> Are there many here that were BeOS lovers?

I used it on the desktop for about six months to a year (1999? 2000?). R4.5. Switched away when they sold to Palm.

I still have a copy of Giampalo's "Practical Filesystem Design" somewhere in the house. It looks like he's published it online: http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf.

I remember at the time being upset that Apple had gone with NeXT instead of BeOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#History), but in retrospect it was obviously the right call, even from a technical point of view. It's really crazy that OS X 10.0 was such a pig on the systems of the time, but now fits in a phone...

PS: Does anyone know if Be's developer notes/articles are archived anywhere? I remember there being some really great articles from the OS developers about stuff like how the app_server worked, etc.

EDIT: Ah yes, the Be Newsletters: http://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/index.html. These are fricking great. I strongly recommend reading them for anyone interested in OS internals.

I'm not quite sure what you're aiming for, but the Be Book is available online (https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/), and includes all the documentation for the API. I don't know that any of the internals stuff is online, though.

EDIT: Haiku also has the Be newsletters (https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/index.html) and "Programming the Be Operating System" (https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/programming_the_be_oper...), which actually does encompass everything I think you were looking for.

"It's really crazy that OS X 10.0 was such a pig on the systems of the time"

I was so ticked because OpenStep and NeXTSTEP were so responsive and I couldn't figure out what the people at Apple had done to it. Plus, changing how the menu[1] worked and moving the vertical scrollbar were and are grave sins as far as I'm concerned.

1) The UI rule that is used to justify using the Mac menu bar doesn't make any sense for touch, big monitors, or multi-monitors.

> I couldn't figure out what the people at Apple had done to it.

Double buffered, compositing window system.

Isn't the Mac menu bar designed to keep Fitts' law in mind? I can see how that isn't relevant for touch, but why does it not apply for big monitors or multiple monitors?

leave what I'm working on -> scroll -> scroll -> scroll -> click menu -> run mouse back to window via a lot of scrolling

NeXTSTEP had nice menu that could be detached - it was so easy

That's not what "scrolling" generally means. And if your cursor has a decent acceleration curve applied to it, the potentially long distance to the menu won't matter unless the menu is at least one large monitor away.

and what word would you use?

well, its a tad bit longer than the NeXTSTEP menu near the window and OS X doesn't allow tear-offs. I find it irritating and stupid compared to what NeXT had. There are quite a few things they dropped in the conversion from NeXTSTEP / OpenStep to OS X that I miss.

Which UI rule are you thinking about? Fitts' Law doesn't have anything to do with distance. It might be the case that you have to move your mouse pointer an inconvenient distance to get to the menu bar, but that doesn't change the fact that putting the bar at the top of the screen gives the bar functionally infinite height and makes it easier to accurately point to.

Fitts' Law absolutely does include distance: it's the observation that the time it takes to hit a target increases with increasing distance or decreasing size of target.

Ah, okay. I guess I misremembered it from when I learned it a few years ago. Thanks for clarifying!

> Are there many here that were BeOS lovers?

I had two machines one my desk at one point, a NeXTSTEP box[1] and a box running BeOS. I loved them both. I spent a bit more time on NeXTSTEP because I took to Objective-C a bit better than C++. I didn't really like Mac OS at that point, but its "children" were a lot of fun.

1) we had a HP LaserJet 4 with the PS expansion and my boss ran the printer out of paper over the weekend. The NeXTSTEP box was on and announced in a very irritated female voice with a British accent "The Printer is out of Paper". This scared my boss and she had words on Monday.

>Are there many here that were BeOS lovers?

Yep, I recently stumbled across my Beos 3.1 copy with complete packaging, separate intel and powerpc discs, BeOS sticker and a 'We Be Geeks' plastic pocket thingy which gave me a huge burst of nostalgia.

I'm also (perhaps unsurprisingly) a fan of Haiku, while I run a Linux distro 24/7 these days and only play around Haiku in a VM, I would love to some day be able to use it for my desktop needs.

It's an uphill battle though, few developers and few porters means there's a shortage of progress and software available which most potential users would consider a 'bare minimum' these days.

Perhaps the most obvious is the lack of a modern browser, WebPositive is an attempt to rectify this but it's a huge undertaking with at the moment only one guy working on it which means progress is slow, despite him putting in a ton of work.

My hope is that a R1 release complete with package management and WebPositive working sufficiently well for day to day web use, will serve as something of a tipping point where people can start to see it's potential as a day to day OS and start using it while also developing/porting further software they feel it is lacking.

> Are there many here that were BeOS lovers?

Yes, BeOS was fantastic: it booted in 14seconds on my computer and was immediately very responsive where Linux and Windows booted in >1m20s plus they weren't very responsive (Windows was slow as a snail after the boot until it really finished booting)..

Unfortunately even though BeOS was much, much more pleasant to use than Linux or Windows (thanks to its responsiveness), the lack of applications for BeOS meant that I rarely used it in fact..

And now SSDs mean that even normal OSs feel quite responsive, so I'm not waiting Haiku anymore..

IMHO its developers made a fatal mistake when they didn't use Linux for their kernel, it meant that it would take much more time to have an usable OS and they missed their 'window of opportunity'.. Yes, I know about Blue.Eyed.OS but it was a failed project from the start due to their strange indecision about licensing..

Man, I have the song that came with R5 "5038" (BeOS backwards) in my iTunes and listen to it much more than I probably should, longing for the good old days. I fell in love on an old AMD1000 tower and it's never gone away. I spend nights up pondering what the world would be like today if Apple had bought Be rather than NeXT per thr original plan. Ah the nostalgia.

Update: Here is the song for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlOi-L-N0X4

I owned a BeBox and used it as my desktop for several years, til it stopped posting. The use of its relational-database-like filesystem, for email and organizing my music, was such a joy.

I once wrote a _MacOS_ shareware review site for a friend, as a single, small perl script that looked through a tree in the filesystem of a BeOS box (on mac-clone hardware), and spit out html. The descriptions and reviews were just metadata columns I added to the relevant mime-types.

I loved BeOS after a co-worker at one of my first jobs waxed poetic about it. Bought the BeOS Bible and read all about it. Really wish it had been more ready for primetime. As it was, you pretty much needed the BONE extensions to make it useful on the internet. And NetPositive was a minor upgrade over Mosaic and Firefox didn't run very well, at least in my experience.

Still, you can't argue with 5 second boots. Took Apple what, 15 years to catch up with that?

> Are there many here that were BeOS lovers?

Yes! I loved to play around with it.

A multimedia OS, dumping C for C++ with a feel that I didn't had since my Amiga days, when I used to spend time with friends doing demoscene stuff and playing around with ProTracker.

> Are there many here that were BeOS lovers?

I'm one. I used BeOS 5 on my home computer for a while, a long time ago. Not for production work, mind you, but for everyday stuff and programming of my own, nonetheless.