pre-emptive multitasking? I seem to recall that was one of the huge differentiating factors of it against Mac / Windows.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by wokkel on Thursday January 09, 2020 @02:03PM (#22004305)

Amiga did this in 1985. It's just that for compatibility reasons Apple couldn't do this. Even funnier: the fastest hardware to run old MacOS (68k version) on: an Amiga computer.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by Wowfunhappy on Thursday January 09, 2020 @03:10PM (#22005100)

A non-Apple computer? Was "Hackintosh" (presumably under a different name) a thing back then?

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by reaperducer on Thursday January 09, 2020 @04:28PM (#22005982)

You didn't need to build a Hackintosh. You could buy legal, officially-licensed Mac clones back then.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by amatecha on Thursday January 09, 2020 @09:59PM (#22008031)

Ah yeah I still have my PowerComputing PowerTower Pro! At the time it was a current model, its 512mb of RAM was insane and my friends & classmates were jealous! hahah :)

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by amatecha on Thursday January 09, 2020 @09:58PM (#22008025)

Check out this video[0], basically an Amiga with an accelerator card potentially makes for the fastest environment to run 68k-based Mac OS (System 7) ...

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph0gxzL3UI

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by Wowfunhappy on Friday January 10, 2020 @09:40AM (#22011197)

Whoa, the Amiga is faster even though it's running in a VM!

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by amatecha on Friday January 10, 2020 @05:57PM (#22016536)

Well, it's more akin to something like Wine where it's not exactly a virtual machine, since the processor instructions are the same. Tho that's about the extent of my understanding.. haha

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by LargoLasskhyfv on Thursday January 09, 2020 @05:56PM (#22006769)

I sometimes used my Atari ST with an emulator called Aladin. "Cracked" to work without Mac ROMs. But wasn't really useful to me because of lack of applications (at the time).

IIRC there were solutions like this for the Amiga too.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by anthk on Thursday January 09, 2020 @12:05PM (#22002997)

Linux could do that in 2001 just fine, and without crashing like Windows. XV was amazing. So was MPlayer.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by Octoth0rpe on Thursday January 09, 2020 @12:23PM (#22003225)

> without crashing like Windows

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.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by anthk on Thursday January 09, 2020 @03:40PM (#22005442)

Nvidia TNT2/Geforce2 MX later.

EDIT: Also, Slackware was rock solid and it crashed far less than SuSE/Mandrake.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by danieldk on Thursday January 09, 2020 @01:24PM (#22003893)

High definition playback is still not as smooth as it could be in browsers on Linux (or if your CPU is fast enough, it will drain your battery more quickly), because most browsers only have experimental support for video acceleration.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_accelera...

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by ac29 on Friday January 10, 2020 @06:35PM (#22016770)

Pretty much any CPU released in the past decade should be capable of decoding 1080P video as well as a GPU (though yes, will use slightly more power). The only exceptions I can think of are early generation Atom processors, which were terribly slow.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by danieldk on Sunday January 12, 2020 @02:54AM (#22025096)

Pretty much any CPU released in the past decade should be capable of decoding 1080P video as well as a GPU (though yes, will use slightly more power).

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.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by slim on Thursday January 09, 2020 @04:14PM (#22005841)

I found Wayland more capable than xwindows in this regard

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by pjmlp on Thursday January 09, 2020 @12:39PM (#22003443)

In 2001 I could still hang X Windows as much as I liked.

And it still happens occasionally, while my Windows 10 userspace drivers just reinitialize instead of locking the OS.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by aeyes on Thursday January 09, 2020 @01:32PM (#22003982)

I think most hangs on Linux today are caused by low memory pressure, see this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20620545

No swap, some swap, huge swap, swappiness=0, zram - nothing helped me.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by acdha on Thursday January 09, 2020 @04:24PM (#22005940)

Linux could do that only if your system was lightly loaded. Once you started to have I/O contention, none of the available kernel schedulers could reliably avoid stuttering.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by fouc on Thursday January 09, 2020 @06:05PM (#22006839)

I had this experience too, my video card was so shitty that I wasn't able to watch 700mb divx videos in windows, I had to boot into linux and use mplayer.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by blihp on Thursday January 09, 2020 @04:42PM (#22006189)

Don't forget about xanim

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by com2kid on Thursday January 09, 2020 @01:19PM (#22003838)

Windows 2000 was rock solid stable with uptime measured in "how long do I keep running before I get bored if bragging about my uptime?"

No comment in regards to the 9x line. ;)

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by cbm-vic-20 on Thursday January 09, 2020 @02:14PM (#22004422)

BeOS would also let you do that while playing them backwards; useless, but a nice demo of the multimedia capabilities of the OS.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by remcob on Thursday January 09, 2020 @07:29PM (#22007371)

This would be challenging with modern codecs using delta frames. The only way I can see it work is precomputing all frames from the preceeding keyframe. Doable, but decent effort for a fairly obscure feature.

But did video formats back then use delta frames?

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by chipotle_coyote on Thursday January 09, 2020 @08:01PM (#22007575)

I never saw BeOS do that with video, but I heard it do it with MP3 files. SoundPlay was a kind of crazy bananas MP3 player -- it could basically act as a mixer, letting you not only "queue up" multiple files but play each of them simultaneously at different volume levels and even different speeds. I've still never seen anything like it outside of DJ software.

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Re:BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X by machinecoffee on Friday January 10, 2020 @08:39AM (#22010824)

The thing also booted up faster than you could blink.

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.

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